Transcription

So, I’ve got a lot of debt. I think it’s probably too much debt. I have a principle of $90,000 right now. My school was $47,000 tuition, and then living…so one year, 67 grand. That’s a lot of money.

All the studies show that, if you go to grad school, you eventually make more money. You make it up. There’s that, I was thinking long term. This is a worthy investment. But I was contrasting this option with a free graduate education, which I decided not to do because of the name and the location and the school.

I don’t know…the job that I have now, it’s possible that they will pay my student loan payments, which is great, and there are jobs…that’s not totally unheard of, that could happen, but you probably don’t want to count on that.

Also, I made a reference to the income based repayment plans. The government has noticed that student debt is out of control, that tuition prices are growing disproportionately to salary in this country and they’ve made some steps…they’re not as adequate as they could be, but they’re in the right direction. So, they’ve capped income based repayment plans at 10% as opposed to 15.

Basically what that means is that you take your income, subtract $10,000 from it, and you divide it by 12 months. Ten percent of that is what you’re paying. So, for someone like me, with a $90,000 principle. I could be paying $1,000 a month in student loans on a standard payment plan. But income based, this year, next year, depending on what my salary is, I pay $400, maybe a little bit more? $500? Especially now that they’re lowering it to 10%. So, that’s something to consider.

There’s also a public service loan forgiveness, which I’m sure you guys have another whole section on, because it’s a very important program and it’s an incentive to stay in the public sector.  If you expect low salaries, after 10 years of steady payments, be them $400, $300 a month because you’re income based or $1000…you’re done, no matter what’s left. So that’s something that I’m probably going to end up doing as well.

So these are all justifications for me accruing $90,000 to live in New York City at Columbia, the school I wanted to go to. So, people make their own decisions, but it’s definitely something that I was like ‘Oh, I’ll deal with later, I’ll deal with later.’ Now I’m like ‘Wow, I’ve got to deal with this now.”