So it happened: the dreaded day when my student loans all entered repayment. I was slammed with a $544 bill from one of my lenders - a third of my take-home monthly salary. Last weekend I applied for a consolidation loan from the U.S. Department of Ed., but have yet to receive that loan. I [...]
The Broke Yuppie
trudging slowly toward solvency.
Tag Archives: Indebtedness
Dealing with student debt: Consolidation
The student-loan bills keep rolling in. Week after week, month after month, loan after loan - they seem endless.
I accumulated nine separate student loans during my academic career, and many of them are on different billing schedules with different monthly payments and different interest rates. I owe money on at least one of them almost [...]
Dealing with student debt: Student loans, defined
Let’s start with the basics: Which loans are available to graduate students, and how much you should expect to pay for them once you’ve finished school.
I’m not going to spend any time telling you how to get the loans. The Internet is overflowing with information on how to saddle yourself with student debt, so if [...]
Introducing: Uncomfortable calculations
Three days into the AC Experiment, I’m sitting in a cozy, well-ventilated room enjoying the fresh evening air flowing through my open windows. My cat seems comfy, too, sprawled along the windowsill, staring at the people mulling in the parking lot of the laundromat across the street. It’s a pleasant night - perfect for open [...]
Why October scares me. (It has nothing to do with Halloween.)
The main source of my financial woes is the more than $55,000 of student-loan debt, the majority of it from grad school, that I must pay off bit by bit each month.
I finished grad school in December, and since then the loan companies have started demanding that I repay them. First the smallish private loans [...]
My emergency fund
Starting an Emergency Fund, personal finance bloggers say, is one of the essential parts of taking control of one’s finances and crawl one’s way out of debt. Here’s what it entails:
Definition of an Emergency Fund: Some amount of money - $1,000, $5,000, maybe more - that is set aside to pay for true emergencies if/when [...]
Intro to my finances
Buy it now, pay for it later.
That’s why I am where I am today - more than $60,000 in debt and trying to figure out how not to be. Thank you, consumerism.
I would also like to thank me-from-three-years-ago for falling victim to consumerism. I like shopping. Shopping is expensive. My salary was (and is) low. [...]