Financial Frustrations

When ever one applies for a loan, or makes an investment with the bank, there are pages of Legal print that have to be signed. The financial advisor usually “goes over” the fine facts with the client, but their explanations are also quite vague. I wish the legalese would be more reader friendly. For example: you are giving me your money to invest for you, but I take no responsibility if your investment makes no money.

The fine print frustration also applies to the statements we get from our investments, columns of numbers with more legalese explanations (or worse, no explanations at all)
I would like to see something like this: You started with $XX, you put in $YY, and you earned $ZZ interest this month.

It is difficult to know how much money I’m going to have when I retire because my financial advisor seems to think that the stock market will go up forever.

That I’ll never have the life my parents or grandparents had. They point to my cell phone and say, “if you didn’t have that, you’d be able to afford to save.” What kind of irrational point is that? They got a mortgage when houses were three times their gross salary. Salaries today are stagnant, true unemployment is going up, and the primary communications tool for this generation is seen as an optional choice that I’ve made instead of saving or investing! And because of that, I don’t deserve to complain about my financial struggles? How am I supposed to get ahead if things continue this way?

I’ve consistently had a job since before graduating college, and now more than twelve years later, I still don’t own a home. Qualifying for a mortgage is hard when you change jobs or work freelance for companies as I’ve done.

We are told to invest, but my credit card interest is more than I’m able to invest in a month… so instead of investing, I am trying to pay down my credit card. I never thought about the opportunities I’d lose out on by racking up debt, and feel frustrated now that I can’t make a dent in it.