Student loan debt made me less stupid

All 18-year-olds are dangerously stupid.

I say “Dangerous” because 18-year olds feel as though they are fully-functioning human persons. But they are not.

This is especially true of the precocious 18-year-olds who can confidently hold their own in conversations with adults and take college-level courses and have a bunch of AP everything on their overstuffed-like-hotel-pillows resumes. You know, kids like me.

Now stay with me here because this next line is going to make me sound like a brat. But in my defense, that’s only because I was a horrible, selfish brat. I went to a college that was slightly less prestigious (eww, gross sentence) than the one I really wanted to go to (like, who did i think i was?) because my mother told me that it was simply impossible for her to afford the tuition at the school I wanted to go to( i felt gross just typing/admitting that). I would like to say that I understood my mother’s argument for the common sense argument that it was — but I didn’t. I sulked in my room and begged her to take out loans to make it possible.

Did I mention that 18-year-olds are dangerously stupid? I should probably also mention they are dangerously selfish as well.

My mother did something so unbelievably clever. While I was Sulking in my room and listening to Conor Oberst (the only person who “got me” because it was 2007), she called up my college and lowered my tuition using other schools financial aid offerings as leverage. This is the single most important thing I could ever tell you: College tuition is negotiable.

I’ll say it again in case you didn’t hear me in your mind’s ear: College tuition is negotiable.

Also, everything is negotiable, but that’s an essay for another time.

I went to college, but we can skip that part because it’s relatively pointless. Fun, but pointless.

At the end of college you have this exit interview where they tell you how much student loan debt you had acquired and when you are supposed to start paying it back. They call it an exit interview, but really they sit you in front of a computer and it feels like you are taking a learners permit test. Like you answer a series of questions and you go through a slideshow and at the end of it they tell you you owe $30k.

The girl sitting at the computer next to started crying.

This is the part where I was supposed to be worried, right? but the truly embarrassing thing is, I knew so little about money at that point when they told me that I wasn’t even worried. I was like I’ll just pay it off until I’m 100. 30k divided by 934 (the number of months until I was 100) is like 30 bucks a month. I can do that.

Wrong dummy.

There’s this thing, it’s called compounding interest. It’s magical when your money is making money, like in the stock market. It’s not magical when it comes to student loans. Every month your loan compounds by x%. In my case, each of my loans had a different interest rate. Between 3 and 6%..

So long story short, I owed $200 every month. When I graduated college, I was only making $1700 a month. Maybe less, I’ve blocked it out. I worked for the Obama campaign and my salary was 30k a year. That’s another thing they don’t tell you. When ppl say “you’re making 30k” you can’t just divide that by 12 months and that’s how much you make. I knew that one at the time, from having jobs in high school, but thought I would warn everyone.

Another fun thing about going to a private liberal arts school is that you will get out of college and a lot of your friends will have their parents pay their loans for them. And then you will resent your friends and you will think they are spoiled brats. And you and your non-rich friends will get together behind their backs and say weird old fashioned things like “Margot (bc rich ppl are named Margot) doesn’t understand the value of a dollar”. Those friends will then be able to do internships with cool people and they will turn down job offers because it doesn’t offer them the “creative freedom” that they want. All the while you will have to silently seethe at them and get a job. A job that pays money. Where you will need to know excel. A skill no one teaches you ever, but is the single most useful thing in the world.

Sometime around two years after I graduated college I made what I thought was the responsible decision and I decided to pay off a student loan in full. You would think that this would be a moment of triumph. A great way to end a short little essay. Overcoming the odds like Mulan climbing up that wooden pole during the army training camp montage.

Nope.

I paid off a loan that had a 3% interest rate when i should have paid off the loan I had that had a 5%interest rate.

Also, here’s another thing. Before you start playing off studnet loans it makes sense to have an emergency fund. I had maybe 2K to fall back on if shit hit the fan. And did I mention that I worked in democratic politics? Shit was hitting the fan all the time.

Although I was totally obsessed with economics and books about the financial crisis in 2008, it took me years to pick up a book about my finances. Then somewhere in all of this I picked up a personal finance book. It was Ramit Sethi’s “I Will Teach You to be Rich” which is a dumb book name. It sounds so gimmick-y considering that the book is not gimmick-y. It is mostly filled with common sense advice and a lot of not very funny and mildly sexist/racist bro jokes. Reading that book convinced me to start saving for retirement, make a budget and got me over my fear of the stock market.

And I started making spreadsheets where I realized that investing my money in a roth IRA was a better idea than paying off as much student loan debt as possible.

Now, I am a personal finance evangalist. I talk about compounding interest like I am trying to save people’s souls.

If I didn’t have student loan debt I probably would not have learned any of this. I think that the process made me less overall horrible. So, I guess I’m strangely grateful… well that seems like the wrong word. I am grateful, but also not grateful because student loans are f-ed up. I don’t think we have a word for that in English, but I bet the Germans do.

There are better, less costly ways of making people less selfish and stupid. Like, making them work on a farm milking goats. And then we would have a surplus of delish goats milk cheese!

I think that you should know that everything will basically be okay if you get yourself into a little debt. I mean you really shouldn’t have to, but you will be fine. I am fine, a little bitter, which is giving me chin acne — but basically fine.

At the end of the day, I leave you with this piece of advice: go to a goddammed State school. But if you cannot get over your unrelenting vanity, then at least know that tuition is negotiable.

This post started as an email in response to the series about student debt on the podcast, Death, Sex & Money.