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The silver lining is those 18 months taught me a hard lesson about managing money. But I could have saved myself a lot of grief -- and hundreds of dollars in interest payments -- if I'd learned about the dangers of abusing credit in high school.
There are signs that today's students are getting the message I missed. The average outstanding balance on credit cards of undergraduates who applied for student loans was $2,169 in 2004, down from $2,748 in 2000, according to a study by Nellie Mae, a unit of student-loan company SLM.
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