Shafinaaz Kamrul
I remember the first time I signed up for a credit card, because it was only a few months ago.
Perhaps I recall that time really well, not because of the “achievement” of getting my own credit card itself, but because of the problems that it helped me solve.
While a first-semester student at Pierce College, I received an offer in the mail saying, “We think you deserve credit!”
At that point the only thing that hit me was the fact that when I opened the envelope, I saw a letter from someone I didn’t know who would let me borrow $500 from him and not ask me every day to return it.
Could life get any better?
No, because ever since that day, life has gotten nothing but worse.
A year back, I heard my CSUN friend Jamie Crawford complain, “If you count out my car, then I’m still $2,000 in debt.”
A term later I heard my humanities professor, Linda Toth, comment, “Credit cards are the worst thing that happened to you, as a college student.
“Right now if you are in debt, then you would never able be able to buy a house.”
But that was not enough to scare me away from getting credit.
I mean, hey, I was different, right? I would not be “overspending,” right?
I’m not one of “those” college students who overspend and don’t know their limits. I should do fine.
If those were reasons to make me want to get credit, a bigger reason was that starving to death while trying to pay for housing, gas, school and books is not going to make daddy dearest send me more money on top of the “advance Christmas present” which I took in cash form.
And why should I ask him, when I have a stranger offering me free money and only asking for $10 monthly minimum payments?
So the $500 should be enough for me — for a month.
And I should do fine with the minimum payments — for five months.
I got my second credit card three months after the first. Two months later I got the third.
Was I overspending?
I was only using it to buy my books.
And stationery.
And coffee.
And food when I’m starving, having already overdrawn my bank account five times over the last three days and Bank of America refuses to let me have more even though I would return them the money with a $35 overdraft fee for each item totaling $175 on top of my $400 withdrawal amount.
Oh, and did I mention my $550 monthly rent, which they refuse to take in any form of payments except cash? And $100 for utilities?
I could give up on my pretty pink Motorazor, as Verizon costs me $69.99 a month but unless I have a valid phone number I have to stand the embarrassment of giving everyone, including my school and work, my boyfriend’s cell phone number.
I could skip my car if only the day had more than 24 hours and I would have enough time to go from school at Woodland Hills to work at Sherman Oaks in a very timely-arriving Metro bus.
I’m sure then I wouldn’t “overspend” $750 per month on gas, insurance and car payments, but then I would lose my job and drop out of school and that doesn’t make life better.
So I spend double what I earn every month.
Just to make it clear, I count the money I earn, plus my father’s given money and the aid I get from school, as my “total” income.
Do I really spend lavishly and forget my limits because of the five credit cards that I owned at 19?
Because I’m a “shopaholic” or an “insincere, careless” college student?
Or do I spend so much because I don’t have many choices left if I want to survive in this world?
Almost all college-going students are in the same situation.
Just because we don’t have the skills and don’t earn as much as our parents do, doesn’t mean that we don’t have the same amount of excuses to spend money.
Not because we’re all spoiled kids but because life doesn’t give us too much of an option.
Web sites and newspapers should stop publishing articles abut how “Children today receive credit at a very young age, throwing them off balance.”
Is there any way they can solve this problem for us?
If I were to give up on these cards, would the person who writes that article help me pay my rent?
Would they perhaps increase my salary or find me more hours over the 45 hours I work weekly?
They don’t charge us anything less for being college students, so how can we spend any less by being college students?
I was at Kaiser Permanente last week for a checkup and paid a fee of $10 on my credit card.
As the clerk was running my card, he asked me, “How old are you?”
When I told him I was 19, he commented, “It’s funny how kids these days own more money than they deserve.
“You must be your parents’ favorite kid, eh?”
Don’t blame my parents or my upbringing for the problem that the society I live in has thrust on me.
Don’t blame me for being a shopaholic when all I’m shopping for is a gallon of milk or some food I don’t even know how to cook.
That credit card helps me survive.
When it’s a cold, rainy night in “sunny California” and I’m penniless, I have nothing but the $3 remaining on my Capital One to get me a hot beverage.
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