Fairfield Now - Summer 2007

Class of '93 Profile
Carmen Wong Ulrich: The debt buster

By Nina M. Riccio

In her years as an editor at Money magazine and now as an author and lecturer on financial matters, Carmen Wong Ulrich '93 has seen young people make some pretty basic money mistakes. Mistake #1: not knowing when a big bill is coming. Mistake #2: not opening it once it gets there. That can lead to Mistake #3: not paying it.

Fortunately, Wong Ulrich is not just a whiz with finances, she's got some background in psychology, too. And that combination served her well when writing her latest book, Generation Debt: Take Control of Your Money, which is "written for regular, busy, smart people ages 18-34, who aren't interested in reading the business pages," she says.

Not that all debt is bad, Wong Ulrich stresses. Education loans, for example, are a fact of life - she needed them herself, along with scholarship aid, to get through college. "But it's a new thing to graduate with this much debt." says Wong Ulrich. "Government grants have not increased, which means loans are bigger than ever." Complicating matters is the fact that we're quickly becoming a cashless society, which means that credit card debt tends to pile up on student loan debt. The result: "We have the most debt-burdened generation ever produced."

There's lots of blame to go around, says Wong Ulrich, from credit card companies that push application forms on 13-year-olds to Pell Grants that pay a tiny fraction of college expenses, to our own insatiable appetites for lattes and laptops. Yet that's where she can help: making a financial game plan, differentiating between needs and wants, and saving for retirement are all subjects she's savvy - and passionate - about. "I'll show you how to get the upper hand on this smooth devil called debt soon. Stay tuned," she tells her readers in her trademark, take-no-prisoners style.

Originally from Manhattan, Wong Ulrich visited Fairfield in high school and fell in love with the campus. "It was great geographically," she says. "Plus, the Quick Center was just being built, and it felt like it was a real time of growth for the School." She majored in art history and psychology, spending lots of time at the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts as a work-study.

"Carmen was always interested in art history from the business side of things," says Dr. Kathryn Schwab, associate professor of art history, who today considers Wong Ulrich a friend. "She was always very mature in a business sense, and spent a good deal of time interning at the Walsh Gallery. Carmen was one of those students who always did more than what was expected of her, and all those experiences allowed her to make a very persuasive argument later, when she applied for a position at Christie's." That position called for someone with five years of experience; Wong Ulrich got the job when she was just a year out of school.

She later earned a master's in psychology from Columbia, then put her business acumen to work for several years at Money magazine, where she met her husband, Lawrence. While there, she began a financial mentoring program for urban youth, a group that often doesn't have access to financial experts, linking them to professionals via an online service. Today, she's juggling hats as a new mom (baby Bianca was born in November), book author, and financial columnist for magazines such as Real Simple, Essence, and Latina. Last March, she gave a few words of advice to a high-income-but-always-broke family on The Rachael Ray Show. "Young people can be very intimidated by personal finance," she says. "It's important to know that it's not that difficult if you can integrate common sense practices into your life."