About My Parking Ticket

There-ain’t-no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch.

This adage from the 1930s encompasses the idea that you can never get something for nothing, the foundation of our government, our economy and our personal life.

Everything costs money.

Yet we have something of a skewed notion about the role of finances in our personal life, feeding into a society full of fat debt.

It all begins with childhood. Every week you give your child that five to fifty dollar allowance, sometimes in exchange for basic household chores. The habit often leads children to believe that something necessary, like cleaning a bathtub when you get it dirty, will earn you valuable credit. Such a lovely fantasy.

That child soon becomes a teen, asking for that weekly allowance to cover things like a movie or fast food and then begging for more money when something drastic, and costly, occurs. Think about a car crash. Or braces. Or a parking ticket.

Maybe the teen gets their first credit card, introducing them to the dangerous realm of fake money, the kind you can spend long before you can ever earn.

By the time college comes around, the habit of spending and debt and free money is so engrained into your mind that it seems unfair that you cannot attend an Ivy League private school without a ridiculous amount of debt or that the state will not cover all of your living, driving and scholastic expenses. They also give you parking tickets.

Graduation means transition, not only out of college but into a realm where you are financially responsible for all your shopping and spending habits. The overhead of the car payment, apartment, school loans, food and utilities and taxes comes crashing down. There is no one to step in and help you out when you decide to go to six flags and spend all of your money on entertainment instead of paying the electric bill.

The responsibility part is where our vision gets a little hazy. Should the state step in? Or our parents? Or our friends? Or should we merely learn the definition of living within a budget?

The curse of Generation X is to think that money really does grow on trees. Unluckily it runs out. Quite fast. Heck, you are even punished in some respect when you do not pay off loans, or parking tickets or taxes. And these punishments are a little longer lasting than a time-out from your parents.

Rule number one, you cannot get anything for free. You must work hard to make money and maintain a budget system.

There-ain’t-no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch, friends.

Instead of spending like a child with that parental-wallet-back-up plan, it is now important to make a more long term plan in the form of a budget, something realistic that we can stick to.

For me this means a little bit of math.

What I make per month minus all my necessary expenses, setting aside money for food and gas and such, then taking the rest of the money and splitting it into my “rainy-day” pile and my “go-blow-this-in-a-weekend” pile.

The spending pile quickly gets turned into cash. I use this as a method of forced budgeting. You can only spend what you have in your pocket.

Most of all, beware the plastic cards. They easily become a dangerous pattern. In reality, if you do not have money you should probably not be spending money.

Rule number two, you cannot buy anything unless you have the money for it. And you do not have the money for everything.

A little common sense when it comes to personal finance would help slim down a bunch of fatty debt.

For my parents this meant prioritizing paying off the house. This meant working hard and habitually saving money so that when the economy crashed we could keep our house.

Rule number three, you have to save money for the rainy day. Cause otherwise a random parking ticket will kill your finances for the next month.

I definitely just got a parking ticket.