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_areaman posted:That is so pathetic. What is your field? My friends are always trying to get me to buy this, upgrade that, because "they would if they made my salary". Sorry, but I have retirement fund, mortgage payment, general savings, and the constant flow of expenses that never ends. I have a corolla with only 80k miles but had to drop $950 in it yesterday for a clipped mirror and steering wheel issue. Many people assume that they can get by with an empty bank account, and then get in credit card debt when something expensive happens. Grad school is often a huge clusterfuck of financial irresponsibility (says the lady with the humanities doctorate and a giant pile of student loans). Some reasons: 1) Often people coming to grad school are from middle-class and above, and are used to a particular level of luxury that they do not want to deny themselves while in school...or they don't even really think about denying themselves. Everyone needs cable, right? A laptop is a necessity, yes? 2) People spend with the justification that they need it for their program (oh, my precious, precious 3,000 lbs of books that I could have used through interlibrary loan but just had to have), or even for their mental image of what a ______ student should be. 3) Stipends are often low, particularly in non-sciences, and many of the best schools are in places where the cost of living is really, really high. 4) It's often close to impossible to make any significant money at an additional, non-school-related job and go to school full-time. 5) For whatever reason, there's definitely a lot of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses. Especially in humanities and liberal arts programs that have traditionally attracted people with family money. That's not so much the case any more, but when you get one or two people in your social group who live large, everyone else feels sorry for themselves if they can't make it. I had people in my cohort who played polo (like, with horses). 6) Lots of students still get help from their parents and haven't really learned to budget "on their own" because they know they have a parental safety net. 7) Loans are easy to get, and until recently could be deferred until after school was over - years in the future for a doctoral program and easy to ignore. 8) You add it all up and at some point it starts to seem like you're not even spending real money anymore, and if everything is crazy and too expensive it just becomes the norm and you say "gently caress it" and buy deodorant at Whole Foods. Then you get out of school, kick yourself for being an idiot, and start figuring out how to pay it back. Thank God I landed a decent job and can save for retirement AND pay loans instead of having to choose. And it's at a nonprofit, so I may qualify for forgiveness in another six or seven years, which would be fab. The sad things is that I'm very very lucky. Programs need to be so much more upfront about employment prospects and salaries, and really should make financial counseling mandatory, because so many students (me included, once) are so willfully "la la I love my field and will make money doing it with my graduate degree!" Students need to do more research about the realities of their prospects before they sign on, and schools need to stop encouraging prospective students to think that money is something you don't need to worry about. I never did meet anyone dumb enough to buy a house in a city they were knowingly going to leave in under five years, though. At least, not in my grad program. An ex-boyfriend did when he was in school for a two-year program that he left after the first year. One of many questionable decisions that should have sent me running the other way.
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Jul 7, 2013 03:33
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:10 |
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Oh, the tragedy of Zaurg. You know, his debt level wasn't even that awful - hardly ideal, but could be paid off in a reasonable amount of time given their income. What was horrifying was the inertia, the additional debt he was always considering taking on, and the fact that the debt they had accumulated was on such mundane bullshit. MLM juice and the hangers and candles, splurges on mall clothes, sports tickets, attending other peoples' weddings at some chain hotel, going to Sea World. Just the most boring crap instead of either stuff you really needed or stuff you could look back on and say "yeah, that vacation in Peru was so amazing that the debt was worth it."And I think the wife spent 50k on a degree from some for-profit online school. And they were both content to let the perfectly decent condo sink into neglect because it wasn't a new house, so gently caress it...we'll let it get so bad that we practically HAVE to move. And then we expect that we can be landlords for some poor sap who'll pay us 1k/month to live with our moldy bathroom.
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Jul 10, 2013 23:25
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