College students are usually too late to learn the difference between what their needs and wants are. Around 1.6 million individual bankruptcies have been filed in year 2003. That was up by 7.4% from the previous year. This has been found in the U.S. Courts' report and it suggested that many the majority of the U.S. adults has not yet grasped the idea of personal finance or the basics of it.
So it's not the wonder of the century that the majority of the college kids do not know the art of handling money either. While their parents want nothing but the best for them, they do not hesitate to provide what these young ones wanted. Unfortunately, fiscal responsibility at times gets lost in designer clothes, fancy piano lessons and high end cell phones.
Richard Boyum, a professor of counseling and psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, commented on this recently. According to him, typical college students more or less take money management seriously, but picks up a few common mistakes as well.
"There's a whole world of opportunities to expend money and many students are under the assumption that money is meant to be spent, rather than saved," Boyum says. "One day I saw one of my students showing off in brand a new and expensive looking jacket. She said the jacket's retail price is $200, but she got it somehow on sale and managed to 'save' $100. Then I said to her, 'Show me that $100.' And I explained that she hadn't saved the $100, she'd actually spent the $100! This analogy surprises most students, though."
Many young adults are troubled with their credit cards. To them, the credit limit is a juicy invitation to keep spending till it hits that limit. These people are considering it to be their own money. What Boyum tired to explain to his students is that credit always comes from a bank--not grandpa. Surprisingly enough, this ideal was like a wake up call for some students: Banks exist to make lots of money and consumers must pay thick interest on the balance when they've missed the deadline or due date.
