Students, it’s time to wake up and see the mounting debt right in front of your face. Stop, take a second and ask yourself if this is the way that you want to start out your life once you leave school. If you think about it, and do the calculations, you could find that you are coming up with thousands of dollars worth of debt before you even set foot into a career. Trust me, I know school is expensive, and student loans are wonderful and all, but do you find yourself living beyond your means just because you can splurge at the moment? Are you only getting as many loans as you need? Or are you just taking in all the money you can get?

Sadly, there is no guarantee of gold paved streets once you graduate from college. With the current economy, jobs are hard to find. This means that you could also be starting out your life with a large debt and little means to pay it. Are you planning ahead for that? Or are you wrapped up in however many possessions you can get your hands on at the moment? I’m not talking to the hard workers who are already waiting tables along with going to school full time.  I’m talking to the people who freely accept all of the loans they are offered, and who currently wallow in free time with no job. To you, I’d like to give a reminder of what living beyond your means did to this country recently and is still doing to this country.

It was through greed that banks were allowed to give out so many bad loans to people they knew couldn’t pay them back. It was also through greed that these customers also convinced themselves to take the loans they knew they couldn’t pay back in order to buy houses, cars, TVs and whatever else they thought they needed. Not even necessarily through loans, but because it became too easy for people to get their hands on imaginary money that they didn’t earn, people began to get those third and fourth cars, that house and that huge surround sound system. And partially because they couldn’t pay the government back, the economy began to fail, and the people who bought so much lost it all, putting the suffering not only on themselves, but on their families.

It is through greed and possibly laziness that people who are living on government welfare are able to turn down job after job, hardly trying once they get hired, because their government assistance actually pays more than the job they were hired for. It became too easy for people to get their hands on money that wasn’t theirs, and so people stopped working and stimulating the economy. I’m again not talking about the people who are so desperate that they need the government assistance. I’m talking to the people who choose to live on it though they have other options.

It was through greed that so many of our manufacturing lines were sent overseas, bosses hoping to collect more on cheap labor, and strangling our own economy by making competition in the market impossible and putting more and more money out of our own market and into another country’s.

It was through neglect that our government allowed all of these things to happen and carelessly spent more and more money, either to put in their own pockets or to fund things that had no business being funded with federal money. It was through all of these things and more that our economy collapsed, and thousands of people were left without jobs, funds and hope. It was because of all this that so many people suffered deeply and were given no answer for it. There was little apology.

So I’d like to ask you, student, how important money really is to you? How much does it calculate into your job choice? Would you be willing to sacrifice your happiness for it? Money is important, yes, and success is wonderful, but remember that it does not define you.  Would you really be happy without it? Would you have the strength and the intelligence to do that? Do you know what’s important in your life?

Many people in this country do not believe that it is better to give than to receive, and many do not believe that money you earn yourself is the money that’s going to pay off in the end. However, the state of our economy has blatantly proven that wrong.

So it’s time to get responsible, students. The habits you pick up in college will possibly follow you for the rest of your life. Make sure that when it comes to money, they are good ones.