Last spring the English department at my alma mater invited me to come talk with students at a couple of events about finding work after graduation. I’m not sure I had much help to offer. Describing job search strategies is hard: “Uh, look in the classifieds and be persistent?” That’s about the greatest wisdom I can offer.
The event I’d rather speak at (if they ever had it) would be one about how to live after getting a job. There’s a lot more to say about that. When you’re looking for work, it seems like having a job will solve everything. What a relief it would be! But getting a job is actually the easier part. It’s once you’ve been hired that you have to start making difficult decisions.
If I could give one piece of advice to grads just entering the adult workforce, it would be this: don’t buy anything for the first year. That doesn’t mean they should deprive themselves of things they truly need. It just means they shouldn’t go spending fun money or trading up for a drastically more expensive lifestyle. This should go without saying for those who have serious debt, but it’s true even for those graduating debt-free. Spending money is a seductive trap that a lot of newly employed people fall into.
The reason I would say not to buy anything for the first year is because the first year in a job (especially when it’s your first real job out of college) should be a trial period. One year is about how long it takes to see what the job is really like. If it starts out good, it might get bad. If it starts out bad, it might get good. The point is that it will probably take about a year to decide whether to stick with the job or dump it.
I’ll generalize my own experience to say that most college kids entering their first professional jobs don’t give much serious thought to how long they actually want to be there. Once they have the job, they aren’t thinking about what they truly want or what it will take to find what they want. They’re just looking at a job that’s “good enough” and that enables them to begin living a bit better.
And that’s where the mistakes start. A recent grad who’s been living in penury for four years can hardly resist the temptation to go out and spend. I remember in my last few weeks of school running into an acquaintance as she was on her way to the Career Services Center. She was getting some help on preparing a resume. She asked me what I was doing after graduation, and I said I had already been hired for a “real job.” With a sort of sad, envious expression, she said, “You’ll be able to buy anything you want.”
That probably sums up the feelings of a lot of recent grads and grads-to-be. Finally having a job with a decent paycheck is exciting. But every non-essential purchase amounts to committing to the job for just a little longer. For those who’ve found a job they love, this isn’t a problem. But most new workers probably don’t really know how they feel about a job until after 12 months or so. Some might find themselves desperately wanting to quit after a year, but afraid to do so because they have no savings—and an apartment full of stuff they bought without considering the consequences.
Most people would probably want to have a little cash saved up before quitting a job—either as a safety net or as a fund to go traveling, start a business, sit around and think, etc. So even if buying stuff doesn’t mean going into financial debt, it still means going into freedom debt. You have to work off the frivolous material purchases before you can move on with your life.
This is all stuff I thought I knew before graduating. Somehow I didn’t remember it well enough. I’m fortunate at least that I didn’t go totally overboard and buy something like a new car or a fancy motorcycle or (god forbid) real estate. But still, I wasted a good three or four grand that I’d be glad to have back in my savings account to help pay for—I don’t know—a round-the-world plane ticket. Now if I want to quit and travel, I’ll have to work considerably longer than if I had been wise from the start.
If I ever get the chance, I’ll give some college seniors a right old lecture on all this.
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