Fiscal Responsibility

Sitting here in the office, I was reading up on racial inequality correlated with net wealth and income; a more tedious read if not completely mind-numbing. I guess this is what happens when you cram for an exam, lol. But anyway, one of the themes that kept recurring was debt and fiscal unpreparedness. This made reflect on my personal spending habits. One of the things that I have unfortunately to some extent inherited from my parents is the spending of money on random things and not being fiscally proportional. However my parents ended up in fiscal peril, chapter 7, second mortgage, ya know the usual among the so called middle to low class families of the time. So why would one inherit such a trait after seeing all this chaos consume his day to day life a as child? I can now see why they did it. Their lives were so stressful that they had to turn to tangible goods to bring to them some level of perceived comfort in their lifestyles. Why would anyone sacrifice their future because they refuse to change their lifestyles? People who are not used to change. People who back when they lived in other places didn't about fiscal issues at all. Those who didn't learn about fiscal responsibility and depended on their parents for every step of the way and didn't once think, hey I need to start saving up money and investing to secure a better future for my family.

Sometimes as a college student its easy to forget the fact that when this illusion of fiscal security through meal plans and paid housing ends, the real world hits you, and you have to learn how to start managing your money and how to get money as well. I guess my experiences since I got back to the US and being for the most part fiscally independent, sometimes even when living at a relatives house, has helped shape who I am today. I like to think of myself as someone who has his goals set beyond just getting through college and going to professional school, but rather someone who is thinking about his credit, his debts, his taxes, his jobs, his fiscal management and so on and so forth. I've been always kept on my feet every semester by that impending bill or fiscal issue that threatens my day to day existence. However in recent weeks, things have gotten on a better light and I can finally start saving money in a realistic fashion. But in complete honesty I was so relieved that I was done worrying about major bills that I kinda forgot about my fiscal management responsibilities. I have spent about $120 on random junk in the past month, and in complete honesty I was at the very least aware of what I was doing every time I made a purchase. I was so ashamed of how much I was spending I didn't even want to monitor my balances on my accounts to see how much I had really spent. Though it seemed like over $250 at the time, upon reviewing my history, it isnt that bad compared to previous years (knocking out over $500 in a month *ouch*).

SO why then. Why would I do something like that even though I held myself to stern standards and hoped to remain fiscally sound? Probably because of my lifestyle overseas. Everything overseas was cheap. I never had allowance given to me in my life, but I was never really denied any monetary request but I rarely ever asked, unless I was going out with friends. While this system was not efficient in teaching me fiscal responsibility, it saved my mom a lot of money by keeping me from buying random useless junk. So with that mindset I came back to the US where I had pretty much lost grasp of the relative costs of things, i.e. what is expensive and what isn't. But even after getting a grip of that, I still spent a lot of money on useless items that in the end had no real positive influence over my life except maintain that perception of a relaxed lifestyle.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I need to keep on monitoring my fiscal status and make sure that I keep everything together and ready for a future for myself and family. In addition, I need to start actually investing money so that I can have something substantial to present to myself in the future saying "this is the fruit of the seeds you planted so that you and your family won't have to starve if something terrible happens". I guess that is a phrase that didn't cross my parents mind when they hadn't saved up any money and ended up in debt over hospital bills and excessive spending because my sister had gotten terminally ill. But that is another story...