Our Story, Part 1a: Andrew

Like most college students, I slogged my way through my finances during college.  I was never really in any major trouble, but I did tend to make impulse purchases at the grocery store and I liked to buy stuff online as well.  My credit card was always paid off, and I thought I was doing well to start building credit in that way.  I remember getting my second cell phone from Spring in 2004—the salesman at Radio Shack said I had amazing credit and that I qualified for 5 phones.  Things were going okay, I thought.

The story really begins when I graduated from Hope in 2005.  I didn’t have a ton of savings, but I was also crazy fortunate to have no debt, including student loans.  (I recognize that this is extremely rare and that I was incredibly blessed.)  I scrimped through my first summer, working nights at a local Italian restaurant, and trying to put as much cash in the bank as possible.  I was renting and had a roommate, and both of us were paying just $250 per month plus utilities.  I was able to live cheap and just sort of survive until I could find my first job.

August comes, an old adviser at Hope recommends that I apply for a job on staff, and I get my first gig (reasonable salary and definitely more money than I had ever seen).  This is where things get a little dicey—here are a few thoughts on what happened in the first couple years I had a “real job”:

• I could have been saving and starting an emergency fund. I had cheaper rent than you could ever have imagine, and I could have been crushing it from a savings perspective.
• A sense of entitlement was growing within me. The adults [read: career veterans] around me seemed to have a lot of stuff, and I thought, “why shouldn’t I be able to have that as well?”.
• I wasn’t using cash, so my purchases were painless. I would walk in to Best Buy and pick up a DVD, or go on iTunes and download the newest and greatest album.  I bought a TV, a Tivo, a Playstation 2, and even an Apple iBook.  But, at no time did I really have the money in the bank, it was all on plastic.

Before I knew it, I had accumulated about $3,000 in credit card debt (0% interest, but still, risky business), and I was about to meet the woman who would become my wife.
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Check back each Friday as we continue this series, “Our Story.”