One of the serious downsides to growing up and saying goodbye to your days living the life of a student is having less time to see even your closest of friends as often as you might like. In fact, with the way in which most people’s lives turn out after they say goodbye to their college days, one would have a very strong argument for thinking that this inevitable journey doesn’t have that many upsides, if any at all.
Well if you manage to navigate the precarious world of being faced with the reality of paying off your student debts, saving, investing and somehow managing to bring in more money than you spend, things can start to look very positive. So in a nutshell it’s all about getting your money right. We can argue all we want against it, but the fact remains that if you have more money at your disposal, you have more opportunities to even enjoy a happier life.
So anyway, I recently forced the issue and made time to drop-in on one of my lifelong buddies whom I’d not seen since a short while after graduation. He told me about how the much-vaunted and touted world of engineering isn’t at all what it seems — well certainly not for what’s in effect a graduate who is effectively paying off his flavour of student debt after studying via a full scholarship. He’s now working for the company that sponsored his studies under a five year contract (that’s how long it took for him to complete his degree), but earns about as much as I did when I was starting out in my first job — a job that didn’t require a college degree I must add.
We hung out in his man-cave for a bit — a nice little joint he’s justifiably proud of and I spotted something rather interesting in the corner, which it turns out was his final year project. As an Electrical Engineer he was tasked with well “engineering” a solution which effectively cleans up “dirty” or “garbage” heavy-current electricity and turns this residual energy into something useful or even discards it altogether.
He assures me it works perfectly, despite how bare and uncovered it lies there in the corner. I mean he wouldn’t have graduated otherwise, but this cleaning up of residual energy got me thinking about the financial industry again, with questions of just where all the residual money goes. Think about it — as much as there are companies such as Stanton and Fisher who specialise in helping people get compensation on some financial claims they qualify for, a lot more people never take any steps to make claims and a lot more residual money just disappears into the ether!
Take bank accounts as well — what happens to those few pennies or even thousands of pounds in many instances, left over inside those bank accounts which lie dormant for a very long time and eventually get closed down for non-activity?
Where does all this residual money go?