My College Friends and I Are Bad With Money

For students, personal finance means thinking about the future, and the future is the worst

I’m a college student, and I’m horrible with money. Evidently, so are my other middle-class friends. We don’t keep track of our spending. We don’t save. And although we’ve heard that it can, and likely will, fuck us one day, we don’t really understand credit scores.

The thing is, we know we should be smarter financially. The stock market crashed in the midst of our childhoods. The Occupy Wall Street movement dominated the media a couple years later. We know that most of us are going to graduate with thousands of dollars in loans to pay off. We have also been well informed about the widening wealth gap in this country thanks to our lord and savior, Bernie Sanders. We understand the importance of fiscal responsibility. But as my freshman year roommate at the University of Delaware, Jack, once put it, the general consensus in regards to financial pressures seems to be, “Eh, that’s Future Jack’s problem.”

This may not be everyone’s mentality, but it does seem to apply to most students. According to a personal finance study released by LendEdu this year, college students have admitted to being as unconfident as they are incompetent with their money. In another survey from 2014, US News reported that upon consideration of payment timeliness, budgeting, saving, investing, and habit-making, college students were found to be increasingly less responsible with their finances when compared to students from previous years.

When you consider that college is in a way its own little world, all this apparent irresponsibility makes sense. All we do is smoke peyote and read the writings of dead German intellectuals (some of whom persuasively negate the existence of monetary value at all). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say to me, “Enjoy it while you can. It will be the best four years of your life.” If that statement holds true, maybe I owe it to my financial recklessness.

I can bask in the blissful ignorance of my college-town, paying too much for drinks at the bars, not cooking for myself enough, and neglecting how much I’m spending all the while. College will be, so I’m told, the best four years of my life because I’m not expected to be financially responsible.

So on one hand, if I start saving now, that future could be less bleak. But on the other hand, if I continue not to care, I won’t have to pollute the present with thoughts of student loans, with mortgage payments, with problems to come.

Additionally, like these other idiots from the surveys, I don’t know how to be financially responsible. Handling money wisely seems to be one of those things people need to figure out for themselves, like sex or how to water ski. Until I’m forced into that bleak future everyone keeps promising me, during a time when a “mortgage payment” is no longer an abstract concept but a tangible bill in my hand, a time when my nine-to-five instills within me a sense of responsibility over what I have earned, I won’t be responsible with money.

Parents are not always much help, either. Growing up, the topic is almost taboo. Of the handful of friends I talked to, most did not know how much money their parents made until they filled out their Financial Aid (FAFSA) paperwork just before college, and they have not broached the topic since. Nor have they discussed what percentage of their income their parents set aside in savings, how they invest wisely, or what their monthly bill payments are even comprised of.

Does this mean parents don’t care if their kids are spending superfluously, and often with their money? Absolutely not. But it does seem to mean that parents often fall short of teaching their kids how to really be responsible with money. And why is that? Is the topic too boring? Too much of a taboo? Or is it something parents feel they are simply unable to teach?

Considering, as parents know, many of us wouldn’t even listen, maybe it is unteachable. We are stubbornly avoiding our inevitable financial burdens for as long as we can. I have heard people propose, in light of the general feeling of financial incompetency on college campuses, that universities should offer financial literacy courses. But even if mine were to, I wouldn’t take it. That stuff is Future Yoni’s problem.

Yoni Blumberg is a senior at the University of Delaware and an Awl network intern this summer.

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