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> if you haven’t matured or gained financial experience by that age, you could easily screw yourself for the next 40 years or so just by being naive. I agree.

> if you haven’t matured or gained financial experience by that age, you could easily screw yourself for the next 40 years or so just by being naive. I agree. Fun fact: you can say the same about the prison system, but people's reactions to that same comment will be vastly different due to demographics. But there's no hint of a solution in this article. Should we raise the age to be an adult? Regulate private university marketing? Improve marketing of public universities? Allowing people to abdicate responsibility is a non-starter.

joejerryronnie 8y ago
Well, I think abdicating responsibility is the solution proposed in this article. The staggering amount of horrific decisions made by the author (e.g. choosing expensive private school, willfully ignoring the word 'variable', choosing super-cool foreign graduate school, choosing to just not pay her debts for a year, choosing to live and work in ultra-expensive NYC, upgrading her apartment the minute she got a raise, etc) make it a bit challenging to sympathize with her situation. While there are clearly issues with student loan practices and the cost of higher education, predatory lendors did not conspire to force all of these truely terrible decisions onto this poor woman. If she put the same amount of effort into a budget/financial plan as she did into this creative blog post, she'd already be on her way to a student debt-free existence. I'd much rather have read a post describing all of the terrible financial decisions the author has made over the last decade and how they've put together a painful, realistic plan to get their financial life back on track. Perhaps with some lessons learned for people facing some of the same decisions. Instead, the author justs rails against the unfairness of it all without actually taking any responsibility for figuring out a solution.

joejerryronnie 8y ago

Well, I think abdicating responsibility is the solution proposed in this article. The staggering amount of horrific decisions made by the author (e.g. choosing expensive private school, willfully ignoring the word 'variable', choosing super-cool foreign graduate school, choosing to just not pay her debts for a year, choosing to live and work in ultra-expensive NYC, upgrading her apartment the minute she got a raise, etc) make it a bit challenging to sympathize with her situation. While there are clearly issues with student loan practices and the cost of higher education, predatory lendors did not conspire to force all of these truely terrible decisions onto this poor woman. If she put the same amount of effort into a budget/financial plan as she did into this creative blog post, she'd already be on her way to a student debt-free existence. I'd much rather have read a post describing all of the terrible financial decisions the author has made over the last decade and how they've put together a painful, realistic plan to get their financial life back on track. Perhaps with some lessons learned for people facing some of the same decisions. Instead, the author justs rails against the unfairness of it all without actually taking any responsibility for figuring out a solution.