I see it at least once a week: the article about people with staggering school debt who have managed to whittle it down to nothing in a year. At least once a week, I read said article and torture myself. How did they do it, I’ll wonder. I inevitably find out that it’s a married couple that sold their second car, cancelled their cable and stopped going out to lunch during the week. Making sacrifices is the way to go.
Then there are the daily articles about how you can save hundreds a year just by getting rid of your landline, clipping coupons and bringing your own coffee with you to work. Okay, done, done and done. Where are my hundreds saved?
Once, I saw an article that might actually apply to me about people my age with debt that are struggling to get by and there are no solutions. The reader comments were more interesting than most of the article. Readers offered simple solutions to these poor people who just need a viable option to keep afloat: just don’t go to college – college is stupid, or maybe you shouldn’t have had that kid. Then there is the perennial comment about how my generation is lazy and expects everything to be handed to them.
I am a single gal, living in a big city. I have a full-time job, a pretty well paying one, and I certainly didn’t get here by being lazy and taking handouts. But I still have an 110k mountain of debt. I don’t have a car, so I can’t sell one. I got rid of my cable and landline months ago. I’m sure I slip up on the lunch thing, but I don’t go out to lunch all that much. I am even moving into a cheaper apartment. All my bills are paid; I just don’t have any left over.
I’m not going to use this as an excuse, but back in the year 2000 when I graduated high school I wanted to go to college. My generation grew up with the idea that going to college was the gateway to good paying jobs. I still believe that high school graduates should go to college, be it 4-year traditional college or getting an associates degree at a 2-year school. But no one ever goes into college thinking they won’t be better off or more prepared for the job market. I never once thought that I would have trouble paying back the money I now owe the government.
Maybe I was just naïve. Gosh, if those people who said college was a bad idea were only around when I was 17 and debt free, I would be so much better off. Nope, because when I was 17 the job market wasn’t a mess and the economy hadn’t completely tanked, and I would have said, “Are you nuts? If I don’t go to college I’ll end up working in the same sub shop for ten years with no job experience besides how to make the perfect hoagie.”
So here is the whole point, what’s done is done; I can’t take back my education by crossing my arms and blinking. What I am hoping for – not a comment from someone who is going to call me stupid for going to school in the first place – is a solution for a person like me that isn’t stuff we are already doing to scrape by. What else is there that us, college educated, hard-working people can do to live a little more comfortably?
#