Payday: What Does That Feel Like Anyway?
Payday: What Does That Feel Like Anyway?
By: Devorah Gerber
Do you know that feeling of Payday? Your check has arrived, your pockets are lined with green, and your bank account is slowly but steadily filling up so you can G-D willing one day buy important articles of furniture like couches and exciting pieces like dressers.
So whilst your friends are investing their money in food and clothes and the latest electronics, you're investing in a savings account because the one percent interest that the bank pays is going to make the difference between a couch and a loveseat.
And then, oh, lovely day! You begin the exciting adventure of college! And now you find yourself caught in a catch 22 because to be able to afford college; you need to make a decent salary. Still, the jobs that pay generous salaries generally require a college degree or, at the very least, experience, a commodity most first-year college students do not possess.
Your parents, kind and loving souls that they are, agree to help bear the burden of half your (and your fellow college siblings) tuition but even so, with the steep curse of the middle class weighing heavy upon your back in the form of lack of financial aid, you find yourself dipping into those precious stocked away funds.
Eighteen years of Chanukah gelt from great aunt Evie, three years of carefully saved babysitting money (other than the occasional dollar spent on a 20 piece pack of football cards), and the loose change left over from your birthday cash suddenly finds itself being depleted. Its cozy home of a savings account has been broken into, robbed, and it no longer feels safe in its safe. Those days of dust collecting in the corners of its untouched home are gone.
Freshmen year is, naturally, the hardest. Your bank account is shrinking, and you've only just begun to work. Other than those minuscule first few paychecks (who were tucked away in the hopes of one day buying a futon but now find themselves buying a college education), your Payday payoff never sees the inside of your bank account for it finds itself going straight to pay the costs of the Undergrad.
It gets easier, of course. All things do with time, whether it's learning to cope with the loss of a loved one or starting a new school year or watching in horror as the numbers in your bank account dwindle with greater speed than a 2010 pre-teen girl chasing Justin Beiber.
Your sister (if you don't have one, invent her) tells you that once you're spending all this money on college, you may splurge your leftover pennies on Airpods. After all, she wisely points out, if you drop 160 bucks on a CLEP without blinking, you may as well buy something you'll enjoy. (Your imaginary sister, she's got her head on straight.)
Then one day, when you've been working long enough for your tuition to be paid, you discover that this month's Payday will be exciting for the first time in what feels like forever. This Payday, you can introduce your paycheck to its lonely, minute number of brethren huddled in the deep corners of your savings account. And slowly but surely your bank numbers start to rise again. It takes time and patience, but in the words of Mother Gothel, "All good things to those who wait."
With years of perseverance and the much larger income that experience and your new degree has bought you, your savings account's numbers rise significantly. They soon have greatly surpassed the numbers that they originally started at.
Which is great- because here comes Graduate school!
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