My Spendy Teen Years…

This post was supposed to be published yesterday… but somehow I messed up… there goes my streak of Tuesday/Thursday posts… Oh well, it’s published now…

Last week I started writing about my financial upbringing and how I have been so lucky to grow up in the situation that I have. I ended that post nearing the end of my elementary school days.

Junior high school was when I started getting a bit more spendy, a bit more independent with my money, and a little less responsible with it.  I would babysit, and instead of getting a pay cheque that had to go to a bank before I could use it, I would get cash… and cash could sit in your wallet and get spent… I’m sure I put some money in savings… but mostly I think I spent my money on special lunches in the cafeteria, or going to the food court in the shopping mall for lunch, or buying random cheap knickknacks during those lunch time walks to the mall.

I got my first credit card sometime in junior high school.  It was technically not “mine” but attached to my mom’s card.  But I wasn’t allowed to use it without permission (and being the super good kid that I was, I followed the rules).  It was mostly so that I could go do my own clothes shopping with my friends and not have to drag my parents around with me.

I don’t know that I really fully understood credit cards back then, but having one got me familiar with the concept and that a credit card didn’t meant I could spend whenever I wanted…

Although I was spendy and slightly silly with my own money, my parents also made sure that I learned more responsibility around money in junior high too.  Any time that I wanted to do something expensive, like a school band trip to Disneyland, the deal was that if I could fund-raise or pay for 1/3 of the expense (plus my spending money for on the trip), my parents would pay for the rest… It was a pretty sweet deal really, and it definitely was motivating to get me to sell my chocolate covered almonds, or whatever else was the fundraising trend that year…

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My Financial Upbringing…

I am extremely lucky.  I know it.  But sometimes I forget, or take it for granted… The Frugalwoods did a post about how they are privileged to have the opportunity to pursue financial independence.  And while I am nowhere near their advanced level of frugality and proximity to financial independence, I did relate to a lot of what they were saying.  I have often wondered how different my life would be now, if only one or two things had been different while I was growing up…

I have mentioned in other posts that before I started this blog, and before I started reading personal finance  blogs, I had been going through life on auto pilot.  That’s not to say that I wasn’t enjoying my life, but I would often just take the default path, with little intention or thought put in to it.  Luckily for me, my upbringing was such that this didn’t lead me down the path of financial disaster.  I somehow managed to end up in a pretty good state, with no student debt, no consumer debt, and a mortgage on my “forever” home as my only debt… so I thought I’d go through my past and examine how that happened…