Money, Never Enough!

My dad always encouraged me to save money. “Even if it’s only five dollars a week, put it away and don’t touch it,” he’d tell me. Yeah, yeah, whatever, I thought. I have the rest of my life to save money. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any money to save. I worked after school and on the weekends. And during the summer I put in a lot of extra hours. But I could always find other ways to spend my money instead of putting it away in a savings account.
I had that same attitude whenever I received money as a gift. Take my high school graduation, for example. I ended up getting around $2,000 from family and friends. It probably would’ve been a good idea to save some for my college living expenses, especially considering I had decided not to work full time my first semester and I decided to get my own apartment. But other options were more enticing.
Let’s see, there were the nights out with my friends, new clothes, a new car, new stuff for my apartment, more clothes, money for the weekends. Saving was definitely an afterthought, to which I responded, “Don’t worry, you can always find babysitting jobs when you need extra cash.” That was my mindset as I began college.
Now as my freshman years is coming to an end (Hopefully it goes fast), that mindset has begun to change—mainly because I came to the understanding that it is harder to save money when you really don’t have any extra cash around..