If you have been fortunate enough to find a job in the past academic year, you may be facing the prospect of a summer without pay. Unfortunately, this summer may include things like moving expenses and attending the ASA conference (though you may have been able to negotiate for the costs of one or both of those) but eventually you will be paid and life will resume as normal. When it does, what are you going to do with your money? Personally, I went straight from grad student poverty to saving for a house, and from there to buying a house, and from there to a million little unforeseen expenses. Tenured Radical has been doing this a lot longer than me, though, and she has some good advice for people who are finding themselves with a real income for the first time in their lives. A brief highlight:
Credit cards are like crack. They sing us siren songs, and we love what they say because we can cure so much unhappiness today and pay for it tomorrow (and the next day, and the next day, and the next day….) Credit cards are like affairs: we tell ourselves and our friends there is nothing wrong with them, and yet we feel compelled to lie about them too.
Memoirs of a SLACer 