Why I’m No Longer Trying To Pay Off My Student Loans
The numbers aren’t even real anymore!
Thinking about my student loans used to induce crippling bouts of up-all-night, hyper-respirating panic and questioning of my life choices.
I had done what a lot of my generation did: borrowed a a reasonable amount of money for college, graduated in a huge recession, and took out a less reasonable amount for graduate school (okay, then I did it again for graduate school, round two). After all, most Millennials were told that education — and not just any education, but the best education money can buy — was necessary to get ahead in life.
My greatest source of eventual disillusionment was the idea that the equation would just sort of balance itself in the end. That it was a simple input-output thing: The more you invest in education, the greater the financial return on your investment. I don’t think anyone anticipated just how much money lending corporations would skin off our financial backs in the process, or that wages would remain so stagnant.
Now there’s a whole generation of people for whom paying off debt isn’t even a tangible reality — despite their most sincere efforts to take a chunk out the number behind the negative sign on their “net worth” label.