anecdotally, in my circle, it's only ok to talk about student loans / precise figures, if you're "doing student debt well" aka, the total figure you borrowed was lower than like- 50k for undergrad, and you're paying it down and making progress every year, and you don't have issues making your car payment / rent / groceries. A friend with…
anecdotally, in my circle, it's only ok to talk about student loans / precise figures, if you're "doing student debt well" aka, the total figure you borrowed was lower than like- 50k for undergrad, and you're paying it down and making progress every year, and you don't have issues making your car payment / rent / groceries. A friend with student loans and no degree who is living with her mom bc she cannot afford anything else- she doesn't talk about this stuff. You have to put the pieces together.
I think there's this shame attached to floundering. I graduated in 2019 with 69k in debt and I got a 28k a year job- I did very little all year but put money towards my loans, stay home, and cry. (And then covid hit .... yay.) The psychological weight of it was horrible. But I couldn't talk about this stuff bc it made me feel like a failure of an adult. How could I not have foreseen this, how could I not be handling it better, making more money? I paid 10k to the loans that year and it was one of the worst years of my life. The Covid years were better, psychologically. I wish I'd done it differently. You would think by now I'd feel that it was money/time well spent. I don't bc I still have loans lmfao.
I feel way more comfortable talking about my student loans now bc I am not trapped between them and living any sort of a real adult life that everyone else seems to somehow be experiencing. That's not bc I bootstrapped my way out of them- I got married, and our combined income is finally enough to afford my loan payments. That's not a success story, that's Cinderella. Or the golden ticket in willy wonka. Don't get me wrong money is still tight... but I'm not nervously keeping absolutely everything that comes into my apt anymore. If I was single, I think I'd have a hoarding problem that would have been kicked off by my low income. These things all tangle up with each other.
anecdotally, in my circle, it's only ok to talk about student loans / precise figures, if you're "doing student debt well" aka, the total figure you borrowed was lower than like- 50k for undergrad, and you're paying it down and making progress every year, and you don't have issues making your car payment / rent / groceries. A friend with student loans and no degree who is living with her mom bc she cannot afford anything else- she doesn't talk about this stuff. You have to put the pieces together.
I think there's this shame attached to floundering. I graduated in 2019 with 69k in debt and I got a 28k a year job- I did very little all year but put money towards my loans, stay home, and cry. (And then covid hit .... yay.) The psychological weight of it was horrible. But I couldn't talk about this stuff bc it made me feel like a failure of an adult. How could I not have foreseen this, how could I not be handling it better, making more money? I paid 10k to the loans that year and it was one of the worst years of my life. The Covid years were better, psychologically. I wish I'd done it differently. You would think by now I'd feel that it was money/time well spent. I don't bc I still have loans lmfao.
I feel way more comfortable talking about my student loans now bc I am not trapped between them and living any sort of a real adult life that everyone else seems to somehow be experiencing. That's not bc I bootstrapped my way out of them- I got married, and our combined income is finally enough to afford my loan payments. That's not a success story, that's Cinderella. Or the golden ticket in willy wonka. Don't get me wrong money is still tight... but I'm not nervously keeping absolutely everything that comes into my apt anymore. If I was single, I think I'd have a hoarding problem that would have been kicked off by my low income. These things all tangle up with each other.