Background: my family had a sucky financial situation my entire life (because they were horrible spenders and sucked at making financial decisions), so I rarely had the luxury to buy more than a couple of outfits/a pair of shoes to last a year.
Now, I got a job, and for the first time ever, I have money to spend on myself. And I've been so crazy indulgent. I must have spent nearly $80 on clothes the past two months. I've bought a ton of tech, stuff I don't really need, like wireless mice and Raspberry Pis.
Generally, I feel really guilty as pomegranate. I've been looking online for a graphing calculator (since I don't have one, I've just been borrowing one from the school) and I realized that I automatically gravitated to the newest, sexiest, $140 model, and, that's when I seriously realized: no, I wouldn't have ever thought of this a year ago, I would be content to borrow a calculator from school like I always do.
It doesn't help that my parents are kinda encouraging me to spend... I suspect they felt a little guilty/bad for not always being able to provide me what I wanted when I was a kid, and it is my money, not theirs, so they aren't really stopping me from getting things I've always wanted to get now.
Almost all the hours I spend online now are to look at stuff I can buy, and then oscillate between being impulse-purchasey and horrible guilt at the prospect of using money.
I... I don't know what to do. I'm so worried I'll end up like my parents, these crazy spenders who somehow garnered $750,000 in credit card debt and then had to file bankruptcy. Not to mention the divorce happened exclusively because of said financial problems. (And yes, we're all still living together. Can't afford to live somewhere else. They still sleep in the same bed. It's pineappleing weird.) I... don't have a baseline, don't have any experience to jump off, and I really, really don't want to ask my parents about how to manage money. Seeing how they kinda suck at it.
So uh. Tell me what to do with my money.
Um. If it helps to know: I work about 35 hours a week at $10/hr (I get free food and my lunches are paid and I get paid at the end of the day in cash). When school starts I expect that to drop to 16 hours a week. I have a checking/savings account, with a debit card. I'm 17.
EDIT: Like, what the pomegranate? Why don't they teach us crap like this in school? How to manage money in general, how to get a job (painstakingly, by the way), what the hell a 401(k) is, credit/debit cards, banks, investments, etc. Seriously, I'd feel a lot better if I knew about this sort of stuff.
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