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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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What year did you graduate?
How much was your debt?
What were those ‘shit wages’?
What were your other expenses? How much of those ‘shit wages’ were you able to put towards the loan vs. your cost of living?
What year did you pay it off?
I’m quite curious.
I graduated in 2011 from a state school in Minnesota. $90k in student loans. Private, parent plus, the works...first job out of school I averaged $50k on an hourly job, and only got up to about $65k by 2017. Got married with that debt, my wife had none. We both worked, my job and hers gave us combined income ~$75k. One bed apartment rent was $950 back then, we owned 2 cars, both beaters, no debt. Paid it all off in late 2019. No debt since then except a mortgage.
$50K is not shit wages. Minimum wage is, for example, $13.25 in MD. That is shit wages. And lucky you to find such a cheap apartment, and be able to share it. Nowadays, using MD again for consistency, you’ll be paying $1450-$1600 a month for a studio, if you’re lucky. And what if you don’t have someone to share that with?
And don’t get me started on the mercurial rise of food products. The luck you have to roll to have a beater not die on you with no way to revive it (mine just did; I can revive it, to the tune of $4,000).
You didn’t have it trust-fund-easy, but you still didn’t have it all that bad.
Well, thats perspective. Thanks! Beaters did die, more than once...wasnt a cake walk.
The context here started with college debt. I stuggle with the idea that a college graduate only find a minimum wage job. Or if they do, that that will be their wage the entire time they're paying off debt. Am I being naïve?
I don't know, I think it depends on a million different factors. I'm around your age and struggled badly financially out of college. I spent more than a year completely unemployed and when I finally got a seasonal retail job, it was a big fucking deal. Took about 6 years busting my ass climbing the ladder in that department store moving cross-country (costing several thousand dollars) before I started making $50k. In the meantime, my $40k principle had grown 25% during the unemployment deferment and my interest started to snowball because despite years and thousands of dollars in payments, my monthly payment didn't even cover the interest.
So yeah, while I no longer make a low wage, it was really fucking difficult to claw out of that hole (office jobs treat you with a ridiculous level of skepticism if you've been working full-time in retail.) It took the better part of a decade and meeting a partner whose second income helped defray the cost of living before I was actually able to see my amount owed go down. I honestly feel very lucky that things shook out the way they have because I can easily imagine it ending differently and certainly there are many for those it has.
With the way things are now, a bit. The world has gotten heavily fucked over in one way or another