Advise to High School Graduates: Make Your Own Coffee
What pearls of wisdom do we wish to impart graduating seniors that will impact them and help the community?
My advice this year is a little early and different than my typical “be an engaged citizen,” “pay attention to your local politics,” yada, yada, yada. Inspired by an article I read elsewhere, here’s my advice to graduates this year: make your own coffee.
What I mean is become someone who saves money. Such advice is usually saved for college graduates because they’ll soon enter the workforce. However, my own experience and observations 25 years later is college students have at least a part time job, if only for spending money, so I direct this advice to high school graduates. And, high school students already drink a lot of coffee.
It is important to save. Children of spendthrift baby boomers may not have any experience with budgeting, especially learning to live with a budget that includes at least 10 percent of whatever you take home going into savings. For those lucky to have mom and dad foot the entire bills for their living expenses while away at college, it still doesn’t hurt to put some away. Non-profit workers have noted that it’s not just youth aging out of foster care that could use some basic money management skills, but young people of all family circumstances and economic levels.
So, to start, grab a little pocket notebook – or your personal directory assistant – and keep track of everything you spend, even for the new parking meters downtown, for this summer. This will help you identify if you’re spending on things you really need or on things you really don’t. With all due respect to Starbucks, the advice to make your own coffee (or sugar, whipped cream and syrup laden coffee drink) is because this is a $3 a day expensive habit.
There are scads of online tools to help you develop a budget, but pick one that helps you save money. There’s one that is helping local folks develop savings goals and gives lots of tips to help them get there: Silicon Valley/South Bay Saves (www.svsbsaves.org). It’s Web-based, provides lots of tips in getting started, helps with maintaining the saving habit when motivation wanes, as well as provides access to personalized financial counseling, if needed, and it’s all free.
The goals can include becoming debt free, but hopefully, you won’t need that. Avoid the temptation to get a credit card that allows you to carry a balance from month to month. In college, you’ll be absolutely inundated with offers for credit cards, but nothing to help you learn to use them or manage them properly. Other goals include saving to develop an amount to invest for higher rates of return or a big-ticket purchase – like a car – so you don’t have to obtain it on credit.
Why mention something as boring as this on the opinion page? It’s not just because compound interest increases the amount of “principal,” but because the habit of saving will spare you from the binds young people faced in 2000. Because they could, they spent ridiculous amounts of money on fashionable clothes, the latest electronic gadgets and eating out, and then were caught short by the dot-com bust. With saving clearly in mind, you learn to not spend extravagantly.
If you get into the habit of saving during your part-time jobs in college, you’re more likely to save some of your new, larger salary from your first job, and ever after. You’ll get a head start in developing some “financial literacy” that every adult needs, but that a lot of people only develop after getting into financial trouble.
Congratulations on this big step and good luck! You’ll be receiving loads of advice soon. Mine is to invest in a coffeemaker or a blender and start practicing your homemade Frappuccino recipes. And of course, don’t binge drink at parties.
Columnist Dina Campeau is a wife, mother of two teens and a resident of Morgan Hill. Her work for the last seven years has focused on affordable housing and homeless issues in Santa Clara County. Her column will be published each Friday. Reach her at dc******@*****er.net.
