I'm Only Here for the WiFi (14 page)

Let's say, for example, you are living in New York City and making $25,000 a year, after taxes. To many people fresh out of school, and used to being exploited in unpaid internships instead of presented with an actual chance at income, $25K seems like a decent amount. It's not a lot, of course, but it's a real salary given in compensation for your work—which is more than many of us can say. And it comes with health benefits, which is something most of us never considered a possibility just a few short years before. But with anything beyond a cursory glance, we can see just how “not that much” $25K is. (In the interest of full disclosure, at the time of writing this, I have never lived in New York City. I lived in Paris for some time, though, which is
fairly comparable in terms of city expenses napalming your wallet at regular intervals. I would use Paris as an example for this scenario, but I simply can't bear being that twee when I'm trying to be serious about money. Just assume I spend all my money on baguettes that I put in the basket of my vintage bicycle.)

So you make about $25K, and you are twenty-three years old. You are far from being too proud to take a roommate (or several) to reduce living costs, but you are still holding out hope that your room will have enough space to put more than just a twin mattress in, and you would like it if it weren't located somewhere between New Jersey and the moon. So you look around on Craigslist and other fruitful online locales filled with other eager twentysomethings trying to beat each other to death for a chance at a well-placed apartment with a laundry room in the building, and you find a fair number of listings that seem to more or less suit your needs.

After an arduous period of being disappointed, frustrated, and intermittently overjoyed during your search, you find something that is right for you and hasn't already been pounced on by a pack of rabid real estate hyenas. In all likelihood, you probably got a room somewhere in the less–organic market–filled areas of Brooklyn, and you're paying around $800 a month. I'm being generous here—you're probably paying more—but let's be reasonable. Out of the roughly $2,000 you're taking home every month, you've already lost almost half.

It is safe to assume that you'll probably have at least $200 in other bills per month (and again, that is being generous, as there is a more than decent chance that you have student loans, which frequently eat through your pockets like methed-out fabric moths). So now we're down to $1,000 per month after your pre-debited necessities are out of the way. Then we have transportation, around $150 a month (including the errant taxi you'll end up convincing yourself you need to take). After you take out food at about $600 a month (it would probably be less if you didn't go out to Chipotle for so many midafternoon meals, but come on, you know you do), you are left with a fairly paltry sum of $250 a month.

Now, $250 seems like a lot, still. I mean, it's your play money in this scenario, you can do whatever the fuck you want with it, right? Not so. See, as I've recently come to understand, a sizable chunk of that money is going to have to go into the rarely viewed bank account covered in cobwebs and dust labeled “savings,” to build something resembling a “nest egg.” You are supposed to have this money to fall back on should you need it, to make more long-term purchases, or to put in some fancy-people investment and “make your money work for you.” (I'm not sure what this means, precisely, only that fat Republican rich dudes my dad knows have always encouraged me to do this.) Let's say you put $50 a month into savings, and that's a fairly low estimate, as we should theoretically be trying to save much more, if possible.

Two hundred dollars—that's what's left. That should be enough to get anyone through a month of personal expenses and pleasure spending. Thinking logically, we could divide that $200 up a million different ways to allow ourselves both our occasional splurges and a feeling of overall responsibility. But I think we all know that $200 for an entire month's worth of excursions and “just for fun” purchases is a shockingly spendable number, particularly when we account for how much we like to spend after a few cocktails. (It is a well-documented fact that money literally morphs into Monopoly money after the consumption of more than four glasses of wine. You could be on the brink of financial ruin and still insist on paying for everyone's planned additions on their houses if the evening is going well enough.)

If you are prone to making impulse purchases, or engaging in “retail therapy” to repair deep, emotional wounds in your psyche, $200 is nothing. If you live in a city where a “reasonable” price for a cocktail is around $10 and all your friends have a profound fondness for going out and buying as many of them as the bar will sell them in good conscience, $200 is nothing. If you like doing things such as going out to brunch on Sundays, going on semifrequent trips out of state, or wearing clothes that did not, only a few moments before, fall off the back of a truck, $200 is nothing. It's an incredibly easy sum of money to spend, and we only think that it is a lot when we deny just how much of life (from hanging out with our significant others to keeping up with
the latest pop culture) is absurdly expensive. The truth is that if you're juggling only a few hundred dollars of spending money every month, many things are going to have to be cut out in order to build any kind of financial foundation.

No matter how much we earn, though, we will always find a way to spend an amount that is proportionally detrimental enough to make the end of the month more difficult than necessary. And, whether we like it or not, planning for the future is about the only way to make sure that we won't find ourselves at some undetermined point down the road with tears in our eyes, comically holding up a stack of red notices from collection agencies as oversized question marks bob over our frazzled heads. Having a decent amount of money to fall back on should you lose your job, or to put toward a retirement that doesn't have to be delayed until you are wheezing feebly at death's door is simply good sense. That means that all of us—yes, even you—need to make a decisive list of everything we spend money on in a month, as well as our long-term financial and professional goals, and start hacking away at that shit with a Weedwacker.

There are things in our daily lives that we can go without, or corners we can cut to make spending a more responsible affair, but it has to start with honesty. As someone who lived most of her life to this point in a state of willful financial ignorance, who is only now sifting through the pile of absurdly unnecessary debts and misguided purchases to forge a path of sustainability,
I can tell you that this is not fun. It is never fun to have to look at what you're doing with the keen, ruthless eye of a True Adult and strike off all the things that you could do without. But, ultimately, to pay bills on time feels good. To have extra money in the bank feels good. To have serious prospects for the future and a plan that enables you to go after the things you want without feeling stretched to your financial limits feels good. And we deserve to feel this way because even though it sucks in the short term, there is something really satisfying about knowing that you have things under control.

So make those difficult choices. Cut out those brunches. Say “no” to those ridiculous nights in those overpriced clubs that make you feel like not even a thousand scalding showers will wipe the smell of douchebag cologne off you and feel better about all the money you saved. While not everything has to go, and certainly not all the time, we can always make conscious choices to stop the hemorrhaging of money that living in a big city in our twenties is all about. Think of all the small steps you can take each day so that you can start hitting the more “significant” milestones in your life—such as partnering up for life, buying a house, making investments, or maybe even spawning—with the kind of serene assuredness that only someone who has been making positive financial decisions for some time now can do. You owe it to yourself to be one of those classy fuckers, treating yourself to a bottle of Champagne every now and again because
you are responsible the rest of the time—and I want to see us all get there together.

T
he first time one of your friends announces her Big
Grown-Up Life Change is something you will remember for the rest of your life. Outside of the occasional high school acquaintance getting knocked up/hitched at the ripe old age of eighteen, the moment where you realize that you're all growing up is almost guaranteed to come in your early twenties. Whether it's someone announcing her upcoming nuptials at an age where it is just barely considered legitimate, changing her Facebook profile picture to an unexpected image of a fetus on an ultrasound, or moving into the world of real estate, it's going to come. And no matter what you do, no matter how much you think you may have grown up as a person yourself, you will not be prepared for it.

When I got my first “Oh, shit, my friends are changing” wake-up call, I was in a local dive bar at happy hour, enjoying my freshly minted twenty-one-year-old status by indulging in a Stoli blueberry and soda (which I perceived then, and in many ways still do, to be the Rolls-Royce of the call drink world). One of my friends announced, a little too casually for my liking, that he was in the final stages of purchasing a house with another friend. As I was just barely able to drink and still very much in the throes of “What the hell am I going to do with my life when I actually have responsibilities outside of not spending too much school money on alcohol?,” the whole thing seemed like some kind of elaborate joke. How could two people, one of whom I had “dated”
when I was twelve years old, be in the process of purchasing something as demanding (and expensive) as a house?

Suddenly, there was a palpable divide between us, one that I didn't quite know how to define at the time. I would later come to understand, having lived through many announcements of this nature, that every time someone makes a big life decision that puts her firmly on one side or the other of “adulthood divide,” it creates an automatic tension in the friendship, regardless of intent. The fact is that people are moving on, whether or not you are ready for it yourself. And this house my friends purchased, as with so many life-changing moments still to come, was happening whether I liked it or not. It didn't seem realistic, and yet there it was, in all its fixer-upper glory, ready for the tireless attention of two eager young bros who were now going to be listed as “spouses” on half of their junk mail. (Full disclosure: I ended up living there for the better part of a year.)

In any case, once the floodgates have been opened on the idea that the friends you grew up/studied with are aging into new, more complex phases of their lives, there is no going back. The next few years will be replete with engagement photo shoots, pregnancy announcements, and moves into condos in more family-friendly neighborhoods throughout the city (and even the suburbs). People are going to move around (and you likely will as well), and the once-ironclad dynamics of your social circles will be called into question on every front. With some people moving onto bigger
and better things (and not showing even a remote interest in keeping in touch with their roots), and others hanging back in a kind of stunted adolescence you don't want to get dragged into, you're left with a fairly sparse smattering of original friends by the time you all start establishing yourselves out in the real world. When you find yourself on the other side of graduation, several moves, and having to make some of these Big Grown-Up Life Changes yourself, reestablishing a social group in which you feel comfortable is one of the more difficult, yet essential, challenges ahead of you.

As with many things, making and keeping friends is much easier throughout your school years. Aside from being in constant, forced contact with one another and not having too much in the way of responsibility, there is an undeniable air of adventure in everything you do. As you go from grade school to college, you always encounter different, exciting obstacles to overcome and new experiences to undertake, and you're all facing them together. The intellectual and social development that is imposed on us from birth to our early twenties is only navigable when surrounded by awesome people who are having just as difficult a time as we are. (It doesn't hurt, of course, that you have a regular schedule of partying and irresponsibility to act as the cement between your budding bromances.) There is only one time in your life when a bunch of your closest friends are all going to get together and get drunk, run through a suburban neighborhood and draw dicks
all over political lawn signs, and that time does not come after the age of nineteen.