dragonlady7 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dragonlady7) wrote2007-12-20 02:03 pm
dragonlady7) wrote2007-12-20 02:03 pm
loan drones
Has anyone else made this connection?
Crippling student loan debt contributes to late transition to adulthood in middle-class American twentysomethings.
I'm nothing like the example in the article-- a young man with over $200k in student loans, his fiancee with $80k-- but I, too, feel that I am not really an adult, that being married and having kids isn't really a realistic option, because I haven't paid off my student loans yet.
I'm doing well-- I think my debt is in the neighborhood of $10k by this point. I've been working hard to pay it down since I got my first job in '03, though I had to defer payments for a year while unemployed. But then, I've had cheap rent, and have not owned a car. Ever.
Z's worse-- he's still over $20k, I think.
Neither of us have more than a bachelor's. I shudder to think what a PhD would set me back.
Has anyone else studied whether this correlates to the American trend of marrying later, buying homes later, having children later or not at all, etc.?
Crippling student loan debt contributes to late transition to adulthood in middle-class American twentysomethings.
I'm nothing like the example in the article-- a young man with over $200k in student loans, his fiancee with $80k-- but I, too, feel that I am not really an adult, that being married and having kids isn't really a realistic option, because I haven't paid off my student loans yet.
I'm doing well-- I think my debt is in the neighborhood of $10k by this point. I've been working hard to pay it down since I got my first job in '03, though I had to defer payments for a year while unemployed. But then, I've had cheap rent, and have not owned a car. Ever.
Z's worse-- he's still over $20k, I think.
Neither of us have more than a bachelor's. I shudder to think what a PhD would set me back.
Has anyone else studied whether this correlates to the American trend of marrying later, buying homes later, having children later or not at all, etc.?
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I'm amazed that the guy in the article managed to rack up that much in debt by the age of 23. His choices don't seem to be that wise. I didn't own a home till I was over 30 because we couldn't afford it. And he's choosing to live in an economically depressed area. That's not going to help much.
I probably don't sound too sympathetic. But what "slice of domestic bliss" are they being denied? The article says they own a great house in a nice area. Can they not afford the windchimes? Or the kids? We lived in a shitty townhouse in the Crack Central area of Orlando and worked and worked and worked for seven years to pull ourselves out of crippling debt. I find it odd that they can't rent for a few years, consolidate their loans (Sallie Mae indeed sucks the big one, but consolidation is supposedly a good deal), and then buy a house.
I think the main problem is the American Dream mentality, that says "I deserve all these wonderful things right now!" That article talks about the college kids who expect to make $40K right off the bat.
I'm rambling. I think I need a nap.
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Yes, that particular couple made some pretty bad decisions.
But I'm not a person who enjoys being in debt. I've never, ever bought anything on my credit card I couldn't pay off immediately, and have not bought a house or a car because I don't want to have debt. Being saddled with five-figure debt for a degree I have yet to actually use was pretty bad. And a lot of people like me are being pushed into degrees they have no idea how to use. There's this huge gap between College and The Real World, and the majority of us have no idea how to transition. Most of us haven't any idea what to expect from The Real World; advisors (themselves academics) blithely assure us further schooling is necessary. And then we graduate.
We get a job for minimum wage.
We get our first student loan bill.
We realize that this is going to take a long time.
Pundits wonder why twentysomethings don't get married, why women don't have kids until they're 40, why young people don't invest. I'd never seen this suggested as a cause, but it struck me that it may well be a contributing factor.
I know I'm older than my mother was when she had me, and I'm the second child. I feel like home ownership, marriage, and children are all simply not options for me; my life is OK and i'm not unhappy, but I don't feel like I really have the option to lead a different lifestyle. I don't have the stability my parents did-- I do not have a career, only a job where I am sure to be fired in either a matter of months or perhaps after 8 or 9 years when I get too expensive. I do not have a pension plan, I do not have health insurance, I do not have any of the things I was raised to believe one should have in order to support a family-- nor do I have any prospects of gaining any of those things. The one thing I do have that my parents did not, despite their crushing poverty and my by-contrast affluence, is debt.
It's a cultural shift, and a partly-examined one, but I haven't the tools to investigate it further. I was simply struck by the mention of student loan debt as a contributing factor in twentysomethings' "dissolute" lifestyles, and identified with it.
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And while I'm currently doing well, it took a LONG TIME for me to get there. It took me thirteen years and a lot of work to get where the people in the article expect to be right out of school. I think about the years of living in the 'hood, watching our neighbors sell drugs out of their apartment, or our other neighbor get held up at gunpoint. When our rent was late, or the check bounced, and we had an eviction notice taped to the door and had to scrounge together a money order to pay the rent. What stands out in my mind as the pinnacle memory was going to the grocery store the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to get Thanksgiving dinner, only to find out that the paychecks that had just been deposited only covered all our bills, there was no money for food, and certainly no turkey dinner. That was a low point, and I told Morgan that I wanted to drive us into a tree. We both still remember that night, to remind us of where we've been.
I understand the point you're making, and agree with a lot of it. There's been giant shifts in the workplace too - where our parents and grandparents worked for the same company for 40 years and got a gold watch and a fabulous pension plan, now you're considered an old-timer if you've been somewhere five years. Health insurance and retirement savings aren't guaranteed like they used to be. That's a huge difference too.
I think what I've been trying to say is that it's not as simple as that article makes it seem. That couple has plenty of options. Defer one loan, pay the other off for a few years, then defer it and work on the other one. Student loans are a pain in the ass, but they're pretty easy to work with. I can't even remember how many times I've gotten Morgan's out of default.
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Sorry.
Maybe I'm projecting.
A house in Wheatfield would probably be about $10k. I suppose if you already owe over $300k it's a drop in the bucket... Wonder who co-signed the mortgage, though.
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You don't really mean ten thousand for a house, do you?
And again, I probably sound unsympathetic, but they made those choices. Getting higher degrees was a priority for them, so that's what they did. If starting a family is a priority, you take your college degree, get your entry-level job, and start a family. You know what I mean?
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A reasonable one's more like $30k. I have some friends who got a five-storey Victorian mansion of several thousand square feet in a desirable downtown neighborhood for $110k. It needed some renovation... but not a lot. (It took them under a month to renovate, and that was mostly to remove cat allergens.)
I'm afraid to find out how much the one I'm living in is worth. It's in a great school district, but I still don't think it's worth much.
That's the trade-off of living in an economically depressed area. Our rent is $300/mo. So my income of $300/wk is not so bad.
Except that certain things aren't cheaper depending on location.
Those things are cars and college degrees. The $400/mo. car payment and $300/mo. student loan payment would be the same if I were still in NYC, with my $1500/mo. rent, and Z's $60k/yr. job, as they are here.
There's also a degree of people sheltering their kids to the point that when they're suddenly on their own they don't even know what their choices are. My cohorts and I were astonishingly naieve. I seriously still don't know how one goes about finding this elusive concept of "a career", though I suspect it doesn't exist. We're all raised with nebulous promises of things that don't even exist; can you blame us for being completely astonished when we finally emerge from this chrysalis and find out that the things we have been expecting aren't remotely possible?
I'm not proclaiming victimhood, I'm just expressing my unsurprise at theoretically-intelligent people making entirely uninformed decisions.
Student loans aren't so bad for day-to-day living issues-- if things are dire, you can defer, etc. I've been pretty poor, but have always been able to eat. It's just that no matter how careful you are, how well you budget, how you scrimp, there's just this huge heavy weight of debt looming. I made insane amounts of money bartending, took home more than twice what many of my local peers did, and meanwhile had a sweet deal on rent and took the bus instead of committing to the expenses of a car... but I still couldn't get that debt gone.
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FWIW, our car payments combined don't total $400. I don't think I've ever had a car payment top $250. But I don't drive anything fancy, either.
That's the trade-off of living in an economically depressed area.
That's true, I'd forgotten. My mother in law's house in Jamestown has a mortgage payment of something like $400 a month. And of course, we live in Florida, which Ain't Cheap. We were lucky to get our house for $112K, before the housing market went nuts. Houses in our neighborhood are currently hovering around the $225K mark, and they're nice enough, but not mansion-like.
seriously still don't know how one goes about finding this elusive concept of "a career", though I suspect it doesn't exist. We're all raised with nebulous promises of things that don't even exist; can you blame us for being completely astonished when we finally emerge from this chrysalis and find out that the things we have been expecting aren't remotely possible?
I think this goes back to what I was saying before, about how in The Old Days, Dad and Granddad went to their job with the same company they've been with forever. They got out of college and probably started their "career" at the same place they retired from 40+ years later. And things are definitely different now. I think a career these days is what you make it. I was a dresser and wardrobe master, a makeup artist, and a retail assistant manager. None of those were really careers. I've been doing the legal thing for 5 years now, and I've only really started calling it a career since I got in with this particular firm. I call it a career because I like doing it, I like my boss, and I like the firm. I can see staying here a long time.
Morgan's almost 40 and he's still searching for his career. He started a freelance gig at Universal Studios and said the other night that apparently this is his career, even though it's not what he planned on. But he's a really talented scenic carpenter and is very very good at what he does, and the people who matter in the industry know that and want to hire him for their stuff. It's not a "work for 40 years and get a gold watch" career, but it's what he does.
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It's a goddamn subcompact and this winter is getting 35 miles to the gallon. A Corolla could do that and would have cost ten thousand dollars less, AND be cheaper to fix...
OK, *I've* never been careless with money, anyway. And his car being so expensive is pretty much why I never got my own. It seemed out of reach. I'd probably buy a $5k semi-beater straight out with no payments, but, there'd be insurance, etc.
But yes. We make less up here, but we can live on a lot less. The real estate market never had a boom up here. In fact it's so depressed that developers from as far away as NYC buy houses here because even if they can't turn a profit, the initial investment is just so ridiculously low.
Yes-- a "career" nowadays consists of a bunch of decent gigs you wind up being good at, with the positive buzz from your last one meaning you can land a good next one. If you can ride it out for a decade at one place, that's exceptional stability.
But it means nobody's looking out for you, and I hope the twentysomethings that are sort of bewilderedly making their poorly-informed ways figure out before they hit their sixties that they can't just do what their parents did here either-- they've got to be thinking about their own retirements. Or there's going to be some pretty sad people in another thirty or forty years, when they realize that this stage of their career is the "work as a Wal-Mart greeter" stage, because they haven't the acuity to work in their field anymore but haven't the savings to retire either.
I dunno what I'll do. Hopefully I'll have sold a book or two by then. Precedent suggests I'll be too frail to work after 70, but I'll probably live to my mid-90s.
Unless the fact that I've had less access to medical care in my lifetime than either of my grandmothers shortens my life. :D
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I believe I was 13 when I helped Dad put in the hardwood floor that has replaced the cracked linoleum I spent my childhood on.
Does that make younger folks more conformist, or less, that they're waiting until they Have Things before they reproduce?
The other factor is, of course, all my married friends shrugging when I ask if marriage is worth it. "It's a good party," they say. Then they think about it. "But yeah, it's ten grand you could've spent on something else."
Marriage doesn't really mean much nowadays. It just doesn't. People get married to get divorced. I'd get married for the legal aspects that make it easier to have kids, except that getting married is so expensive now that I'd feel I couldn't afford kids if I did. Ha.
Eh, I'm obviously just having a gloomy stressy holiday season. :p
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