One of the most recognisable markers of becoming an adult is financial independence. Some people disagree, saying that the first time they felt like an adult was when they began college. To a certain degree that’s true, but not really. College is where you are playing at dressing up as an adult. Yes, the rigidity of a high-school has been replaced with the flexible schedule and dress codes of college classes, though, for the record, adult life rarely begins at noon in jeans unless you make certain tough life choices. But I did feel a lot more grown up when I left home to attend college – far, far away, and for the first time contended with things like cleaning toilets, cooking my own food, doing my own laundry etc. Still, I had some semblance of an idea of how to do those things. The one thing I wasn’t prepared for was finances.
I don’t think I had ever had a proper discussion on things like how accounts work or what stable financial planning looks like – either at school or anywhere else. And then I landed at college and was told to open an account. Believe me when I say that for the longest time, I thought the only difference between a credit card and a debit card was that in a credit card you get to sign your name and in the other you just insert your boring pin. So I lived on the florid autographs of my credit card. It wasn’t until Mary, a bank teller with a bristling sense of revenge, accosted me three months into my first semester that I realised you have to pay credit card bills back, or else they keep growing exponentially. I feel like these are the real-life practical lessons that people who are not Mary should teach kids. “Ma, can I can go out and play?” little Taimur will ask you. “No,” you could reply, pulling out a stack of bills. “Why don’t we talk about fiscal responsibility and the benefits of opening a savings account?”
Oh because let me tell you: once little Timmy had gotten over his teenage angst and through his university socialism, he will one day need those skills and have none. Or maybe I’m projecting. I have been financially independent for many years now. I am very lucky in that unlike almost all the Americans that I know, my family did not just throw me out into the ocean of Life at 18 and stopped paying the bills. But I have learned my financial lessons through trial and error (mainly error: I still have a designer shirt that I bought on a self-affirming whim 6 years ago that I can’t wear because nobody looks good in yellow neoprene), but I am still looking around, waiting for someone to discover that I have essentially been faking being an adult.
“And in a sense aren’t we all just faking it, Michael?” I concluded.
Michael Ye has been staring at me with a certain apprehension for the last twenty minutes of my impassioned monologue.
Painting using a credit card
“Um,” he said finally, adjusting the papers on his desk like a news anchor between segments. “Well, yes, in a sense. I suppose. But I don’t – um – really see what this has to do with your credit card application.”
“You don’t?”
“No. And also,” he added, leaning forward. “I’m not totally sure who Timmy is, to be honest.”
We were sitting in his office at my local bank. One of the reasons I had made my speech on the need for financial education is because I was trying to convince him to give me a credit card. I had recently been made aware of the fact that I need a credit card in order to build what the Americans call a ‘credit history’, which is a made-up number on a scale of 200-800 that describes how “trustworthy” you are – mainly with loans. A person’s credit score decides an awful lot in the U.S. It decides where you can live, what car you can buy, which house you can afford, literally everything, really. Having moved here recently, I don’t have a credit score, which was fine by me because a) I don’t believe in spending money I don’t have and b) I fear another designer shirt debacle should someone hand me a credit card. In college a friend of mine applied for one and they gave her – an impoverished student, mind you – a credit card with a limit so high that it makes me green to this day. This was, of course, before the credit crash of 2008 – back when they used to throw credit lines around like pop corn.
Michael patiently took me through all the credit cards they offer but I stopped him at the first one: a chic black card with unlimited rewards and free access to airline business class lounges.
“But you don’t have any credit history.”
“But I do like airport lounges so, like, what’s your point?”
It took him a further twenty minutes to explain that even though I could apply for the high-end cards, the chances that I’d get them were nil. He suggested that I go with a card in which I essentially pay the bank a certain amount, which struck me as the kind of card a crack-fiend getting off meth would take to get their life on track. He did not like the analogy and I have applied for a mid-range card in the hope that fiscal charm will get me through.
And even now I know this is an unwise financial decision. But what can I say? Like Timmy, I’d rather go out to play.
