Students lack financial advice

The last time I flipped through the myriad channels of my television set, I was struck by the proliferation of finance-related content that seems to have popped up over the past few years. It seems that Americans are becoming progressively more interested in the messy business of money and the vagaries of Wall Street.

The popularity of financial information among the layperson has been rising steadily for decades. This is made apparent by the increased prominence of television channels, radio programs, books and websites covering everything from the ups and downs of the New York Stock Exchange to the latest scandals that seem to be increasingly commonplace in the corporate world.

These media sources have succeeded in broadening their audience from the seasoned stock trader to the casual participant by focusing on news that affects individual investors and placing more emphasis on personal finance.

One trend that has accompanied these successes is the rise of personal finance "experts," including Dave Ramsey, Richard Kiyosaki and Suze Orman. These media personalities write books, appear in television programs and run seminar series to teach people everything from the basics of financial planning to the intricacies of working one's way out of a great deal of debt.

These experts have taken advantage of two societal shifts to rise to prominence. First, the downfall of pension programs and the increase in the variety of financial instruments available to workers in the United States as a result has forced employees to pay significantly more attention to their retirement savings. As these employees play a more active role in the management of their nest eggs, the market for helping people through this process has grown by a corresponding amount.

Second, modern society has seen significant increases in both the percentage of people in debt and the size of the debts the average American carries. The experts and the media have created a vast body of content to teach hapless Americans the not so intricate methods to get out of debt (the Saturday Night Live skit "Don't Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford" comes to mind.)

The net result is that each expert feels the need to capitalize on these two trends, and approximately 95 percent of the literature on financial planning revolves around the following two-step process:

1. Get out of debt.

2. Start saving for retirement.

Personally, however, I am not in debt; I've also yet to start saving for my retirement (any of the experts would no doubt let me know that this is a critical mistake for anyone who has recently turned 22 like I have). As a result of this, the vast majority of financial advice is utterly useless to me, and I suspect I am one of many college students in this predicament.

College students, after all, merit a class of financial advice all our own. I call this the "ramen diet" school of finance-advice given with the assumption that spending more than a dollar per day on food is enough to bust the average college student's budget. The Cup Noodles-eating college student has become such a cliché that it is virtually unavoidable in the advice of any "expert" who lowers him- or herself to the level of addressing the financial concerns a college student may have.

Personally, I have happily never had to eat ramen more than twice a day in my college career. And even when I do have to resort to ramen, I usually eat the fancy Shin Ramyun kind from the Korean supermarket. Thus this flavor of advice is not applicable to me either.

The fact that I'm on acceptable, if not fantastic, financial ground doesn't mean I don't have a significant number of questions about how to best handle my money. I want to know where I can find the savings account that pays the highest interest rates on my money but still leaves me flexible to pay the large sums that make up Tech tuition, for one. Likewise, I'd love to discover a credit card company that both offers a worthwhile rewards program and would actually approve me as a student with limited credit history if I were to apply. Finally, how do I successfully manage a budget when my co-op schedule causes my income to arrive at a highly irregular rate throughout the year?

At the moment, I have to sift through countless articles that are completely impractical for anything I might be interested in just to attempt to discover the answers to these questions. Despite occasionally monitoring websites like bankrate.com I don't have anything resembling a good answer for the latter two questions.

Many college students who haven't taken an interest in figuring out their personal finance issues, however, don't even know the right questions to ask. These students are unaware of the many options they have for managing their money, and this ignorance creates the sort of people who wind up overspending on their first credit card, falling into debt, and adding to the U.S. population's staggeringly-high debt load.

Alas, it appears unlikely that an expert will come forth and answer all of my feeble questions about how to manage the few dollars I actually have. Perhaps the solution will be creative software (probably web-based) that allows college students to collaboratively discover the answers to their money management dilemmas. Until then, the only "expert" on my financial situation will remain myself.