Americans owe $1.3 trillion for higher education. Photo: Richard Baker/In Pictures via Getty Images Not long ago, my fiancé and I had a depressing conversation. What would we do if we didn’t have nearly $60,000 in student-loan debt, combined? Buy an apartment, even a house, have a kid? All at once, the possibilities seemed endless. With our payments on pause for now, thanks to two executive actions, we allowed ourselves a little space to dream.
The pain we feel when we imagine a debt-free life isn’t ours alone. We share it with hundreds of thousands of others who owe a total $1.2 trillion in student debt, and so I thought I’d pose the public question: What has student debt prevented them from doing? Below, a few of their responses. I have a relatively comfortable life, but it’s balanced on a knife edge and the constant fear of falling off has a mental-health toll as well. That is something that can’t easily be quantified.
Rich people don’t have student-loan debt. I remember one time in a student-council meeting in college, I asked, who in here has student loans? And it was me and two other people out of a 30-person room that raised their hand. So there are a lot of people that are able to afford to go to college without taking out loans. Forgiveness just wouldn’t affect them. We’re not talking about them.
What happened was we were just able to live off one income and I was emotionally trapped, and physically, too. Because that was the argument, too, against going to therapy, “We can’t afford it because you have to pay off your debt.” I have a lot of trauma around housing stability and in the last couple years, I have been denied four apartments explicitly and implicitly due to my blindness. I’m apartment hunting again and the fear of that happening again is intense.
onesarahjones I rented a swanky apartment in a gentrified area. Downed expensive cosmopolitans in fashionable bars. Gorged fully-loaded Irish breakfasts for the insufferable hangover. Uber-ed at will. Then one day, my car broke down on the motorway. PersonalFinance
onesarahjones I will be 66 when my student loans and thousands of high-interest dollars are fully paid. My higher education is funding something other than my life. AdvancePublicServiceLoanForgiveness ZeroPercentLoans CancelStudentLoanDebt
onesarahjones My mortgage interest rate is 3.25. My student loan interest rates are 5.16, 5.96, and 6.55. What are we funding with Student Loan interest? ZeroPercentStudentLoans or better yet CancelStudentDebt CancelStudentLoanDebt
onesarahjones I’m 74 and still have $50K.