In this 2-part series, I will let you know of 7 hidden money traps that caught my son during his freshman year of college so that your son doesn’t have to go through the same thing. This article will discuss the first two traps. These traps added much stress to our lives and can certainly be avoided if there is awareness that they are out there. Considering we were paying for every penny of his college, I tried very hard to stay on top of anything money-related. Unfortunately, these traps caught us by surprise.
What is a trap?
According to the Oxford Pocket Dictionary on Google, one definition of a trap is, “a device or enclosure designed to catch and retain animals typically by allowing entry but not exit.”
Over the years, my son has trapped his fair share of critters (animals) as he is an avid outdoorsman. Because of this, we have owned several sizes of traps. Neighbors have even borrowed these traps. He always released the critters that he trapped to another area never causing them harm. The only harm to the animals was the inconvenience of being stuck in a place they didn’t want to be and having to wait on someone to release them. Obviously, sometimes they didn’t know if they would ever be released!
One thing my son learned from trapping animals is that once trapped, it is nearly impossible to escape without help.
Back in his days of trapping animals, he would place food items in the trap to lure them. The animal would get close enough to go after something enticing, then BOOM. Once the door to the trap shut, the animal was trapped safely until my son relocated it away from wherever we were trying to prevent it from being.
Money traps
In comparison, there were 7 hidden money traps that my son, my husband, and I weren’t prepared for when my son entered his freshman year of college. True to design, these traps were hidden in some way and had consequences.
In fact, even I never saw any of them coming until it was too late. We did make our son pay us back for all of the traps that he fell into financially, which sadly for him drained his savings account of hard-earned money from summer and Christmas jobs. Yes, these were hard lessons to learn, and it felt like the traps just kept coming and coming.
1. Parking tickets
Welcome to college
The first trap is parking tickets. I am talking about on-campus parking tickets. But, ironically, at summer orientation, the parking ticket nightmare introduced itself to him. And I was with him! Looking back, this foreshadowed the parking ticket issue.
He parallel parked his truck late at night in front of a friend’s condo where we were staying, and he went past the line and into the next parking place in front of him. Being the lone vehicle on that section of the street, and with it being dark outside, we didn’t notice that he had parked imperfectly.
The next morning, we saw a ticket on the windshield. Welcome to college.
On campus
Fast forward, and my son wasn’t able to get a parking decal for his dorm parking lot. There was only a limited number of decals available in the dorm parking lot. He had to purchase a decal in the parking garage about .3 miles away uphill. (I know, I know. Poor spoiled kid.)
The reason he couldn’t purchase a decal for the dorm parking lot was that he was in a summer school class the day that the decals became available online. Also, I was working that morning and couldn’t purchase it for him, either. This was a big, costly mistake. He should have skipped class, or I should have rescheduled my client. The decals were gone by the time he got out of class.
Unfortunately, he ended up making 18 bad decisions in the parking category. This added up to $1255 from August-May.
Sometimes he would illegally park in a spot in the parking lot of the dorm and be away from his truck for less than 10 minutes to run get something out of his room and come back to find a ticket on his windshield. Other times, after parking in the dorm parking lot on the weekends (this was allowed), he would leave his truck there until Monday. (Another ticket on the windshield.)
I’m sure the tickets also included his parking at random places on campus. That’s a big no-no.
It was a trap that he could never seem to get out of. The lure of convenience trumped the sting of having to give up his hard-earned money over and over.
2. Uber
We nipped the Uber trap in the bud after four days of his being on campus.
In high school, he never really used our Uber account even though we allowed him to. “Better to stay safe” was our motto. However, either his friends and he were angels, or they had girls that drove them around. I’m not sure…
So, we had no way of knowing that he didn’t really understand how expensive calling Uber repeatedly could be. We initially gave him his August allowance and also said he could use our Uber account for rides.
The chauffeur
As I said, we withdrew his access to our Uber account after 4 days!
I guess he confused Uber with having a personal chauffeur.
At first, his being on the account thrilled me because I could see where all he was going. This only thrilled me for one night! After that, I realized I didn’t want to see every move he was making. That WAS NOT the plan for letting him use our Uber app. It was a weird, disturbing feeling to watch him on the app; he had been off of our Find My iPhone app for a couple of years. Ha.
Even though I didn’t want to see where all he was all hours of the night, the big issue was that he racked up $140 charges in four days. Umm, no. The trap was the enticement of having a chauffeur several times a night, as opposed to having to find parking places, especially when it comes out of your parents’ account.
On his own
So, we nipped it in the bud, and he linked his Uber account to his debit card for the rest of the year; somehow, he got by. Who knows!
Further reading
These were 2 of the 7 hidden money traps to avoid during your son’s college freshman year. Read the next 5 traps to avoid.
Read Laurie’s story of how her recent life experiences led to the birth of this site, White Cotton.
