Friday, September 27, 2013

And So It Begins

You’re 18 years old. You’re FINALLY an adult. You’ve been waiting your whole life to grow up, and now it’s here.

You are finally legal to grab a drink, well in some provinces at least, you get your first job, and you’re offered your first Credit Card. You're introduced to freedom that comes along with being legal, you go out with friends, go shopping with your pay check, and you're thinking about moving out.

What you don’t realize is that although you’ve been in school your entire life; learning “everything” you need to know to become a successful adult like the molecular composition of Aluminum, the full biography of William Lyon McKenzie, and that the log 1 = 0, you know the important stuff, you did not learn one very important aspect of everyday life; how money works. You don’t realize that carrying a $1000 balance on your credit card will grow to $1,219.39 in a year,or that if you make $15 an hour it takes 33 hours of your time to pay for an Ipad. Growing up, we were taught never to ask about money, it's rude. So we didn't and as a result we didn't learn and we became financially ignorant adults.

To make matters worse we became financially ignorant adults during a time when credit started being extended faster than you can say "show me the money," and so we began to think that perhaps money did grow on trees, in the form of credit. Until, one day, you realize that perhaps credit isn't magical money that grows on trees, rather it has to be paid back, and you've paid a lot of your hard earned money in interest.

“Most debts are fun when you are acquiring them, but none are fun when you set about retiring them." -Ogden Nash.

The point of this blog is about financial enlightenment for the young adult. I'm just a twenty-something year old in the finance industry, studying toward my Chartered Financial Analyst designation, who has worked extending credit at the bank. After speaking with some of my friends and family, and working at the bank, it surprised me how much most people just don't know about personal finance, despite it being the basic pillar of our lives. So I decided to do something about it. This blog is intended to give some useful information in everyday language to help the twenty something year old, and even older, make sense of the world of credit cards, budgets, investments, and economics.


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