On Monday, the venerable Andrea at So Over This published a great piece about student loans. In it, she posited that a lot of people don't really know what they're signing on to when they start borrowing money for school at the tender age of 18, and that there's a movement afoot ... Read more...
Major, MAJOR Student Loan Repayment Milestone
As of Wednesday, my student loan balance is officially below five figures! I now owe $9,967.51. True, this is still a large sum of money. And it's also true that I don't like owing any money at all. But I've committed to paying my loans of a little less aggressively to ... Read more...
Apparently, Paying For Your Kid’s College Education Means They’ll Get Lower Grades
File under: stuff that really, really surprises me. According to a recent study, students whose parents pay for their educations earn slightly lower grades than students whose parents contribute less. The GPA difference between parentally bankrolled students and those without ... Read more...
Discharging Student Loans in Bankruptcy IS Possible – But Should It Be So Hard?
It's no secret that I'm a huge proponent of higher education, even if that means taking on debt. I, in fact, took on a fair amount of debt to attend graduate school - almost $25,000 just in principle. Thankfully, I've paid off over half of my student loans and plan to have them ... Read more...
Student Loan Payoff Milestone!
Guess what?! My federal student loan - my only remaining debt - crossed another payoff milestone this week. It's officially below $11,000! When I started blogging almost four years ago, I had a hard time envisioning the day that my debt level would be so low. It feels like ... Read more...
Get Real: A College Education IS Worth It
Since the onset of the recession in 2008, it's become very trendy to discuss the crisis that recent college graduates face when attempting to get a job in a bad economy with massive student debt loads. Of course, there has also been a lot of chatter out there about whether a ... Read more...
“Parents, Step Up!”
I have the free Dave Ramsey app on my phone, which is basically just a collection of short segments from his radio show, updated almost daily. A few days ago there was a segment, filed under the category Best of Dave, called "Parents, Step Up!" The whole segment was a 10-minute ... Read more...
Have You Heard About Coursera?
A few weeks ago, I caught the end of an NPR story about a start-up called Coursera. I missed most of the information in the story, but I inferred that Coursera is an online learning platform. Like, where you can take full courses online. Cool, right? But then last Thursday I ... Read more...
Why ARE You Paying Back Your Student Loans?
I read a post last week at a blog I just discovered called The End of Insanity. The particular post that I read had a LOT of comments because the author argued a controversial point: there's no real reason to pay back student loans. She feels that her loans are "more of a ... Read more...
Big, Fat….
...payment on my private student loan! Since my curriculum writing money came in one paycheck early, I scheduled a payment of $610 on my private student loan; I'll do an update of all my loan balances when they post to my accounts. I'm feeling very energized about getting this ... Read more...