Graduating wasn't as liberating as I had hoped.

While I was still in school, I was frustrated that the intense demands of my coursework made it difficult for me to pursue many extracurricular interests and hobbies. It wasn’t so much that I had no free time (which I used mostly for partying), but that I had no mental energy left to write or read about other things. I thought graduating would solve this because I would no longer have 200-400 pages of assigned reading every week, and my mother really sold me on the positives of post-graduation life. I envisioned a life that was socially much less exciting, but one that would allow me to pursue my interests by taking classes and writing at home while working and earning a living.

Unfortunately, the only thing that turned out the way I imagined it is my social life. The reality of loan debt hit me very hard, and it has only been in the past few weeks that I have come to fully understand my financial situation. Originally I thought my debt was around $20,000 USD, but it turned out to be roughly $45,000 USD. Over the course of the summer I had three dental appointments which incurred bills totalling about $1100 USD, and I also need to get my wisdom teeth extracted, which will cost somewhere between $1200 and $2000 USD. I desperately need to buy a car, because living in San Diego without one literally borders on being impossible.

This is all occurring while I have been making an income of $0 USD because getting a job turned out to be much harder than I thought it would be. Even with a BA from the most prestigious public university in the world, I found myself getting very few calls from employers I applied to. I managed to get a few interviews, but I was not hired by two marketing firms, two 24 Hour Fitness clubs, and one high school. What I thought was my best lead - a non-profit human services agency for which I have already volunteered two summers with - still hasn’t called me, even though I just finished volunteering my third summer with them.

The good news is that I have finally been hired. I managed to get a position as an instructional assistant for a special ed teacher with the National School District, about twenty miles north of Mexico. The hourly rate is relatively high, about $15.50 USD. The problem? It’s only a part-time position, just three hours a day. That comes to about $230 USD a week before taxes. My parents don’t want me to worry too much, and they’re helping me out by letting me live with them and eat their food, but when I try to divide $45,000 by $230 I can’t help being just a little depressed. Before graduating I thought a job would give me some discretionary income, even if it wasn’t much; I’m not even sure if I’ll be making enough money to pay for my necessities.

Obviously part of this has to do with the fact that I’ve only landed a part-time job, so I’m hoping to pick up another part-time job. I have a pretty good lead from a friend who I volunteered with, though he says he’s been pretty busy lately and a mutual friend of ours said that he’s bad at responding to texts. Even if I do get another part-time job, the hourly rate will most likely be lower, probably pretty close to minimum wage. The real problem though isn’t that these jobs don’t pay enough; it’s that the cost of everything else (especially the cost of living) is outrageously inflated beyond what these jobs pay.

If I were making close to $400 USD a week from two part-time jobs that would be a lot better than $230 USD, but I don’t like the idea of spending the next six years of my life paying off loan debt, the next twelve years living with my parents, and having almost no discretionary income for any of it. So instead of reading about sociology, learning about writing, taking improv classes, working out at the gym and going to clubs, I mostly think about additional ways of making money. There are online survey sites, but these are unreliable and sometimes scams, and even when they’re legit, they tend to be extremely time-consuming for extremely low pay. I noticed there’s a tab on my online Wells Fargo account labeled “brokerage,” and I’ve been wondering what that’s about.

I’ve heard some people say that these days it’s better to start your own business than to work for someone else, but I have no idea what I could possibly do for a business. I’ve been learning a bit about making money through blogging, but according to what I’ve read you need to find your “niche,” and I just have too many interests and they’re too varied. There’s a lot of self-help literature about making money by blogging that are very explicit about the do’s and don’t’s. I know that I want to write and at this point there are non-review things I want to write. If money weren’t a factor I would probably be content to just write without much regard for all the rules and guidelines I’ve been reading.

But I don’t even want to do most of this, besides the writing. I don’t want to spend my time and energy working on and learning things that I don’t have much interest in. I want to spend that time learning the things that interest me and developing myself the way I want to. I want to have a little discretionary income so I can actually buy things for myself. Unfortunately my financial situation doesn’t really permit that.