[internisus]

I think I've probably made this thread before, but I need to do it again. I'm pretty lousy with money in the long-term sense of planning out how to manage expenses and debts. I don't even seem capable of researching and understanding my relevant options. Currently, I do not have a place of my own, so my monthly expenses include only my cell phone bill, a $100 payment to a debt collector for a years-old insurance-disputed medical bill, and my student loan payments. Plus whatever groceries, etc. I have never had a credit card.

I "paid" for college entirely by myself, and I have something like $25k federal and $80k private loan debt. I had a problem with my private debtor being totally unreasonable, asked to whom I should send a letter, and sent that letter twice with no reply. A phone rep told me that my letter was received and my case being considered. Soon after, I was contacted by a debt collector. So the entirety of my private student debt is with a collector now. My credit fucking sucks, and my dad, as cosigner, took a hit that's been hurting him with regard to his mortgaging capabilities and such. It's quite a bad situation.

Anyway, the bills I have for student loans together come to like $1050 per month. This is the chief reason why I have failed so far, at nearly 25 years old, to not live with my parents. These loans are unconsolidated. I don't even know if I can consolidate the private stuff that's with the debt collector now, but in any case all I've found when I've gone looking to consolidate are interest rates and payment plans that fail to reduce my monthly payments.

So I'd to get some perspective. A lot of you do or have gone to school, and, if you don't mind sharing, I'd like to know how much of the burden you are or have been personally responsible for and how you have handled that. If anyone knows a lot about how to manage this stuff or has any other advice for me, I'd sure appreciate it. I'm trying to get myself out of a 2.5 year-long rut, and I've never really known what I'm doing in this area.

If it's of interest, I'm working (primarily) as a freelance proofreader. This month happens to be a very good month for me, and I'm bringing in $2400. The workflow is extremely unreliable, and this is around triple what I can expect most months as guaranteed. I'm working hard to find more work of this kind; it's a very good match for me, and I'll be great once I have enough work. I'd like to be making more than $3000 per month as a minimum, and I don't think that's unrealistic. Once I find the work to make that much, I won't really be that uncomfortable with my student loan situation anymore, but I'd still like to know how I can better manage it.

I don't mean for this thread to be only about me. I know not everyone is comfortable talking about these things, but, for those who are, I'm curious to hear about other people's financial situations and how they handle them, even if it doesn't help me in any way.

[CubaLibre]

Law school is putting me $150k in the hole. It's all me; my parents are too rich for me to qualify for need-based aid, even though I'm completely on my own and they don't pay for anything (except my cell phone I guess, family plan).

The good news is that it's easy to graduate from law school and make enough money to pay off your loans quickly. The bad news is that the jobs that allow you to do so are soul-sucking corporate firm law factory jobs. But, even "poor" lawyers make something like $70k or $80k a year. The loans are still manageable with that income and frankly it makes me sick how many of my peers consider such salaries "unacceptable." It's just meaningless to me.

So... all I've got to say is I will have a huge amount of debt but also probably will be able to pay it. Sorry I couldn't be more help?
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[internisus]

It's cool, man. I actually take a selfish comfort in hearing of someone else whose folks make so much money that financial aid is out of the question but who won't contribute a dime to education costs.

What kind of law are you going into and what do you plan to do with it down the road?

[DecentBee]

So glad I live in a country with free university education.

[RobotRocker]

[DecentBee]

Yeah, but at least I'm not 100k in the red.

[Gironika]

you know what's excellent?
having to pay a fee of 400 bucks to be able to study and being told that nobody has any clue what to do with the money the universities get twice a year.

that said, it'll be about 7000-10000 bucks i'll have to pay when I'm done. But still, the chance to get a job and be able to pay back your debts is better than giving in before even having tried.
_________________

[CubaLibre]

[Adilegian]

[internisus]

A judge! Are you going to be a district attorney along the way, do you think? That always looks exciting. I think it's cool that you plan to both prosecute and defend, and that makes sense for a judge's credentials. That's the limit of my ability to say anything about legal professions though. Anyway, it sounds like you'll have an interesting and important life.

[Broco]

Ah, so you're a law student CubaLibre. That partly explains why me and you always end up in arcane arguments!

I've idly considered going to law school myself, but ultimately based on what I'm hearing from practicing lawyers, I feel the work is unlikely to be more interesting than software (unless I were to land an appeals court clerkship or something), and it's definitely a step backwards in terms of quality of life. Well, I wish you good luck avoiding all the "trap" jobs I've heard you can end up into (corporate associate slave, dead-end small practice, eternal document review temping).

[CubaLibre]

[SplashBeats]

perspective for our non-american readers:

i'm in my third year at my university and my debt is somewhere around $20k. not great, but managable. internisus' plight is what happens when you go to a $30k a year private university, instead of a $8k a year public university.

[DecentBee]

[Felix]

[Martial Loh]

Damn, I thought my debt of what is approximately $25K was bad. The tax system in the UK sort of makes you pay back the loan bit by bit every month...

Im not too sure how much I'm paying at the moment, but its likely that I'll be paying it back till I'm in my late 40s, if I don't make any voluntary lump sum "contributions"...

I also fail at not living at home (same age as you Internisus), though I suppose a big part of that lies with my hatred of renting properties, when I could be saving towards buying a place (which won't happen anytime soon, thanks to the stupid house prices here)

ps, i hear proof reading legal documents pays well...?

[Broco]

Felix, what's optimistic/frivolous about it? I never said there would be a magic trick hidden in those books that would make the debt go away. But he needs knowledge of the laws that control his relationship with financial institutions, things that can be negociated with them, anecdotes of other people's experience, and perhaps also potential overall strategies, to make good decisions to make the best of his situation. That's exactly the kind of information he was asking for in his top post, and I'll wager those books have it.

As for your "Marxist attitude", I take it you mean that the web is enough for you. Well okay, but the information available on the web at this time is generally superficial and disconnected. If you want in-depth information that is coherently organized, at this stage in the development of the Internet you need books. I'm not sure how you could claim otherwise on most topics. There are so many times that I read websites for hours on a topic, but my thinking was still confused and incomplete, and then reading a book made the subject fall into place. Books are a cheap and high-quality source of knowledge.

As for where books were useful in solving practical problems, well most of these don't necessarily fall under the category of "major life problems" but still:
- I taught myself C++ and Japanese from books. Neither web resources nor university classes were very useful in comparison.
- I decided on whether I would pursue graduate studies and perhaps a professorship after reading this book on choosing and succeeding in grad school. (I didn't.)
- I alleviated my back pain through books on ergonomics, stretching, posture, etc.
- I saved a few hundred dollars on my first taxes with a tax-for-beginners book.
- In a month I will hopefully go through the American border on my first try after recently read a book on the procedure for obtaining work visas. (My last attempt a year ago resulted in rejection -- this really sucks -- owing to my misunderstanding of the bureaucratic rules. Now I feel I know what makes them tick.)

[taidan]

Oh man, I just had a loan horror story. I had a loan with Sallie Mae, cosigned with my grandparent and whatnot. Had it for one of my first years of college. Stopped getting any mail about it, to the point where I forgot about it. My folks have some loans with Sallie Mae as well to help me get through school, and I figured all that old mail must have been for them.

Nope. I got a letter in December saying I was late on my first payment. Neither my cosigner or myself got any correspondance via email or the post office. I got it sorted out in the end, but its scary to face possible (and major) damage to your credit rating. Even if I remembered the damn thing I wouldn't know my account #, what address to send payments to, or even how much they would be.

Thankfully the gov't is very good at giving you ways to pay them back.

Anyway, after settling down after school, I have something of a budget figured out. After a while you quickly learn how much your monhtly bills are. The trick for me was figuring out how much I could feasibly spend on frivoulous things (games, bar, etc.). For a while I was good with avoiding these things, and that turned out to be beneficial when I lost my job and had no income for three months.

Many find it all too tempting when you have a full time job to go wild with the newfound income, but the spendthrift in me couldn't (and can't) do that until I've something of a financial buffer for when things go bad.

Oh yeah, and loans never seem too bad alone, but when each monthly payment is put together it can be quite a sum.

[GalaxyHead]

If being self-taught could get you by in this country I would have never joined a university.
_________________
“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” - Harry Schoell, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc, in response to erroneous reports about a robot under development.

[Chuplayer]

[Broco]

[Rud31]

Genki is an excellent series for learning Japanese. It starts you into Kanji almost immediately. Everything keeps cross referencing each other, so by the end of the 2nd book you have a very good groundwork in REAL Japanese that you can start moving on to children/teenager pop culture media.
_________________
My Hawt Blog Vita Games

THERE ARE DEFINITELY WORSE VIDEO GAME PODCASTS

[CubaLibre]

I wouldn't really recommend college to anybody, except maybe engineers. Unless you find a school with an alternative curriculum that actually teaches you things (like mine), you're basically going for the piece of paper at the end. Whether that piece of paper is worth it to you is a decision you should make apart from cultural norms.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[Ebrey]

[BotageL]

[dark steve]

when are all the not that industrious, not-geniuses above the poverty line going to get a god damn free lunch in this country already

[Toto]

dark steve i can't tell whether you're agreeing with ebrey or not. perhaps that is the point.

[Adilegian]

[BotageL]

[internisus]

It's not as clear-cut as that sarcastic political line. Financial need is determined very simply, based upon your family's income. They don't factor in your family's debts or cost of living. The reason why my dad didn't make the expected "family contribution" is because, although he makes like $90k/yr, the cost of living in New Jersey is extremely high and he has lots of debt that eats into his income. Plus my family had a lot of medical expenses during that period. So FAFSA and my school determined that I was ineligible for financial aid because my father has a sizable income, but I didn't have anything going into school with which to pay. While I was coming from a place where I had a roof over my head provided for me and obviously didn't live below the poverty line, those facts had no relation to my actual financial need in attending college.

[SplashBeats]

you still chose to attend a pricey private university, and your debt would've been fairly manageable if you'd gone to a public school and kept your loans to state-owned lenders.

[Adilegian]

[Broco]

[Felix]

[gambrinus]

[internisus]

I'm forced to acknowledge that my selection of college (ignoring outright cheap public institutions) was based on the same thought-process as that which led me to college in the first place: the cultural and familial expectation that I should go to college and go to "the right college for me." If I had had the perspective then that I do now, I might not have gone to college at all. Due to the subsequent debt and the uselessness of my degree in getting jobs, I often feel regret that I did, but at the same time I value much of my time and education there. I was able to attend many small, highly participatory classes that made an important impression upon me.

This is largely my way of eschewing responsibility for the choices that led to my burden of debt, from one perspective, but it really is the truth. In any case, the road not taken doesn't really matter when it comes to planning a logistical future.

[CubaLibre]

[Adilegian]

[gambrinus]

[Broco]

CubaLibre: of course I have your attitude towards self-education as well, but I've heard over and over again many/most people telling me that they find it impossible to learn from books only and require a teacher.

To me this is difficult to understand, since teachers at the undergraduate level or below tend to simply parrot the content of the textbook in a somewhat unclear and disorganized manner. When I ask why, I usually get the answer that they get to interactively ask questions that way. But this sounds like an excuse since there is precious little interaction at least in most the classes I've ever been in. I suspect the true reason is that most people require much more mental effort to parse written sentences than you or I do, owing to either insufficient reading practice in childhood or dyslexia.

Try measuring your reading speed sometime; I have measured that mine is about 600wpm most of the time, and I suspect yours is comparable. The median is 200wpm. I have an idea of how it is for someone of average speed, because my Japanese reading speed is maybe 100-150wpm at best, and that can make reading a frustrating slog even when I don't need to look up any word in the dictionary. Anyway, for that reason, your reasoning only applies to a limited subset of the population.


Adilegian: yes, there's a lot to be said for a university that avoids the usual situation of the profs feeling their job is research and undergraduate courses are an irritating chore, like washing the dishes. Are there really no public universities that take this tack though?

[niitaka]

internsius, how did you get started as a freelance proofreader? do you like the type of work / amount of work you have to do?