Youth Communication - Money Matters for Teens: Advice on Spending and Saving, Managing Income, and Paying for College

This arrangement copyright 2022 by Youth Communication

Originally published as Money Matters in 2014 by Youth Communication. Additional stories appeared in Represent.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Executive editor: Keith Hefner

Contributing editors: Rachel Blustain, Sasha Chavkin, Al Desetta, Sheila Feeney, Marie Glancy, Katia Hetter, Kendra Hurley, Philip Kay, Nora McCarthy, Tamar Rothenberg, Autumn Spanne, Maria Luisa Tucker, Hope Vanderberg, and Virginia Vitzthum

Cover design by Daniel Brount

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-5992-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-5993-0

Printed in the United States of America

To teenagers, money matters. As you leave childhood behind, the ability to get and spend your own money marks your growing independence. Knowing you can buy something you want is exciting and liberating. Having some money for the first time is also a chance to mess up and learn the consequences of bad spending decisions.

Getting older means discovering more of how the adult world worksor doesnt. The gap between the richest and the poorest Americans has been growing for decades, and experts predict it will continue to grow unless politicians vote for policies like higher taxes for the rich and greater benefits for the rest of us. Young people bear the brunt of this inequality because it makes it harder to get a job and to pay for the college education you need to move up the ladder. If your parents can support you, you may not need to worry about money yet, but you will soon.

In this book, teens write about their problems handling money wisely, the lessons theyve learned from managing their own income, clever ways theyve found to earn and save, and their growing awareness of how our larger economic system determines their relationship to money. Many of the teens who wrote the stories in this book are in foster care or live in lower- income neighborhoods, and they write about the hard transition to economic self-sufficiency.

Xavier Reyes wasnt even living on his own yet when he found himself trying to climb out of a deep hole of credit card debt, from which it took him years to escape. The smartest first step to taking real control of your money is to start a bank account, as Jarel Melendez and Chantal Hylton do. But Chantal points out there are fees to beware of here, too: A bank account is only a good thing if you know how to use it.

Several stories deal with teens concerns about how to become financially independent. Giselle John is on a mission to save $7,000 before she turns 21 and ages out of foster care. Asia Fillmore learns not to keep bankrolling friends who never pay her back. (Asias story also gives teachers an opportunity to teach colloquial as opposed to formal writing.) Whether youre trying to leave home or just want to have more money in your pocket, thrift is something most young adults will have to learn. Anita Ames writes about overcoming her prejudice against second-hand clothes. Chimore Mack turns her beloved dog into a source of income by breeding her and selling the puppies.

Yet sometimes solutions are harder to find. Shaniqua Sockwell writes of repeated frustrations in her search for a retail job. Jianxin Shi and Danielle Chambers share their experiences getting scammed by commission-only jobs that really were too good to be true. Since tuition bills loom large on a college-bound teens financial horizon, Maria Alashola and Marci Bayer report on how to approach them, along with other college costs.

Expensive as it may be, college is important because it gives teens a better opportunity to achieve true and lasting financial independence. Marco Salazar describes his fathers decades of struggle as an immigrant, and attributes much of that struggle to his lack of English skills or a college degree that is valid in the

U.S. Marcos dad expects his son to receive an education and live the American dream he couldnt have.

After years of feeling engulfed in shame over her familys reliance on welfare, Diana Moreno makes peace with it as the support that will enable her to build a better life for herself. And when Hattie Rice is moved from her parents rat-infested apartment to a foster care placement in a nice neighborhood, her grades climb because she sees and comprehends what she can achieve. Im sure that if I stay focused and succeed in school, she writes, I can make it out of the ghetto.

Taken together, the stories in this book will help teens understand their own attitudes and assumptions about money as they prepare to become financially independent. The issues teen writers raise here can pave the way for a discussion about responsibility, values, and the way our individual spending choices fit into larger economic questions.

Names and some details have been changed in these stories:

On My Own: An Aging Out Story, A Bad Deal,

How I Learned to Be Stingy, I Took a Scam Job, and

I Want an Equal Relationship, In older stories, dollar amounts have been adjusted for inflation or updated.