Summer job money can stretch into future
Toiling behind the ice cream counter or sweating on the lifeguard stand aren’t just rites of passage for college students. You might need summer job money to help cover the ever-rising cost of tuition, living expenses and textbooks, plus visits home.
Money earned from a summer gig may not seem like much, especially if you’re working only seasonally. According to the most recent data on median wages from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women ages 16 to 24 earn $206 a week for part-time work and $511 for full-time work. Men in the same age group earn $215 a week for part-time work and $528 working full time.
But even with lean earnings from just a few months, here’s how you can change your financial fortune.
Money directly to savings
Your employer may give you the choice between getting paid by direct deposit or by payroll card, which works like a prepaid debit card.
“Always use direct deposit if you’re given the option,” says Amelia O’Rourke-Owens, program manager for the nonprofit America Saves for Young Workers, a Consumer Federation of America initiative.
When you’re paid by direct deposit, you’ll generally have the option to split your paycheck into separate checking and savings accounts. You’re more likely to save money you’ve earned if some of it never hits checking at all.
Consider sending 20 percent of your paycheck to savings to start. Make sure you have enough money in the checking account for regular expenses first.
Invest in your future
You won’t regret saving a portion of your summer income for the long term. You won’t be able to spend it right away, but it will last long past graduation day.
Say you open a retirement account like a Roth IRA with $50 when you’re 20 years old and put $50 in it every month. At 70, you would have over $175,000. Increase your contribution to $100 a month in two years, and you would end up with almost $330,000.
A Roth IRA in particular is a good idea because you can withdraw money you’ve put into it at any time without penalty. So it can function as a backup emergency fund.
Another way to plan for your future: Put down a deposit on a secured credit card. Your deposit — say, $200 — will generally be equal to your credit line. That will help you safely build credit.
Pick right bank account
A checking account with lots of fees will needlessly eat into your earnings.
You might be tempted to choose the bank your parents use, but shop around. Make sure you understand minimum balance requirements and monthly maintenance, ATM and overdraft fees.
While some banks waive fees if your paycheck is deposited directly into an account each month, that won’t help college students who work only part of the year, O’Rourke-Owens says.
Several online banks and credit unions offer free or lowfee checking accounts. Prioritize one that will reimburse ATM charges or has a wide ATM network, and that has low overdraft fees.
Done right, your summer job can lead to new friends, pizza money, a line on a résumé — and a step toward long-term financial security.
Craft breweries are on pace to see a record number of openings and closings in 2018, according to the Brewers Association.
As of June 30, the United States was home to 6,655 breweries, the most in modern history. A year ago, the figure was 5,562. Thirty years ago — the year Chicago’s longest-tenured brewery, Goose Island Beer Co., opened — that number was less than 200.
Craft beer as defined by the Brewers Association, a Colorado-based trade organization, continues to see steady though unspectacular growth, clocking in at 5 percent during the first half of 2018, just as it was in 2017.
Production volume for craft brewers also increased 5 percent during the first half of 2018, the Brewers Association said.
“While more mature, the market continues to show demand for small and independent craft brewers,” Bart Watson, the Brewers Association’s chief economist, said in a statement.
“There are certainly industry headwinds, but this stabilized growth rate is reflective of the market realities that exist for brewers today.”
Despite the high number of both openings and closings in an industry that barely existed a generation ago, Watson said that “openings continue to far outpace the number that shutter.”
He declined to release specific numbers of openings or closings until the end of the year, when the data are more reliable.
“Both the opening and closing numbers are higher than what we were tracking at this point last year, but I’d prefer to avoid specific numbers since they will be easily misinterpreted,” he said.
Chicago has the fifth-highest number of breweries of any city in the nation, Watson has said. In recent weeks, it has seen one closing: Baderbrau Brewing.
The Brewers Association defines a craft brewery as “small” (annual production 6 million barrels of beer or less), “traditional” (a majority of production is derived “from traditional or innovative brewing ingredients”) and “independent” (less than 25 percent of the craft brewery is owned or controlled by a company that is not itself a craft brewer).
The definition of “independent” means Brewers Association statistics do not include a large amount of volume that would otherwise be considered “craft,” such as breweries acquired by Anheuser-Busch (including Goose Island), Lagunitas (owned by Heineken) and Ballast Point (owned by Constellation Brands), among a handful of other brands.