Finance For Youth: The Blog

All of us, at one time or another, screw up somewhere. There is no way around it. In fact, I’ve noticed that the more you try to avoid screwing up, the more you will inevitably screw up, and each screw-up will be more severe. When Greg broke the vase on the BRADY BUNCH, he initially allowed each of the other children and Alice take the blame for his mistake. Of course, at the end, he took the blame, which is actually the point here.

A few months ago, I got a new phone. As part of the deal, AT&T gave me a debit card preloaded with some amount of money. Not hating the idea of free money, my wife and I had a plan for what to do with it. So we put the card in a drawer and forgot about it until it was time to go buy whatever it was that we were planning…, the card expired! Okay, I screwed up.

Again, screwing up isn’t nearly as important as how you react. When you are at work, and you make a mistake, or even royally screw up, you can try and cover it up, hoping nobody catches on, or you can face up to the mistake and move forward. One way will almost certainly backfire on you, and you will quite possibly lose your job. The other way, you may get in a lot of trouble, but you most likely will be given the opportunity to fix the mistake and your reputation. I’ve told many people before about times when I have tried both methods, and the results. I can’t tell you what to do, or how to act, but I can reliably predict your chances of success depending on which method you choose.

When you are budgeting, sometimes you underestimate your expenses or overestimate your income. It happens to everybody at least once, and you kind of learn to not let it happen again. Or, you compound one minor mistake with a series of ever-increasing mistakes.

So, what should you do when you screw up? First, own up to the mistake. Admit to whomever you need to that you made a mistake so that they hear about it from you and not from someone else. Second, learn from the mistake. Write down what happened, what the result was, and what you could have done differently. Try to keep this in a place where you can get to it if you ever are faced with the same situation in the future. Third, and possibly most important, resolve to never, ever, EVER make that mistake again, and stick to this resolution. Not sticking it out makes the rest of the process meaningless. Don’t forget to do whatever you can to minimize the consequences by trying to fix the mistake. It is nice to know that you learned something, but if you don’t at least try to remedy the situation, what good have you done?

What shouldn’t you do? First, don’t beat yourself up unnecessarily about it. Remember, everybody makes mistakes. Many mistakes aren’t terribly big deals. They only become big deals when we compound them or ignore them to make more. Second, don’t try to hide the mistake. This is suspicious behavior. People who see you make a mistake and try to hide it will start to wonder what else you might be trying to hide; and don’t give me the argument that they may never find out. Do you really want to take that chance? Third, if you can help it, don’t repeat the mistake—ever. Also, don’t try to pass your mistake off onto someone else. When you do this, you are cheating yourself and screwing someone else. Accept your mistake and move on. You never know what the final result may be.

Back to the debit card thing. I called AT&T, told them straight up that I had made a mistake, and asked if there was something they could do to help me out. They told me that policy was policy. They asked me to hold, and told me that my new card would be sent out within three weeks. I’m grateful for their awesome service, and I’ll make sure I don’t make that mistake again. The moral of this story: Own up to your own mistakes and do what you can to make sure you don’t repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

When I was growing up, my parents went to a generic store to buy clothes for us kids. We all got the exact same clothes, with subtle color differences. In my parents’ defense, there were many kids to shop for, and we were all boys, so the clothes never lasted as long. They simply couldn’t afford to clothe us in the fads of the day.

When I started buying my own clothes, I fell into the habit of buying “cool” clothes. I still do, to an extent. But the truth of the matter is that FADS ARE EXPENSIVE TO FOLLOW.

Funny thing, it isn’t just clothes: Almost every aspect of life that has fads or temporary fashions costs more to follow than going outside the fad. This leads me to believe that fads are not good things.

Personal Finance has many fads as well. People who know me will ask me who I “read”, in an effort to determine the source of what I teach and how I live. Many of them will be sporting a copy of their favorite author’s latest offerings, like a shield against the unbelievers. Whether it’s JIM CRAMER, DAVE RAMSEY, ROBERT KIYOSAKI, SUZE ORMAN, or even me, people get stuck on ONE person and follow that person (dare I say) religiously.

People, don’t do this to yourself. I don’t pretend to be the only game in town, and hopefully these others, or other bloggers out there who are the current flavor of the month don’t either. Read as much as you can out there, preferably from sources who don’t agree. Take what works and discard the rest. Once you figure it out with Finance people, start really looking at other areas in your life where you follow the fads. See if there are other view points that you might gain something by listening to.

Sometimes, the level of stupidity in the world is crushing. How are young people expected to grow into good, productive, members of society if they don’t have good examples from their parents and the other adults in their lives? Yet those same adults, who only qualify for the title due to their managing to hang around for at least 18 years, are quick to blame young people for everything that goes wrong in their lives. I don’t envy what we adults are leaving to the youth of the world. Our forbearers did better for us, and we adults should be ashamed of ourselves for the behavior we model for those that come after.

My first STORY demonstrates how little regard many adults have for the future. The basics of a story are this: A family got greedy and bought a house during the most recent housing bubble, using an adjustable rate mortgage to allow them to “buy” more house than they should have. Many others in the neighborhood did the same thing. Well, as always, the ride came to the end for many of their neighbors, and they lost their homes. Now these specimens of human waste have decided that they are just going to stop paying their mortgage because they don’t like the rules of the game they entered into.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t care, but they have kids, and they are teaching these kids that it is okay to decide, in the middle of a game, that they want to change the rules or take their ball and go home. Instead of teaching their kids the value of making wise decisions after careful deliberation, they decide to teach them to say “F-You!” to doing the right thing, common sense and decency. I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on them; it is people like these that inspired Finance For Youth in the first place.

Before I go off on a humanity-hating binge, I feel the need to balance the scales. VERIZON recently helped an old and lonely widower retrieve his departed wife’s voicemail greeting after it had somehow been erased. This man listened to his wife’s voice every day since her passing. When I originally heard about the story, I thought it was a little strange, but “live and let live”, or something. When I read that Verizon really stepped up and fixed the problem, that’s a good day for humanity.

This week’s post might seem to deal less with finance than normal, but stick with me here. We’re going back to moving out a little bit, but today we’re talking about some skills EVERYBODY should pick up. Bringing the whole shebang back to finance, knowing these skills can save you a lot of money, and not knowing them can cost a lot of money.

COOKING: This is a no-brainer, but knowing how to cook is important, especially if you are living on your own. Let’s talk a little about degrees here. When I say cooking, I’m not talking about being able to open a can of tuna for a sandwich, nor am I talking about cooking like THE NAKED CHEF, but you need to learn how to throw a few, cost-efficient, nutritious ingredients together so you don’t starve or so you aren’t forced to spend stupid amounts of money on fast food. There are plenty of books in your library (free books, who knew?) to get you started, and there are also plenty of web sites that can point you towards some decent meals. There are also a few tools that can help you. None of these are essential, but hardly anything really is essential. These are items that come in handy and make life a little easier. I know there are other items that can do the same thing, and sometimes even cheaper, but having these, and many others, makes cooking just that much more fun.

• Microwave
• Rice Cooker
• Crock Pot
• Sauce Pot
• Good knife

SEWING: When a button falls off, or when you step through a hem, you have a few options: You could buy a new piece of clothing, You can take it to get mended, or you can fix it yourself. Although fixing it yourself might not give you that professional look that the other two options will, you really need to think about degrees of importance. I can only speak for guys here, but if I loose a button, and I sew it back on, this button will be covered by a belt (pants), or possibly a tie (shirt), so it doesn’t matter that much. If I’m trying to do some serious alterations to shorten the length of a sleeve, I will probably take it to have it done, only because I don’t want to relive the COSBY SHOW (VIDEO LINK) episode. Of course, there is a fourth option: You can go back to Mom or Dad and they can help you.

There are a few other skills that are important for you to know, and I’ll be going over some of the ones I feel are important in the near future. If you can think of any skills you think are important, drop me a line!
Till next time!

A letter from a reader says:

Will: I’m not your target demographic, but I need some help, and I think your site is really good. I’m sure you can help me with this problem. I got a promotion a few months ago to a position where I work directly under a really strict boss who is really good at what she does. I earned my position and I am also really good but I always feel like I can’t measure up in her eyes. I feel like I’m screwing things up much more than I used to and she’s just sitting there watching me fail. I feel like I was given this great opportunity but all I’m doing is failing and ruining my reputation. How do I prove to my new boss that I really do deserve this promotion and how do I stop making dumb mistakes?

Originally, when I read this, I thought I knew the writer. She sounded like someone I had worked with a long time ago. Turns out, I was wrong, but my friend’s story isn’t much different from Misti’s.

I have a reputation of being a really hard manager. Not because I’m needlessly hard on the staff, but because I also have the reputation of being the best there is at what I do. I’m not bragging about this, I’ve worked very hard to cultivate and earn that image. People are afraid of making mistakes around me because they think I am going to be unforgiving. Once people work with me for a while, they understand that I am more concerned with their growth than their perfection.

A few years ago, I was at a bank, (actually a credit union, but I use the term bank for those who are unfamiliar with the concept of credit unions) and I was temporarily assigned to a specific branch to “fix” the staff there. They had consistently bad customer service scores and staff rarely stayed there for more than six months before going up or going out. The company originally thought the problem was management, so they traded managers out on a fairly regular basis. The incentive for managers was to be the one that turned this branch around. One manager actually started to turn things around, although it was after the reputation for the branch had become so bad that being sent there was a punishment rather than a benefit. He asked me to come in to help him for a while.

Pretty early on, I had a meeting with the staff to see where the problems were, and how to deal with them. The staff felt like they were on the Island of Misfit Toys, because they had no stability in leadership, the management never came and visited, and they were pretty much left out there alone to sink or swim. Most of the staff just gave up trying.

One particular teller was known as a bad apple, because she would openly voice her opinion to whoever would listen. She was a smart girl, but she had had no guidance in how to behave at a job (this was her first job ever!), and she had a bad rep. She didn’t want to give up, but she was mad about the situation. Having had a lot of experience with bad reps, I took an immediate shine to her. I told her that if she was willing to do the work, we could turn her reputation around and maybe save the branch in general. The end result was that she worked hard and did the work. She became very highly regarded, and was offered a better position at another bank.

Months later, she called me to thank me for everything. She told me that she used to be terrified of me because I was so precise and she was afraid I would hold her to the same standards I held myself. It wasn’t until much later that she realized that she could relax a little, knowing that mistakes were treated as anomalies until they became habit. I would coach someone who made a mistake on how to avoid doing so in the future, and I would come down hard on someone who slacked off or was just a general *******. Her story and Misti’s sounded very familiar to me.

For Misti, I would suggest that she knows how good she is. She needs to stop thinking of her boss as some ogre who is out to get her (especially since there is no indication that she IS out to get her), and start trying to learn from her. Take your time, relax, and don’t focus on not making a mistake: Focus on doing your best, and if you make a mistake (which should be an anomaly), fix it and move on. Don’t dwell on it too much, and don’t let an occasional mistake dictate how you are perceived to those in power. The mistakes will stop as you become more confident in yourself and stop looking for someone to validate your mistakes.

Does anybody else have anything to suggest for Misti?