It’s been less than a week since Nicholas graduated from Enloe High School and he has gotten to experience many of the unbridled joys of adulting up close and personal this morning!
There’s a reason they call this “the real world” and many more reasons why it occasionally sucks!
We started out the day registering him for his automotive courses for the fall semester at Wake Technical Community College’s new Shangri-La for learning wrench turning at the North Campus. He’s going for the “Automotive Service Technician” where we hope he’ll be apprenticing in one of the service bays at Toyota or Lexus along with his course load.
We had originally thought of letting him dip a toe into the collegiate life given how much fun getting him graduated from high school wasn’t but given his major enthusiasm for the subject and the prospect of paid work experience alongside the classroom/lab instruction for the semester, we figured we may as well strike whilst the iron is hot.
That was the easy and fun part.
Then there was dealing with Financial Aid. I already knew this was likely to start out with bad news given that the FAFSA used the financial numbers from 2019 where I got royally screwed with unexpected income on the last day of the tax year rather than the much more favourable income figures for financial aid that 2020 would have given.
At least we have that to look forward to but yeah…our Expected Family Contribution (EFC) was astronomical and the only shocking thing was that it wasn’t even worse.
But that number certainly brought back bad memories of when I was heading off to UCF with my father having committed the cardinal sin of financial aid formulas by paying off his mortgage. It took two years of begging and pleading with the financial aid office to effectively divorce my father financially…and even then I was stuck with massive loans to get through to the degree. I don’t regret doing what needed to be done and I paid off those student loans and the huge pile of credit card bills about three years after graduating thanks to being in IT but I don’t know that I can truly sell the benefits of the four-year college experience and debt load with the amount of inflation in tuition and fees (and if we’re honest…GREED) in today’s economic environment.
We’ll see what happens when they actually pump out an offer letter in the next few days but I’m not expecting a whole lot of good news on that front either when what’s already visible in their portal says he’s not qualified for the Federal and state grants (Pell, etc).
When it comes to financial aid…I’ve found that preparing for the worst and then being pleasantly surprised later by alternative funding sources not necessarily in their control is the only way to navigate this Scylla and Charybdis and maintaining what passes for one’s sanity.
But now that we’re moving toward him working in an auto shop, we’ve got to get him his Class C licence and in order to do that, we’ve got to get him insured.
Welcome to more “adulting sucks”!
It royally sucks…to the tune of $600 extra per six months just in the “inexperienced driver surcharge” that gets tacked onto the bill for at least a minimum of the next three years presuming he keeps his nose clean in his driving activities. Eventually adding a car of his own and the already massive bill gets even worse.
Mind you, when the lady quoted that number…I almost had a heart attack before I remembered it’s for a six month period, not per month! But even so…for someone just above minimum wage, $100/mo for just insurance blows.
Mind you, when I started at UCF…I had insurers down there quoting me $4,000 per year with a straight face. And that was over 30 years ago in a no-fault state and we still had people coming to Florida from New York and Massachusetts to establish bogus residency to escape the even more insane rates back home which were 2-3x the absurd Florida insurance rates. If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many Florida plates in the Northeast that stay way past the 30-day registration limit, now ya know!
And why were those rates exorbitant?
Florida’s no-fault insurance scheme was meant to dramatically cut down on the court dockets by having your own insurer pay for relatively minor claims in an accident rather than the usual method of having the drivers involved running to the courthouse for a lawsuit. It certainly did remove individual litigants from the dockets but replaced them with wealthy insurance companies who could actually afford the lawyers…thus 3-4x the lawsuits resulted after no-fault was passed in the 1970s than before.
Targeted ship…sank truck!
But the other factor was that the insurance companies pretty much got away with anything they wanted to charge knowing that Tallahassee was unlikely to regulate them. Oh, there is an insurance commissioner and a whole department to support them on the public payroll…but the average Florida insurance commissioner *SELLS INSURANCE* even when they’re in state office (in other places, this would be called a massive “conflict of interest” and thus be illegal but in Florida, it’s considered quite normal). It should come as no shock that of the 20+ rate increases sent to Tallahassee for the commissioner’s review and theoretical veto whilst I lived there, NONE were actually refused because the commissioner was bought and paid for by the insurance industry itself and no commissioner would dare vote against their own interests.
When I describe Florida as a third world country we happen to own, there’s several reasons and this one is usually the first one I think of! It certainly has the climate to be the Sunshine State but you could just as accurately describe it as the Banana Republic State. 🙁
The irony is that literally right now, Governor DeSantis is debating whether to sign the bill eliminating the no-fault system in favour of state-mandated minimums or veto it and he’s getting the full court press of lobbying on both sides. My view is that it’s unlikely to result in an appreciable saving for Florida motorists and is likely to follow Colorado’s example where the premiums went up at least 50% in years following repeal. Until they remove the conflict of interest where the industry picks its rubber stamp masquerading as a regulator, Florida rate-payers will get the screw even worse than we do here in the NC Rate Bureau.
So I’m truly beginning to understand why my father didn’t smile all that much when I started driving and moving on to college and doing this adulting thing.
Adulting sucks.