There's also a lack of experience dealing with (comparatively) large amounts of money. When I was in high school, a hundred dollars seemed like a lot of money.

There's also a lack of experience dealing with (comparatively) large amounts of money. When I was in high school, a hundred dollars seemed like a lot of money. It's hard to compare the costs of rent, food, transportation, insurance, interest payments against potential income, when all those numbers sound like unfathomably-huge sums of money. I think you have to live at a certain income level for awhile to really understand how much money you're making and what things cost relative to that. You can make a mock budget as a high-schooler (I was required to do that for one of my classes), but it's hard to know if the numbers you're plugging into your budget are even remotely realistic.