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.?
no subject
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.
no subject
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?
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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