It seems almost as if it’s a rite of passage these days for graduates to incur debt. In fact of all the people I know who are college graduates, I think I’ve only met maybe 2 who haven’t taken out some kind of loan at some point in their student career. Hey, college is expensive and don’t let anyone tell you any different. Each year tens of thousands of newly minted graduates enter the job market, eager to flex their intellectual muscle, work hard and get ahead but almost all of them have this pressing burden weighing down on them in student loan debt.
Student loan debt is a unique animal in the credit markets in that whenever you enter into a federally backed loan to pay for school you will pay that loan back. Even if you decide to be cute and try and skip out on the loan, they can garnish your wages to get their money back. Aside from the IRS I cannot think of too many other circumstances that this can happen, at least at the Federal level. Some states allow this type of enforcement for other types of debt but it will vary from state to state. Anyhow the point is student loan debt is real debt and just because it’s easy to access does not mean that it should be entered into lightly.
Think of your debt as an investment, not an expense. If you are going to college and incurring debt you should treat this as a business decision, in other words you need to ask yourself “what’s in it for me?” If you are going to do all this work, for all these years and pay money both earned and borrowed you need to have a clear expectation as to why or what’s in it for you. It may be that this is just a personal goal that’s worth taking on the financial hardship to fulfill, well then more power to you just so long as you fully understand the gravity of your decision and are entering into the agreement with your facts straight. It may be that you want a higher paying job out of all of this (don’t we all) but you need to understand clearly where you’re going, what you’re going to do when you get there, how you’re going to get there and hopefully how much money roughly to expect once you arrive. Do some market research and keep your expectations realistic.
Remember student loans are a tool that should be leveraged wisely.