Beating Broke

Don’t Be A Fool, Focus On School

August 3, 2011 By MelissaB 19 Comments

The back to school season is upon us, and many newly graduated high school students will head off to college for the first time. More than ever, college students feel financial pressure. The cost of college tuition continues to rise, and a student is often forced to decide to go into student loan debt to pay for her education or to work many hours to try to pay for the tuition without going into debt.

As a former college teacher I have a few thoughts on the subject. If a student is going to college full-time, I cannot stress enough that school should be the main focus. If a student needs to work, he should work part-time, 10 to 20 hours a week. Yes, there are plenty of college graduates who brag that they worked full-time and went to school full-time and did just fine. Yet, what were their grades?

I routinely had students in my class who worked full-time and went to school full-time. In this scenario, education almost always gets shortchanged. A student cannot neglect their employment, or they will be fired. Instead they neglect their school work and get low grades, often not even passing grades. A good rule of thumb is that for every hour in a credit course, plan to study three hours outside the class for a liberal arts class and four hours for a science or math class. That means a student taking a 3 credit hour rhetoric course should plan on spending 9 hours outside the classroom doing homework. If the student is taking a 4 hour anatomy class, he should plan on spending 16 hours outside the classroom on homework. A full load of classes can range anywhere from 12 to 18 credit hours. Those hours represent the time spent in the classroom. Even if all the classes are liberal arts classes, the student should still be putting in 36 to 54 hours on homework a week to obtain optimal grades. So, be sure to take your degree options into consideration when deciding on a job. Because, unless the student doesn’t plan on sleeping, working a full-time job is too much.

There is nothing wrong with reversing the situation and working full-time to avoid taking on student loan debt. However, the student should only commit to taking a maximum of 2 classes a semester to obtain optimal grades.

College students should accept that they can’t do it all. Either go to school full-time and work part-time and accept that you will have to pay off debt when you graduate or work full-time and go to school part-time and accept that you will graduate debt free, but it will take longer. If a student takes on too much and earns low or failing grades, they have ultimately just wasted their time AND money.

photo credit: ralph and jenny

Your Credit Score Now Available on Kindle

July 28, 2011 By Shane Ede 8 Comments

The Beating Broke Guide to Your Credit Score is a guide that I wrote a while back, that has been available as a download here on the site as a .pdf document for some time. With the recent rise in usage for ebook readers, I thought it was time that it got converted over and presented as a kindle ebook. So, that’s exactly what I did last weekend. It’s now available in the Kindle store on Amazon for only $0.99. It’s still available as a pdf download here for free, if that’s what you want, but I know some would rather have it directly on their reader. It’s also been made available in the epub format (free) on Smashwords.

Debt Ceiling Crisis?

July 25, 2011 By Shane Ede 13 Comments

If you’re even slightly interested in the US economy, and, let’s face it, most of the world is, then you’ve likely been at least marginally following the last few weeks worth of debt ceiling news. The quick and dirty of it is that the US government has a debt ceiling that puts a cap on how much debt the US federal government can carry. If they reach that cap, they can no longer issue treasury bonds and the like to raise money to pay for things. Based on what I’ve read, everyone would like us to believe that it’s a major crisis, and the world will end if we don’t raise that debt ceiling and allow for more debt. But, is it really a crisis?

Let’s think about this just a little bit. Replace “U.S. Government” with John Doe in everything I’ve just said, and all the news you’ve read. If we were talking about an individual, we wouldn’t be talking about how the world would end if they weren’t allowed to accumulate more debt. We’d be talking about how they need to radically cut costs, increase income, pay off debt until they can get their finances in order. Would it be called a crisis? Maybe on a personal level, John Doe would believe it was a crisis. But, it certainly wouldn’t be world ending.

I’ll admit that it is a bit different when it’s a government entity that we’re talking about. If the US government goes bankrupt, there will be some pretty serious problems with the economy for a while. Which brings up another issue altogether. The US economy needs some diversification of it’s revenue streams. Way too much of the economy balances on how much money the US government sinks into it each month.

It’s time we start asking the same questions of the US government that we would be asking of John Doe. Do you really need that expenditure? That service? All three cars? The McMansion? Unfortunately, those that are in charge in Washington are playing political ball instead of really trying to solve the problem. They think way to hard about what programs they can cut that won’t lose them votes in the next cycle, or how much they can raise taxes without losing votes, when, instead, they should be looking to make the US government financially solvent and stabilizing it’s fiscal situation. You or I would start with a balanced budget, I don’t see any reason why the government shouldn’t do the same.

What do you think? I don’t think I’m being to idealistic in asking that they carry a balanced budget each year. Or that they cut costs until they can do that. Yes, they’ll likely have to raise taxes some to pay off what they’ve got for debt, but if it doesn’t come with some pretty significant cost cutting, they’ll all be looking for new jobs in 2012 anyways.

photo credit: Public Notice Media