Generally, college students are poor. It’s not your fault, I swear. I remember during my first two years of undergrad, I tried to keep up with all of my friends. I bought Chipotle almost everyday (double meat, carnitas and chicken), ran up bar tabs and didn’t even care to look at how much I spent, and worst of all, I actually bought my books from the bookstore! Check our our textbook page here. I had a ton of money from my graduation party, so I was sure that I had enough. No later than spring quarter of my freshman year, I literally burned through all of my graduation money! Needless to say, my parents were less than thrilled. (If any of you were blessed with an Italian father and a Serbian mother, you know what I mean by ‘less than thrilled’). However, they thought that I learned a valuable lesson. To help me out, my dad said “Congratulations! You’re broke. Get a job”. So that was that. I decided from then on, I would be completely self-sufficient. Yeah, it sucked pretty bad, but in the long-run I think I came out on top. A lot of my friends had parents that were CEOs or VPs of huge company so-and-so or hot shot lawyers, whatever. Mine weren’t. When I get out of school, I’ll know how to budget my money.

Alright Zack, quit going on and on. TELL ME HOW TO INVEST!!

Well, first of all, you need to save up some money. Most CDs have minimum deposits, as with savings accounts and checking accounts. If you want to get into stock trading, you need a little more. When I first started trading stocks, I only invested a couple hundred bucks. I did pretty well, but when you have shares in multiple companies, you need to pay anywhere from $5-$20 dollars each time you trade. This adds up, trust me.

In order to save, you need to LIVE FRUGALLY for a few months! You might think that you do now, but seriously, check out that link…living frugally is sometimes like the stock market, you need to spend money to make (or in this case SAVE) money!

Its also a good idea to build up your cash reserves not only so that you have money to invest, but to cover and emergencies that you DON’T want The Bank of Mom & Dad to help out with such as bailing a buddy out of jail after a long night, speeding tickets, or when you got your car towed even though your girlfriend SWORE they didn’t tow at night! [Sidenote: A friend of mine actually got arrested for running onto the field during the 8th inning of a Cleveland Indians Game - Check out the YouTube video here!] This was definitely one of those times NOT to go to The Bank of Mom & Dad.

In the next part of this series on Investing for College Students, we’ll talk about the next step: Low-risk investments!

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