Instead of graduating college with a buttload of debt, I came out with about $30,000 in savings. This is a measly amount of money compared to the earnings of some people I know who started their own companies or got really good at online poker, but I thought it was a good chunk of money at the age of 21. This is how I did it and I hope it’s entertaining to you.

compare generic cialis pricescompare generic cialis prices — Yeah, I have really great parents, and I went to wasn’t very expensive six years ago. Even though our house was about three miles from campus they let me live on campus. The entire four years of education cost about $30,000 including tuition and dorms. That’s less than the cost of one year at most private schools. So the result is that I had no student loans.

compare generic cialis prices– Yeah, my parents are awesome. They’re not rich, though. The car was about five years old, and my mom bought it because her boss sold it to her at a very large discount. The boss had a Jaguar, and never drove his little Honda Accord, and so it was a very good deal. That’s why I never had a single car payment.

compare generic cialis prices — This may be a mistake in hindsight, because my credit history still isn’t very long. However, it may be a blessing too, because I ended up with no credit card debt.

compare generic cialis prices– I worked at a couple places on campus — one was an academic reader position, and another was a lab purchasing position. It’s pretty funny but the purchasing position paid about 30% more. Every other day, I would order radioactive embryos and chemicals for the plant biology department. That was a fun job because I got to look at what toys and weird stuff the professors were buying. The weirdest things I bought were cocaine, and two dozen live sterile cockroaches. The cocaine was bought with a license so it was legal. When the cockroach professor came in to pick up his cargo I asked him what he planned to do with them. He replied that he will have his students dissect them and determine the sex of the bugs. They were actually quite expensive, about $2.00 per head. I wonder who are the professional roach breeders out there. That’s got to be a pretty odd job.

compare generic cialis prices– UC Berkeley has one of the best libraries in the country, and almost all the textbooks were there. I estimate I saved at least $1000 just by borrowing books from the library. It’s hilarious because I had a class with 200+ people, and there were 3 to 4 copies of the current edition of the textbook in the library, but noone borrowed the books except for me. What’s up with that? Maybe some people like keeping textbooks to remind them of the pain they went through, but I don’t. I just kept on renewing the books until the end of the semester and kept them in my locker. I guess not all college libraries have great collections, but most libraries will have at least one book you read during the long four years.

compare generic cialis prices– This is one of those funny things that I just did out of the blue. I used to be a very big library book sale fan. I especially like their fire sales where bags of books were sold for $3 to $5. So the end result was that I ended up with a lot of books. I started listing them in Amazon Marketplace and some of them started to sell. It was pretty fun and easy to do and didn’t take that much time. The most profitable book I sold was purchased for $1 and sold for $97 on eBay. I actually learned a lot of things about running a “business”, but I quit this venture after college mostly because I got bored of it and didn’t have time and space for it anymore. The total net profit from selling a few hundred books was about $5000 to $6000. It was enough to cover rent for my senior year of college so my parents didn’t pay for it.

compare generic cialis prices — These all happened in senior year. I didn’t really go to school the first semester of that year because I did a co-op, which is a paid internship that I received school credit for. That was sort of the first taste of having a real job and living on my own for me. It was a really good experience, and I think all college students should try to get an internship before graduating. The second internship happened sort of randomly during the second semester, and I got the job because of my experience in the first internship. That was much more part-time and lasted a shorter time period. The contract job was offered to me through a friend. So senior year all I did was work, and it was quite interesting. I had the opportunity to experience three extremely different working environments, and meet lots of cool people. Of course, I also managed to save most of my earnings from these gigs without debt and such.

compare generic cialis prices– Sweepstaking is usually seen as a hobby for old people and stay at home moms. In fact, most of the women in the sweepstakes forums are stay at home moms. I learned a lot about advertising, spam, and sweepstakes laws when I had this hobby. I entered sweepstakes sponsored by reputable companies, and I won a lot of things. I’m still wearing clothes won from that hobby to this day, and my current favoritel Citizen Ecodrive watch is also a trophy from a win. I also won money and other random things. The coolest prize was a weekend getaway to Miami, Florida. I went there with my mom, and it was an awesome getaway because it was completely free. Sweepstakes is purely luck and the more you enter the more you will win. It is time consuming, and I gave it up when I graduated because I felt like I don’t really need to win small things by giving up my information anymore. Actually, there is still one sweepstakes I enter, and I may write about it in the near future.

Now you may ask, when did you study for class and do projects? Well, I spent a lot of time on those too, but college students really have a lot of time on their hands. That’s why a lot of them can start companies, get good at pokers, or becoming gaming champions.

So what did I do with my $30,000 after the pomp and circumstance? I put $7000 of it into a Roth IRA at Vanguard, and $13000 of it into an individual fund acount at Vanguard. I haven’t moved the Vanguard money for two years and the $20,000 there has now grown to about $27,500. I put half of the money in Vanguard Target Retirement 2045, and half of the money in Vanguard Primecap Core (a fund recommendation from my mom). I don’t worry about my Vanguard fund very much, and I’m just letting it grow. I put the other $10,000 in t-bills and i-bonds, which has been earning less interest. However, T-bills are very accessible and I like them because I don’t have to pay state taxes on the income. I think ultimately it really helped me to have very supportive parents who are also financially savvy. They told me about things like Roth IRAs and mutual funds and now after two years of working full time and saving, my little nest egg has grown to more than four times its original size.

Monday was my first day back at work after a two week vacation for my wedding and honeymoon. I was really glad to be back at work because I kind of missed my cubicle and I have been at home for an entire week following the trip to Kauai. The extra week was used to catch up on television and a lot of cleaning. At the end of the week we went to church and invited the hubby’s best man and his wife to dinner. She is pregnant and is deliriously happy to be pregnant and can’t wait to quit her job and be a stay at home mom. She said to me, “some women just love their jobs and want to go back to work after they have kids, it’s so sad, but I guess there are just people like that!” I really didn’t know how to respond since I don’t have kids yet, but I do have a job I am quite fond of. So I just smiled nervously and let her talk. It’s odd, but her comment reminded me something the media calls the “mommy wars”, which is a term for the general bitterness and divide between career women and stay at home moms. I have met women on both extremes of the “war”. One woman who has never had children and worked her entire life said to me once, “I don’t think having children is integral to being a woman, and how sad would it be if you had a kid and it died or something?” She also told me that she thought it was so sad that a lot of girls went to college to get their “MRS.” degree. It’s funny but most women I know are very passive aggressive creatures, and they rarely say what they mean directly. I found it interesting that both the best man’s wife and this career gal both used the word “sad”. On the surface there is some sort of pity between them, but there is also disgust and despise. On one front, the career woman is disgusted that the sole purpose for some women to go to school is to get a husband, and on the other side the stay at home mother to be despises women who want to put their careers over their children.

So what fuels the mommy fires? I think deep down both sides are at least a little jealous of each other. All the stay at home moms I know have supportive spouses who provides for the family and any woman is definitely extremely fortunate to find and retain such a precious spouse . Security and family are what a lot of single career-driven women crave even though they may not admit it. My mother saw a woman she worked with secretly cry on her birthdays as she aged from 25 to 35 without a family of her own. The last time my mother saw her she said she no longer wants a husband, but desperately wants a child. On the other hand, having a career gives a woman a certain sense of freedom and I think some full time moms desire that mobility and power. Also I imagine having only your spouse and kids as friends can get lonely. A relative of my mom ‘s boss had four children and raised all them as a stay at home mom. One day she left her home and addressed a note to her husband that said she is leaving with her internet lover. It just goes to show that isolation and children could drive one mad.

I have mixed feelings about this “war” because I am a young woman with an excellent career, but I also wants kids. I think in an expensive place like the Bay Area, it may not be practical for most women to become full time stay at home moms unless their spouses make above average incomes. It is definitely possible to do it, but I know that if my husband had to support the both of us and at least one child on his income alone we would have almost no savings. For our generation having no savings is really not an option because we have virtually no social safety net to rely on when we’re old and decrepit. However, I have seen the stresses moms go through at work. Since I work in technology, most of my coworkers are men and children don’t seem to phase them much. Generally the ratio of female to male engineers is something like 1 to 4 in Silicon Valley companies. Also when I meet female engineers, very few of them have children. There is one woman in our team that has a child, and she is always calling in sick to take care of her child. There is noticeable resentment towards her from everyone because of her absences. So I think if I had a child, I would need to work at home, or a very large company where no one knows what I look like. In conclusion, I probably need to keep my career just for the survival of our family, but maybe the hubby would like to be a stay at home dad? He is much better at cooking and cleaning than I am!

I think it’s funny that most people always wonder how much money their friends and coworkers make, but rarely talk about it. It may just be an American thing, because in China my parents and grandparents tell anyone they know how much money they make. I think because of them I am usually pretty open about how much money I make when people I trust ask me about it, but really, very few people ask. Here’s a story of how a friend reacted when I told him how much I was paid.

So I have known this guy for more than ten years now. He was a year above me in high school and we had several classes together. We went to different colleges but studied the same major and still kept in touch online and played games together. We never really talked about money very much because finances didn’t really matter when you’re young and in school and your parents paid for most of it. Our conversations mostly consisted of him making up funny nicknames for me and random stuff. So after he and I both secured our first real world full time jobs after college he asked me how much I was paid. As I stated in a previous post I made $60,000 a year when I graduated from college. It turns out that he was making a bit more than $40,000 per year and I told him he was definitely underpaid. He was outraged and went straight to his boss for a raise even though he had been working there for about 3 months. His boss definitely knew he was underpaid because the company immediately gave him a $13,000 raise and bumped his pay from 42,000 to 55,000 per year. I think he was happy about the raise, but still a bit miffed that I made more than him and he was doing a job he hated. But now he was definitely more confident about his skills and worth, because he went on to look for a new job and got a lot of interviews, and finally he took an offer at that ginormous search company which rhymes with oogle.

So we’re still friends after that, but now he feels rich because he has a lot more income. He looked into buying a condo in 2006 because a coworker was into real estate investing. He asked me about it and I told him many reasons why I thought it was a bad idea to buy at that time. He was thinking of putting 5% down and buying a 499k condo in Fremont that was less than 900 square feet. He was throwing all those arguments such as “I will have equity” and “housing will go up” at me. Then I said to him, “You know that equity means the amount of money you have paid on a home and not the price of a home, right?” To this he replied, “What? That sucks!!” I think that at the peak of the housing bubble a lot of people just repeated what the realtors said without really researching what each of the buzzwords meant. My friend isn’t stupid, and he didn’t buy the condo. Now more than a year later he is gladly renting an apartment with a roommate and recently he told me he probably would have bought the house if I wasn’t against the idea so much. I also told him about other investments such as mutual funds, bonds, and stocks and just explained what each of them were and he realized on his own that the investment gains on a home probably isn’t more than investment gains on stocks in the long run. He bought some money market funds, treasury bonds, and stocks on his own. We both agree that we want to be homeowners, but a home shouldn’t be an investment vehicle, and the current Bay Area prices are way out of line.

Now after less than a year he is totally debt free and has saved a substantial amount of money at the age of 24. According to him he is learning about capitalism and he needs to understand capitalism to beat it. So I’m glad to see that his basic ideals has not changed by having and saving more money. In fact, he has grown much more responsible just by learning about finances.

What is the moral of this story? I guess one important thing is that you shouldn’t be afraid to discuss finances with your friends and family. You learn a lot about a person by how they deal with their money and you can also get tips on how you can manage your money. It’s also possible that you will find a friend who is really in need and an opportunity to help someone. Another thing is that twentysomethings really need to have a guide on how to manage their lives when they’re thrown in the real world. It’s pretty hard to transition the talks of fun and games to serious financial issues when you have friends that you’ve had silly conversations with for years and years. And finally there is the cliche lesson of believing in yourself, because ultimately my friend did whatever he wanted to do without compromising his values. I fed him information, and he made his own choices to save and invest for his future. My friend wanted me to write this story because he’s quite proud of where he is now, and I think anyone can do what he did if they choose to.

Wow, it’s Monday again and there’s a My submission for this week was , and I found a couple other interesting articles on careers at the carnival too:

• — This article at Cash Money Life describes some incredibly dangerous careers. I didn’t know fishing was so dangerous.

• — I agree with pretty much everything in this article, and I’ve seen some botched negotiations too.

Check out the Carnival for a slew of other great articles! Trent’s editor’s picks are all very good.