If you Can't get A's & B's in High School Then Don't Go to College

I'm going to state this as a rule of thumb:

If you can't get A's or B's average grades in high school then I don't think you should go to a 4 year college.

Note that I said A/B average grades. So if you get an occasional C or D then that shouldn't alone hold you back as long as you're averaging B's or better. I'm also applying this to a 4 year college. If you don't have the best grades then you might still consider starting at a community college or junior college either as a stepping stone to a 4 year school or to pursue a 2 year degree.

Why do I draw the line at a B average or better? Simply put I think that if you can't pull at least a B average in high school then you aren't going to be prepared to succeed in college. High school is easier than college and if you can't succeed academically in high school then you can't succeed academically in college. Going to college and struggling then dropping out won't really benefit you. Or if you go to college and work really hard and barely manage to get C's in college then it will be fairly hard to find good employment with such a transcript. Generally I think people in this situation are better off pursuing another career that wouldn't require a 4 year degree.

Why shouldn't people go? College is expensive and it has to provide a good return on your money to be worth the investment. If you can't succeed in college then it is wasted money. Too many people go to college nowadays and they are wasting a lot of money by doing so. Only 60% of people who go to college graduate within 6 years, so 40% of people are wasting money going to college.

So what if you don't have the best grades in school, then what should you do for a job? Tomorrow I'll list some career choices that don't require a 4 year degree.

Cutting Back on Eating Out

Around a year and a half ago I talked about how we were Spending a lot on eating out. Originally we were spending around $900 a month on eating out. Since then we worked to cut back the spending some and recent spending has been in the $600-$700 range but thats still a lot. Eating out has been one of our major expenses.

Some of you might be wondering how I could possibly "waste" so much on eating out. I splurge a significant amount on eating out because I value it highly and I can afford it. I don't have a new car, I live in a modest sized home and I save over 30% of my income. If I made less money, or if I had lower savings or any debts then I certainly wouldn't be eating out as much as I do. Still eating out is a significant expense and I've tried to keep the spending on it down.

My wife and I discussed it lately and we agreed to cut back on our eating out. We usually eat out about four times a week and we decided to cut back to three times. This should cut our costs for eating out roughly 25%. This should get us down to the $450-$525 / month level.

We decided to cut back eating out for a couple reasons. We both felt that we were eating out a lot and that we wouldn't really miss the experience if we ate out a bit less. I enjoy eating out. The experience is something I like to do. But if I ate every meal out or ate most meals out then the experience would be so routine that it would end up meaning nothing for me. Another reason we decided to cut back is that we felt we had higher priorities for the money. Eating out once a week less will save us something around $2,000 a year in after tax money. There are a lot of great things we could do with an extra $2,000 a year. We haven't designated a specific thing to do with that money and in fact we may just save it. But when we thought about it we asked ourselves the question : would we prefer to eat out 1 time a week more or would we prefer to have $2,000 extra per year? We chose to have the extra money.

Why not just eat at cheaper places? If you're quick with math you can probably figure out that we spend around $35-$40 per meal on average. Those are not cheap meals at cheap restaurants. Instead of cutting back to 3 meals out we could just eat 4 meals at cheaper restaurants. In fact I could actually afford to eat a lot more if we ate at junk food places all the time. A primary reason we eat out is for the entertainment value. I like to sit in a nice comfortable booth in a nice restaurant and have a nice night out with my wife. I don't like to pull through a drive through and have someone hand me a bag of warmed over food like substances. I don't really want to trade good quality food for low quality food. Lets face it junk food places don't sell very high quality food. Now I don't mean to come off snobbish about junk food, I like McDonalds as much as the next guy. But eating a quick burger isn't the reason we spend money on eating out. We eat out for the "going out" entertainment factor and the higher quality food.

Time for After Christmas Shopping

Now that Christmas is past us its a good time to go buy some Christmas stuff. If you need any wrapping paper, Christmas decorations or holiday cards you're sure to find them for bargain prices this week. I would assume most stores are running sales to clear out their holiday stuff. Target.com has a sale on their holiday items. Seems their discounts are in the 30-75% range. HomeDepot also has a clearance sale and they are selling a bunch of stuff for 50% off. Those are just the first two websites I randomly chose to check out. If you're going to shop online then try using Ebates and get a further discount. Ebates has 5% back for Target and 3% back for HomeDepot. Course like I said those are just two randomly selected stores and I'm pretty sure most other stores will have holiday stuff on sale.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas.