The stress resulting from financial woes can impact your overall health, so here’s a lesson in financial wellness from The Simple Dollar blog:
Here’s what you shouldn’t do. When I was in college, I used my student loans to finance my lifestyle. I worked at a decent paying job ($9 an hour at a job related to my major was great), but that wasn’t enough – I needed more. So I took out student loans, even though scholarships covered most of my tuition and housing expenses for college. Even worse, I didn’t really understand the value of the college education I was getting – I basically completed a major, decided it wasn’t for me, completed a completely different major, and took enough classes for some minors along the way. After I finally graduated after six years, I had accumulated about $35,000 in student loan debt. Including interest, I’ve paid about $32,000 in loan payments so far and I’ve still got about $16,000 left to go.
What did I learn from this disaster that college students can use today? There are a lot of students out there entering college and taking out student loans to pay for it. The money they’re spending, in the form of loans, far exceeds the money they’re taking in. I know all about it – I was doing this very thing just a handful of years ago. I made some incredibly stupid mistakes along the way, and it takes a lot of hindsight to see the things I could-have-should-have done.
If I had it to do all over again – if I were a college student today with a big pile of student loans building up and not much income – here’s exactly what I would do. read full article