How I rank myself...

I don't know whether it's just me, or a natural human-nature thing to do, but I constantly compare myself to those around me. All the time. I don't make fun of people in my head to make myself feel better, or anything like that. However, I like to see how I rank up to those around me.

I look around me and I see myself smack in the middle of a group of people - some who I deem are much more sucessful than myself and others who are less sucessful. Now, sucessful is a relative term. I don't consider being married with children 'sucessful' or 'unsuccessful.' It's a lifestyle choice, and one I'm not ready to make yet. However, things like 'owning a home' or 'owning a buisness' or being able to take vacations or having a huge savings account do factor in.

I try hard not to compare myself to people older than I am. My boss, for instance, owns a home and a sucessful buisness and has a great deal of expendable cash. I consider her sucessful, not only because she has all of that but because she is responsable with it. She works hard for it and I admire that. I know someone my age who just purchased a new home with his fiance. I'm jealous that he owns a home - even though I know they struggle to pay off the mortgage. I feel as though he is more successful than me. One of my closest friends lives in a sister-city to ours (about a half hour commute out of the city) who purchased a home with her hubby a couple years back. They really have a plan, he works/teaches out of their home, making part of their mortgage deductible on their taxes, not to mention a lot of the other stuff that he buys.

I also have a lot of friends who I feel are less sucessful than me. I have friends who have recently graduated and are $15,000 or so in debt with no plan on how to pay it off. The 6 month grace period is comming up fast and I worry about their situation. Most of them seem not to worry though, which makes me worry more! They seem to think it's part of the college process to graduate with debt, but I don't even want to think about how long it's going to take them to pay it all back, especially if they decide to move out right away. Those first jobs out of college don't always pay exceptionally well!

And, for the first time, I'm comparing myself to people I don't even know - YOU! I look around to a lot of the other financial bloggers and it's hard when I see people with net worths into the $400,000 range - I'm nowhere near that. However, I have no idea how old you all are. If you're 22 like me, then I feel like i'm completely slagging behind. At the same time, I see a lot of bloggers who are in mounds of debt. It's great that they are working towards being debt free. I feel as though I am more sucessful than some of them because I have no debt. Of course, I know none of your situations in-depth, so it's hard to compare lifestyles when I know nothing of yours.

I also have a couple of friends who I deem are less sucessful than me even though they have more money than I do. One friend, in particular, comes from a very wealthy family. She went to school in Scotland, and had the money to fly home many weekends (8 hour flight, mind you, but still!) and have her entire tuition and room/board paid for by her parents. She's never worked a job in her ENTIRE life and she's 22 now. So basically, one of two things will happen. Either she'll sail through life with lots of money, doing extravagent things and so forth. OR, she'll end up broke at 35 with no money because she never learned how to balance it all and make it work. Either way, i'm not sure I care. She was the kind of person who tried not to flaunt that she had a lot of money but it still managed to work its way into conversations. She just came off as though she felt as though she was better than you - a little pretentious I think. We're no longer friends, because I don't have the patience for that. I feel as though I am more sucessful than her since I think as though i'm getting more for my money than she is.

My other friend has the opposite problem. Her family was pretty average - didn't always have money but made it through just fine. Once her parents split up her mom (who she lived with) didn't always have money but they had a place to stay. Her mom eventually moved back home, leaving my friend to live with her grandparents while she finished school. She didn't have to pay rent, and the only bill she had (like me) was her $40 or so cell phone bill.

However, she never really decided on what to do in University and jumped around a bit before picking a major. Downside was that she racked up a good amount in credit during that time. Last time I saw she had $13,000 in debt from her line of credit and probably another $800 or so in credit card debt. That's pretty average I think, however, she then decided that working and being at school all at the same time was too much stress and promptly quit her job. She got an extention off of her line of credit and is living off that. Now, bad idea, right? Well, she isn't exactly, what you would call 'fiscally responsable' and still lives beyond her means. She has a lot of extravagent ideas and plans, but no real means to acheive those. She jumps around jobs a lot and never seems to settle. She is currently leasing a car (a debate I will get into later) for about $300 a month (paying with her line of credit) and still spending lots on frivilous things.

However, the thing that bugs me the most is that she's lucky. Things always seem to end up in her favor. She's recently landed a job which, although doesn't pay a whole lot, pays pretty good (Okay, this one's not luck, but the fact that she's sticking to it so far is good) and then yesterday she called me to tell me that her father is giving her $15,000 upon graduation to pay off all of her debts. Now, yes, that is a wonderful thing for her dad to do, however, that isn't really teaching her about the value of money if, everytime she gets into debt, she gets this magic gift of money to get her out of the hole.

She has suggested many times that if I bought a house she'd come live with me, and everytime I politely tell her 'maybe...sometime'. I don't have the heart to tell her no, but chances are she'd have other plans by the time I bought a house anyways.

Everyone seems to have that one friend, hey? I love her to bits, but I wouldn't hire her as my financial counsellor.

Now I know that this post has sounded very judgemental of me, and I'm sorry. I'm sure we all think things like that. I don't judge people for the situation that they are in (well, most people - there's a couple that I do) because it's not always their fault. However, it's how I compare myself to others in this big world!

Hmmm...2 posts today and it's only 10:00 a.m. Slow day at work so far!

Ka-bump, ka-bump...

So, i've hit a minor road block in my financial plan. Apparently I owe people money that I had forgotten about. Dammit. I hate that. My bad though, I completely forgot.

I owe my mom $702 for the British Pounds she purchased for me before the trip. She ordered extras and gave them to me. About £300 equals $702 with the horrible-exchange-rate of 2.34. Uuugh. Oh well. So, instead of splitting my last paycheque from Subway, I'll have to deposit that whole thing and then next month i'll have to deposit less into my savings/emergency fund in order to cover that extra cash. Too bad. I was all excited about finally getting this plan underway. Hmmm.

I also owe my sister some money but i'm not sure how much now. It was $400, however, some of the purchases that I made for both of us I took out of that $400. Eurostar tickets, which cost me: $366.54. So $183.27 was her share, brining the $400 down to $216.73. Hmmm. I'm sure that there is more that I took off of there, too, although I'm not sure how much. I'll have to e-mail her and ask (I'm too impatient to wait until tonight when I see her).

Hmmm...my saving plan may have to wait. Boo. Hiss.

So what have I got?

Well, I figured that since this is a financial blog per se, I should let you all know where I keep the mountain (or pile, or puddle, more likely) of cash that i'm sitting on.
TD Chequing Account: $965.26
ING Savings Account: $256.64
USA Savings: $902
AmEx: $0
Mastercard: $0
VISA: $0

That's where I stand. My cheqing account is at a high I haven't seen in a couple of months - I was pleased when I broke the thousand-dollar range, however, that has falled again. When I was at my previous job (working till, mostly), I collected American change and bills from the register. The change I bought at face value, and much of the bills I also bought at face value. $ is the amount that I have collected since fall of 2004. Unfortunately, I have given my notice at that job to pursure more Justice-related careers so I won't have that luxury anymore. But it's served me well: Now all I have to do it wait for the Canadian dollar to drop again so that US stuff will be worth something.

Something else you should know about me: I'm terrified of debt. Absolutely terrified. Once a check I wrote for my AmEx put my chequing account into something like 75 overdraft and I freaked out. I didn't sleep well, I couldn't eat. I couldn't spend a single penny until I knew that my account was in the positives again. Of course, it bounced back within days, but for those few days I was a wreck. This has served me well in the past but I will have to get over it for the future. In the past this has kept me from overspending or overcharging my multiple credit cards. In the future when debt may be neccesary I will have to face it and learn to deal with it.

For this very reason I took a year off between High School and college to work full time and earn some money. I earned $15000 some-odd dollars - more than enough to cover the first couple years - and I've worked part-time ever since then. I've been fortunate enough to have an amazing boss. She let me work the hours and the days that I wanted/needed to and gave me appropriate time off when I needed it. I also was lucky enough to live at home with parents that didn't ask for rent or grocery money. My only expense was my cell phone which (still) runs me about $40/month. I took a trip to Europe last spring with a class and that ran me about $4000 and the trip this spring is looking to run me about $2000. I like to live by the mantra that I need to travel while i'm still young and unmarried and un-childrened. Not that you can't travel when you are all those things, but I am very selfish (and I think that it's good for me) and like to do things my way and for me - especially when I am paying for it.

Seeing as $1800 some-odd dollars are due in tuition at the end of April, I am forced to either borrow money from my dad or from my sister to cover for it. I am leaving on 3 weeks vacation (most of which is already paid) to Europe and want to save every available dollar for conversion to British Pound. I dislike the idea of borrowing from my little sister, because it's the concept behind that. She's my little sister, and she has more money than me. It's not a big deal since she only spent one year in college and has worked full time for a year now, but it's the concept. I could borrow the money from my dad, but then he'd most likely charge me interest seeing as he'd be taking it directly off of his line of credit. But, i'd better decide soon.

I actually applied for a TD CanadaTrust student line of credit and they turned me down. That made sense to me seeing as I have no assets. No car, no house, no nothing. However, they still turned me down when my mother and I applied together. I got pissed off, and, as stubborn as I am, I am not going to call them and see if we can come to some arrangement. I am just going to seek alternatives and refuse to let them have any of my money. Suckers. I'm not bitter at all. No. Of course not.

This post ended up being a lot longer than I had originally planned. But I hope it was of interest to you. Stay tuned for more fun, finance-related nonsense!