Life After College: Financial Woes

Yeah, that's my life savings right there.

Because I’m making six pennies a year in my job after taxes, I follow a very strict budget that allows me to afford a moderate amount of food and a moderate amount of fun. There is no room for a savings plan in my budget so I just figured if I was extra careful nothing would ever go wrong.

By Jenni

Then last week everything went wrong.

I spilled sangria (or water according to the troubleshooting report I made to Apple) on my laptop, I dropped my straightener one time too many and it broke, and I found out my parent’s insurance company is onto me no longer being a student and has dropped me. For those of you non-accounting majors out there, that’s about 5 billion dollars worth of problems.

I had a minor panic attack. And by minor I mean I opened my window, stood on the ledge for a few moments, and thought about who I would haunt if I came back as a ghost. Then logic hit me and I realized that because I’m only one floor up I would just break a bunch of bones, sending me to the hospital and making my lack of insurance problem even worse.

So instead of jumping I thought of my other options. Luckily my grandparents who live in the city had a laptop I could borrow until I figured you out what to do about my laptop-turned-coaster. Unluckily it was designed for the partially blind. I’ve seen desktop computers more portable than this laptop. Hell, I’ve seen elephants smaller than this thing. The screen was about a football field long and the font was visible from space. This proved to be more than an inconvenience when I was blogging at WiFi cafes.  I was writing about STDs for one blog and let’s just say the employees at the cafe did not enjoy being able to read about gonorrhea while serving coffee. So not only did I have to blog from home all week, but I’m pretty sure I’m on a sex offender list now.

Which might have worked out better anyway considering my straightener situation. I can’t live without it  (or go into public places) because my hair’s naturally a combination of straight, curly, frizzy, and balding. Right now I have the iron permanently turned on hoping it’s just messing with me and still works. While I have no patience for a straighter with a sense of humor, I would take it if it means running those two hot plates of heaven through my unruly mane.

And as far as health insurance goes, well, it’s hard to get sick when you’re not leaving the house, right? And if I somehow do catch the Swine Flu, I’ll just steal someone’s identity who has insurance and load up on the meds.

In the meantime I’ll have to consider starting some kind of plan for saving. And by that I mean working on my pick-pocketing skills… or selling this laptop by the pound.