College Spending

College Students’ Spending Habits and Credit Card Ownership Being in college will earn any student a degree after however many years its takes to attain the degree of said student’s choosing. Along with that degree comes an innumerable amount of pressure dealing with new things, making deadlines for classes, and how to best use the small amount of money students get from part-time jobs. When dealing with money, college students want whatever item, trivial or not, they desire at the time they desire it. For example, if I want to go out and get a case of beer and take-out food for $25, and I only have $28 and need gas the next day; I will probably get the beer and food and walk the next day. This sort of attitude is very common and leads to having small amounts of money all the time, and credit card companies know this. I believe the reason that college students fall for credit card programs of good and questionable intentions is the feeling of temporary invincibility. I can go out and buy whatever I want and not pay for it until I have the money. The trap many credit card companies want students to fall into is not actually having that money later so interest payments pile up and said students will be paying down outrageous bills for years. These large bills lead to the next problem college students get into with credit cards, getting another one to pay off the bills from the first one. This eventually leads to bad credit and large amounts of debt in the future even when students are out of college. College students spending habits are different from most other Americans because of our lifestyle, but we should still have the discipline to not pile up credit card debt just so we can be part of the crowd. Even college students without credit cards have different spending habits than average Americans. These spending habits even differ from being a female or male college student (Hayhoe, 2000). I am most definitely grouped in with this category because