TUK101

This has actually been a great thread. Just about everybody that has chimed in has given excellent advice. I am 35 and am trying to get back to school to up my skill set so that I can get a job that is not in the construction field. What vabyrd has just told you is excellent advice that I wish that I would have followed 17 years ago. Now that my back and body are giving out I have no choice but to get an education and now I have got to relearn how to learn lol. Great advice here guys, even if bigtime6656 doesn't follow it I at least got something out of it.

bigtim6656

Sadly I am headed into the construction field. Though I plan to have the pen in my hand writing orders and checks. My plan is to design and build homes. I am working on fixing my credit right now. Should be way ahead when I get done. I got lucky and the local car lot got me a loan so I could trade my truck in. The only reason I took the 21% was to fix my credit it is just to hard to get a loan right now. I had to credit counselors tell me a loan was the only way i would fix it. My plan is to pay it off in a year or so and if i can trade in for a newer or new jeep at a low rate. The loan officer told me a pay of in a year i could get between 6 and 10%. At that rate i doubt my payment would go up on a new jeep. Then hopefully have it paid off right around the time i get done with school and get a loan to start my company. Then sit back work my *** off till 45 50 and hit the woods till i die.
Thanks alot guys. Alot of good advise here. Might wait on the Ar I need a new 52 inch lcd tv. My 42 inch ant doing it. JUST JOKEING.
Though i am going to feel bad flaming the 1500 laptop guys when i buy one to run autocad. Though i have a good reason i guess.

cartman308

When I was in college I wrote a paper in my criminal justice Senior Semenar class on the 2nd Amendment. The instructor was left wing, pinko, commie! She had red ink ALL OVER MY PAPER arguing against every FACT I stated. However! I recieved a B on the paper. My grammar was good, i had a couple error on citations, but overall I did well. She graded me on the structure of the paper not the arguments i put forth. She did add her comments but didn't take points away for me having a different view point.

She may have been a polar opposite of me in terms of political view but she graded my paper fairly! I guess i have to respect her for that

IndyHunter83

Wow.. great thread. very entertaining. Bigtim, I'll give you my honest opinion, I don't think that it was just your grammar that probably killed your paper. You seem like a young kid so I'll offer you some advice. In order take on a topic like gun control in a college level paper, you have to look at it from all sides and give a clear and accurate picture of what your sources tell you. I agree with you that the thesis statement "Gun control only keeps guns out of the hands of those who would legally posses them." is a great statement but you need the sources to back that statement up.

Also, you seem like someone who likes to use the things that he pays for, so here's a bit more on the good advice, use the help that is available because you are paying for it. If you need help with citations then you need to get to the writing lab. There is no stigma that comes with it except, your professor may thing "this guy really cares about his grade and wants to do well". My first two years in college were spent as an english writing major and I learned a lot from just asking my professors how I could do better.

Lastly, I am wondering where you are a student at, I work construction management and I'm a senior in the construction engineering and management program at the Purdue School of Engineering Technology. There are only 5 or 6 programs in our state. I'm just wondering which you are at or possibly trying to get into.
The one thing I will say to you right now is, if you get your feathers ruffled because of a bad grade on some paper that won't matter a month from now then you have got a lot of maturing to do before you get into the construction field. I've been in construction for 10 years and what I can recommend to you is that calm down and try to understand where other people are coming from, especially when you post something on here. I've had people yell and scream at me and I just took it because I was ultimately to blame for the mistake made. Now this was a tough lesson for you, I respect that, but get up and dust yourself off. Learn what you can and go talk to your professor face to face so that you understand what you did wrong. I promise she'll have more respect for you after that.

vabyrd

The car loan of 21% ain't gonna fix jack. Pay the thing off and DO NOT get another vehicle. Drive that POS until it dies, then drive it some more. You are already upside down on it, meaning you owe more than its worth. Look at how much you will actually pay for the thing when its done rather then the payments. If you had it in cash, you would never pay what you paid for that vehicle. Don't even think about another rifle or car or anything else for that matter. PUT MONEY IN THE FN BANK!!! You should be doing nothing but studying and watching DAVE RAMSEY. Go to the library and get some of his books on FINANCIAL PEACE. See the problem with college is they don't teach you numbnuts whats really important. FINANCE is first!!!

Now, as far as your career goes, you can forget it. You don't want to do it anyway, just look at your opening line. Real estate is in the toilet, contractors are starving. FTN. Whoever put the notion in your head should be smacked. You aint going to be building crap except more debt. It going to take 5-10 years for real estate to even look like its turning around. ....

SO, drop that crap and look to something that is always in demand. Medical is good, but your aptitude needs work. If you like trades, possibly look into plumbing or HVAC repair and installation. Why? because people poop and cant stand to be hot (or cold). Have any idea what an emergency repairs costs?? Yep, big freaking dollars. If real estate does turn around, you'll be positioned to build a house or two ON THE SIDE and make good dough-ray-me on them. See at that point, you'll know most of the builders and see all their mistakes.



That will be $100, please.

Oh yeah, you can't "sit back and work your ass off"

Why do I bother....

bigtim6656

2 years at Ivytech in Terre Haute and then 2 years at ISU. I wanted to go to purdue or IU. The issue is Ivytech told me that ISU will take the transfer fulling but other schools will only take what they want. I calmed down and plan on emailing her. After looking at the paper again I would say i deserve the F or maybe a D. She said i gave a good argument just a few issues with how i wrote my citations. Then the issue with purchases. As always i was balanced and gave points for both sides.

spaniel

First i see no problem with me taking my own money to buy what I want to buy and using my loan to pay for school.

You're taking out loans, therefore you have NO MONEY!! You're not making anything! If you are still going into debt, you have no money for expensive toys.

Where does it say i can not do that. Why should i be broke and have nothing just because i am a student.

Because you should be earning money before you are spending money. Why do you feel so entitled to have all sorts of toys that hard-working full-time workers cannot afford? You have a lot to learn about money. I take it from your other post that you already ruined your credit somehow? Or if it's that you're trying to build it, a silly 21% auto loan will do nothing for you. Get a credit card that gives points/money back (like Cabela's) and PAY IT OFF EVERY MONTH. THAT will help your credit. You're just throwing money away on that car/truck.

How are you to tell me what is appropriate for my budget. I know kids in school who show up for the first month get there loan an fin aid and that's it go buy a nice care 1500 laptop for nursing and never come back till finales atleast i do my work and pass 90% of my classes.

A $1500 laptop that is used to do coursework and access things online FOR SCHOOL. You can't do college without a computer anymore. Besides, a nurse and walk out the door at graduation and make $50k/year virtually anywhere in this country. Not so in construction.

And passing 90% of your classes? That's a low bar you're accepting there. You expect to be clearing 6 figures (taken from another post of yours) and working in the office writing checks when you've got failed classes on your record? Who's going to hire you? In a market like this they'll hire someone with a 3.0 GPA competing for that same job.

As for who I am to give you advice on your budget, perhaps you would get a long way by listening to people who have been there. I grew up dirt poor as a result of the farming crisis of the 1980s. I remember a few years we never knew if we'd have a roof over our heads the next month, but we made it through. I understood that you don't get nice things just because you want them, no one is entitled to anything. No money for it, no nice toy.

I had no safety net so I had to either make a successful career or I'd never leave that poor town. I worked my tail off in school, then picked a cheap state school with my major because a) they'd give good scholarships to get someone with my GPA in, and b) living expense etc were dirt cheap. I used the money I'd saved up through summer jobs to buy a basic computer. I worked my tail off there too and despite doing 2 NCAA sports got near the top of my class again. On the way I worked as many as 3 part-time jobs at a time to pay my rent and expenses. I can remember going to the bar literally with a pocket full of change, because that is the only money I'd let myself spend on that. On graduation day I had less than $100 to my name but was DEBT-FREE. My 15-year-old beater car was finally not fixable with the toolbox and duct tape I kept in the trunk and needed to be replaced.

This does not mean I did not enjoy the outdoors. My college was surrounded by Michigan's Upper Penninsula woods and I spend every weekend there. For hunting, I had a Traditions Deerhunter sidelock that I bought for $119 and a Mossberg 500 I bought for $200. I shot the same PSE Spirit bow from age 12 to age 26. Cheap but effective, I killed 2-5 deer every year.

In 2000 after graduating, I stayed there for a week after graduation to roof a professor's house all by myself to earn the money for a car downpayment ($1500). I bought a 1998 Ford Contour used with 23,000 miles for $8500. I bought a stick because nobody wants to buy used sticks so I got a great deal.

I went into a graduate program that paid me a living stipend. Each month after my car payment ($250) and rent ($400) I had about $100 left for everything else. But I made it and took out no loans.

3 years later I got married and my wife had a great job so our situation improved. But she'd spent a lot while in grad school so we paid for it by big loan payments every month. Despite having more money we moved in with our bachelor best man and rented half his house, $400/month, to save money. We put on our wedding for about $8000 including honeymoon, I paid for it with money I scraped together over the previous two years and again no debt other than her student loans (which paid for themselves by getting her a great job). We did buy her a new car in 2003 because she worked the late shift in downtown Detroit and I did not feel safe with her leaving work at 2am in an old car of a model stolen a lot. Took a loan for that.

In 2004 I took the first debt of my life outside my small car loan (which I'd just paid off) when I decided to leave my research grad program to pursue a more lucrative MBA. I ran up about $40k in debt in two years, but we continued to live cheap so that was a lot less than the $100k debt most of my classmates left with. When I got my job, I arm-wrestled the company into a loan to allow me to pay off high-interest student loan debt and get a better interest rate.

All this time, I continued to shoot and enjoy the outdoors. I made do with old and substandard WalMart hunting clothes though I did upgrade my ML to a Traditions Lightning LD and eventually a T/C Omega as our finances improved. My wife bought me my most expensive gun to date, my Remington Sendero elk rifle, as a birthday/Christmas/anniversary present one year.

The result of all that hard work, listening and learning from my bad experiences, and financial common sense was that I landed a great job and within a year of finishing school we were able to buy a nice house on 15 acres in Indiana (10% down, 30 yr loan, no gimmick loan to get us in trouble though they tried to sell us one) so I could build a gun range and game bird habitat, and my wife went to part-time. I can apply for relatively pricey non-resident tags out west each year. We can go on vacation and afford to buy plane tickets to visit family spread across the US.

My wife's "new" car (paid off in 2008) has $105k miles on it, I still drive the 98 Contour (paid off in 2004) now with 163k miles on it. My hunting truck is a 2WD 91 Sierra with 200k miles I got for free.

It would be nice to go on a cruise or fancy vacation, to the Bahamas, but typically we go to stay with family or something equally cheap. It would be nice to hire an outfitter and get trophy elk, but it's a fraction of the price to do it myself (and a much more rewarding experience). It would be nice to drive a new car, or have a 4X4 that can actually get into where I hunt, but what I have is paid for and gets the job done for now. It would be nice to have a custom 243AI in a McMillan A3 stock like I've always drooled over, but the cheap Savage 243 I just bought does 95% as well. I could really use a Ranger ATV around the property, but that money looks good in the bank right now.

Instead of spending all my money on STUFF I sock $1000/month away against the student loans to get them paid off, stash 7% of my income in a 401K, and focus on having good experiences with friends and family -- without wasting money.

So who am I? Just a guy who made it from nothing with some basic financial common sense, patience and maturity that you could stand to learn.

You're all hung up ruining your financial future spending money you don't have on STUFF. Learn to appreciate what you have, and make do with what you have until you are on a solid foundation. You'll get double or triple return in a few years by being smart about money NOW.

STUFF isn't what makes hunting or the outdoors enjoyable. I spent the first week of November up in the Montana mountains on an elk hunt with my best friend from high school. We passed the time talking about all the years of great times we had together hunting, all the kills and experiences, back when we were both poor using hand-me-down guns with crooked sights and had never laid eyes on a gun with an honest-to-God scope, "only rich people had scopes".

He has a good job too. You know what he was hunting with? That cheap Remington SPS and Nikon Buckmaster scope setup I told you about. And he killed a muley at 550 yards with a perfect shot.

You don't "deserve" an AR or anything else for that matter, until you've earned it. So many people got themselves in trouble and lost houses/cars etc over the last two years for the exact same reasons you're catching crap now. Learn from their mistakes without having to make them yourself. When you're 31 like me and in a good spot rather than trying to dig yourself out from a mountain of debt wondering what the hell happened, you'll appreciate the advice.

devil dog

I have read quite a few good post's here!, evidently, Bigtim is'nt reading them, proof is in his follow-up post's. Young man, what people are telling you, you need to take to heart. Go back and read what you have written, not once have you tried to correct any spelling, sentence strucure or grammer.
My advice, since it seam's school is'nt just quite your thing, why don't you join the military, there are many programs in the military that can help you with your problems, main one is to mature and become a grown-up adult. Once you get your problems straightened out, you can continue your higher education while you serve.
I'm not telling you this to be mean!, I'm telling you this through personal experience, myself, I sucked in school, I did'nt have dislexia or anything like that, I was just pure lazy. While serving in the Marine Corps, I started to learn what education was, I'm not talking about math or science, I'm talking about the ability to comunicate, the understanding of basic english. The ability of writing a sentence, a paragraph, or a paper. Lets say, instead of asking about the quality of a DPMS SASS compared to a Remington R25, lets ask, if while in a fire-fight, my weapon jams, upon clearring it, it double feeds, what is the proper method to clear the weapon, to get back in the fight. Your answer; Take TH magizin outa gunpul hanel bac le go seral timews untel gun clers. What the hell are you going to do at this point, other than probably get killed. A better responce to receive; put the safety on, remove magazine, pull charging handle to the rear several times to clear the jam, once the jam is cleared, lock the bolt to the rear, incert the magazine, release the bolt and hit the forward assist, disengage the safety and get back in the fight.
Being enthusiastic about guns, bows, hunting or what-ever is fine, but being a responsible adult is much more important to serve in ones life, an understanding of education is the first, best step. Myself, through understanding this at a younger age, I now, at the age of 46, own my own bussiness, even with this shi*ty economy, am still keeping it together. I beleive I owe this to the lessons I learned while I served. Semper Fi, Always Faithfull, it continues after the Marine Corps, part of the meaning to me is, always faithful to God, Country, and most of all, Myself.
Now I'm not saying just the Marine Corps is the only option, not everyone is cut out to be a Marine, but the Army, Navy and the Airforce will also instill some dicipline in ones life, hell, the Airforce offers the best educational options available.
Well, you can take this advice or leave it, the only one you have to satisfy is yourself, you just need to dig down and ask yourself, am I bettering my life the route Im taking, or, can I use some help, learn a little discipline, become a mature adult.
By the way, this still does'nt come easy to me, I still have to proof-read what I write. I keep a dictionary handy to check my spelling, make sure my sentences have structure and can be understood. Sometimes I still get lazy and blerb out some lines without checking myself, and yes, all to often get corrected, but the fact of the matter, it makes me do the right thing and proof-read befor I hit the submit button. Just my .02 worth.

Horacio

Interesting topic.

I'm sure its possible for an instructor to allow their personal bias to reflect poorly on a student's grade when the subject matter is a topic that is widely debated.

That said, without reading the actual paper and knowing the grading criteria, there is no way of knowing if that is the case.

Be careful of calling it bias, IE, don't cry wolf. There may be sound mechanical reasons as to why your paper was graded like it was.

Its been a while, I graduated in 1998 from Texas State and writing papers pretty much saved me. It was something I was really good at and I could BS my way through just about anything. I don't recall, however, having to write anything over an emotional or politically charged subject....I was a Finance major.

lovethebigguns

I must agree, what a great thread.

These guys have given us all a heck of a lot of great advise. Spaniel, your long post was phenomenal. I am exactly your age, and unfortunately in nowhere near your financial position. I'm OK and in due time I will be there! I too made the mistake of having an extra few $$ in my pocket in my early 20's and thought I could buy 3 or 4 guns a year and then all of a sudden I found my self in such a freakin hole that I had to sell them all. Bigtim, I'm in the boat you might be in someday, though I was working full time through college, I took out a bunch of student loans but by God I had a nice truck and guns and my horses and what-not. Now I kick my self in the A$$ every time I send that student loan check out.

I didn't buy an AR (I actually don't care for them) but in the same situation you're in now, I bought a shiny new Ruger Red Label for something like $1,200 and it wasn't fun the day I took $600 for it to pay a truck payment and buy my beautiful daughter some diapers. But by God I did it, and have never regretted it. The lesson I learned off of that $600 loss was invaluable.

Please don't give up on school. I do agree that you should think about changing majors and get into a more demanded field. Also, for the love of God, don't be afraid to ask for help. I too can tell from your posts that you have trouble with grammer. That being said, ask your family to read each and every paper you write. Hell, email them to me and seriously, I'll proof read them for you. I just finished a Bachelor Degree program and graduated Suma Cum Laude, and my classmates leaned on me regularly to help them with the same thing, so I should be able to help. An additional piece of advise I have for you is to practice proper grammer and sentance structure in EVERYTHING you write! I think that instant messaging and the invention of text messaging is going to be the demise of our literary world as we know it. If your sending a text, posting on this forum or sending your buddies an email write it as if you were going to turn it in. Trust me, it will be good practice for you.

PM if you're interested in taking me up on my offer.

Good luck to you sir.