Quote From: caddyguyI don't mean to interrupt the communication you and Alien Lifeform have going on but I do want to give you my opinion. You can then decide if you want my advise or not!!
In your first post you spoke about your money problems and then jumped to your junk car as your major problem. Your car is NOT your problem. You have an INCOME problem......meaning you have expenses stacking up and you do not have enough income to cover expenses. You are about to take on more debt in order to get what you want NOW. I certainly commend you for wanting a good education.....however, I recommend you suspend your education UNTIL you can raise some income. Drop one semester and work like a dog to earn some money.....save some money.....get another car.....enough to pay for school.....and then return to your education. Take time to read some books on how to understandthe waymoney works and how to manage your money. Make money work 'for' you, not 'against' you. If you need to build 'credit' let me know and I will tell you a 'safe' way to do so WITHOUT using Credit Cards and without going into debt. Please, do not start your life thinking that BORROWING is the only way to get the things you need/want.
EDUCATION: Choose a career path that will pay off when you finish school. I just heard a story about a lady who had an MBA in Social Studies......lost her job......started cleaning houses and discovered that she could earn more money doing that!!!! One sure does not need an MBA to clean houses!! Get my point??
ROOT PROBLEM: Not enough income. Take care of the root problem first and the other problems will disappear. I truly like to help those who are trying to help themselves!!
I've already chosen my career, and I'm not putting it on hold. I'm just not doing that. Sorry. No. I'll put other things on hold before I do that. I'm never going to make better money if I put my education on hold. I'm not going for an MBA. Please don't make assumptions about my career aspirations. You basically just told me I don't need college. My family would explode and disown me if I dropped out of college. So that's not happening. Not an option. And maybe your friend is happy cleaning houses. That's great! More power to her and I'm glad she found her niche that way instead of the other job. I'm not that kind of person. I think I would kill myself if I was stuck with a job like that, or a job in retail, or a food service job, for the rest of my life. I'm fine with it as a job for now, working through college and whatnot, but I would be extremely unhappy making a career out of that. That's not for me.
And I never said that I am in debt because I borrowed money. Never said that. I did say that I owed my boyfriend money, but I also noted that he told me I don't have to pay him now, and that he can wait until the money problem is sorted out. And I can't just not pay for car insurance. I'm covered under my mother and father's plan, so I need to pay her, whether I need a car or not. I didn't borrow money from her, I'm paying for my insurance. And I'm a little insulted that you would assume that I just go through life borrowing money.
I have no credit cards. I'm not in credit card debt.
I know I don't have enough income. I'm trying to find ways to work with the income I have. I can't just go to my boss and say 'I have money problems, pay me more.' What do you want me to do?
What happened with the car is that my dad told me I might have a cracked head. Okay, I didn't know what that meant. My dad does that all the time. He just looks at my car and says 'You need blah blah blah' and gets mad at me when I don't know what the hell he's talking about. Once he even turned to my boyfriend and said 'My daughter doesn't know -insert car jargon here-worth sh**!' While I was standing there watching him say it. Then he goes and tunes up my engine, does some more work on it, then comes back in the house and tells me 'I put -insert more car jargon here-should be fixed for a while.' Then tells me nothing else. Now my car is in this situation, and my dad is (yet again) getting mad at me because I didn't know what to do automatically like he does.
So, whoever posted the scenarios, you're half right. My dad told me what the problem was, but not what to do about it. And I already stated that I CAN NOT take the bus. There is no bus stop near my house, and my friend is having a hard time finding a job any further than what she can walk to because the bus is almost always late, sometimes by an hour or more. If I'm at the college campus (which is about 40-45 minutes from where I live) at 4:30 in the afternoon after class, and I have to be at work at 5, the bus is not going to take me straight to work. If it arrives at 5 (provided it's on time) I'm going to be late by a lot. If that happens too much, I get fired. Then I have no income. And if I take the bus in the morning, and am repeatedly late for class, then I get dropped. I'd get in more trouble for being dropped from a class than I would dropping out willingly, because that means that the teacher believed I wasn't working hard enough to deserve to be in the class.
And thanks Alien, I'll talk to my dad about that option instead of spending more cash on another car. That seems like a sensible option to take if it's doable.
Personally, I think that Alien is really the only person that has given me some effective advice on how to save money in this situation, by giving me an option to cut down on the expenses by a lot. So I think I'm done here.
