Why Didn't I Learn It In College?

One of the few loose ends in need of tying up since I've left YSU is what to do with my retirement funds.

Over the course of six and a half years, I haven't accrued that much since we weren't paid much to begin with.  Truly, looking at the number on my annual statement never fails to disappoint me.  It's just one more reminder of how utterly broken my employer, the state education system, and the larger system that allows adjunct faculty to be paid and treated so poorly all are.

Last week, I met with the Allstate Financial Services representative who oversees my mother's investments and retirement.  He handed me paperwork for an annuity that will, by the time I am sixty (some thirty years from now) not even double the money I would be moving to him.  Now, I know that interest rates are terrible and that it's a lot to ask to get some sort of decent return on funds, but that just seems to me like I'm being suckered.

I can understand the need for prudence when a person is within a few years of retirement - no risky investments that one can't weather the possibly negative outcome of.  But I'm thirty.  How is it that I can't make my money do more for me?

All I can think, sitting here today at the shop, is that universities should have a financial wisdom component in their general education requirements.

Seriously, I'm thirty years old and at a complete loss on how to do any of this.

When I was a freshman at John Carroll we had to take a First Year Seminar course that, other than waking me up for an 8 a.m. class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, taught me nothing.  We read Peter Singer's The Great Ape Project, about apes and chimpanzees having rights; Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart; and Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity:  A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.  I think you can discern for yourself how little any of those texts meant to an eighteen year-old me.

The professor who taught my particular section of said course was - and still is - an Associate Professor of Marketing in John Carroll's Boler School of Business.  Her approach was to have to do as little as possible for the course because she knew all too well that this time every week could be so much better spent.  Instead of using that time for better purposes though, we just didn't do much on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8:00-9:15 a.m.

Imagine how much someone with a PhD and a business background could have taught us about far more important things like finances, investing, retirement - things we could actually put to more use than considering the issues pertaining to British colonial policy in Africa and Chimpanzees being afforded rights on par with human beings.

Instead, I sit here on the cusp of age thirty-one all at sea about my retirement funds.  My very expensive Jesuit education - the one at the university with a renowned school of business - should have provided me with some sort of idea on how this goes.

To my dying breath, I'll defend the humanities and the role that literature, art, philosophy, and religions play in the formation of the well-rounded person.  However, I'm well-rounded with an obvious flat deformity when it comes to money.

During my sophomore year of high school, when we had a course called Principals of Democracy, we learned how to do tax returns.  We were quizzed and tested on them. Why can't colleges offer a "Here's how not to totally screw up your finances 101" class?  It seems well worth it to me and, at the very least, a public service that would help keep many college-aged students from falling into credit card debt.

As I solicit advice from friends on Facebook and ponder what will become of this money, I just wish that somewhere along the line a person who actually knows these things would have taught them to naive little me instead of letting me blindly wander this forest.