I once had a co-worker who said “I can’t afford not to play the lottery.”
Anyway, a lot of my debt is student loans (a little over 100k), but I consolidated them a while ago when 7 or 8% seemed like a pretty good deal and I’ve heard you only get one shot to consolidate. So now I have to pay 800 a month until I’m 50 something, so that’s annoying. The other 9k is my own stupid credit card debt, so that’s what I aim to tackle first and just let the student loan be that gorilla monthly payment.
I understand that human psychology is powerful stuff, but it seems to me that the job of a debt guru should be to help you become comfortable with the best repayment strategy, not to tell you to waste money because it feels good to do so.
You don’t have to itemize to get the student loan interest deduction, which is good since it will probably be some years before most fresh college grads need to itemize.
“Nominal” salary? I’m trying to avoid more debt :). I’m taking the bar exam in CA, too. I wouldn’t be able to make rent in NYC. Mmm, parents’ house… Mmm, living like a student for another ten years… Teach for America is looking pretty good right now, as it’ll make getting a permanent teachers’ job smoother sailing and knock out two years of my 10 for public interest loan forgiveness. Shame I didn’t go that way BEFORE grad school, but it’s cuz I went to college for free.
Pssh. There is no stopping reasonless optimism. Anyone who still goes to law school after the hefty number of blogs and news stories that have been released about jobless grads and closed-up firms deserves what he gets. First-year students are equally willfully blind; they’re positive there’s a $160K job waiting for them at the end of the rainbow, no matter what.
That’s what I have long believed, but empirically, that simply does not work for people. People honestly need gimmickry, by all observation. So rather than grump that nobody listens to the best advice, I figure that as long as they’re listening to non-terrible advice, hey, what the hell.
I think the job of a debt guru is to give the you best chance of getting out of debt. If the best chance isn’t he most dollar-optimal path, well better a little inefficiency than failure.
I’m pretty sure that just teaching school doesn’t get you the forgiveness. Doesn’t it have to be teaching in certain types of communities? Do ALL public education teachers get their student loans forgiven? If so, why wouldn’t every education major just load up on them, defer them a bit, and then get them forgiven?
Teaching does, as of the 2007 version of the act. Here’s the full list of employers:
. Type of Public Service Organization (check one):
(a) 0 A Federal, State, local or Tribal government organization, agency or entity;
(b) 0 A public child or family service agency;
(c) 0 A non-profit organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code that is exempt from taxation under Section 501(a) of the Internal Revenue Code;
(d) 0 A Tribal college or university; or
(e) 0 A private organization that provides at least one of the following public services and that is not a business organized for profit, a labor union, a partisan political organization, or an organization engaged in religious activities unless the qualifying activities are unrelated to religious instruction, worship services, or any form of proselytizing (check all that apply):
0 Emergency management,
0 Military service,
0 Public safety,
0 Law enforcement,
0 Public interest law services,
0 Early childhood education (including licensed or regulated child care, Head Start, and State funded pre-kindergarten),
0 Public service for individuals with disabilities and the elderly,
0 Public health (including nurses, nurse practitioners, nurses in a clinical setting, and full-time professionals engaged in health care practitioner occupations and health support occupations, as such terms are defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics),
0 Public education,
0 Public library services,
0 School library services, or
0 Other school-based services.
Moggraider, your plan to teach high school, rather than working in a public interest legal position, seems like a waste of talent that is desperately needed in public interest.
While you won’t be able to get a job at the sexy public interest stuff (e.g., ACLU or U.S. Attorney), there is no shortage of public interest jobs that should pay at least as well a high school teaching salary. These will not turn away a candidate from a good school who did moderately well despite not taking any course work in that area (I’m really not even sure what course work you’re referring to).
In addition, many schools have loan forgiveness programs that are less painful than the one you’re thinking, if you work in public interest law.
Also, $250K?! I know you said dual degree (MBA?), but how the hell did you manage that much? Has tuition gone up that much in the past few years?
My wife with a masters in mathematics has been trying to find a permanent high school teaching position for 2 years without much luck. Please tell me how you plan to walk into a teaching position. I suspect our area is especially terrible for teaching jobs, Michigan, but I wasn’t aware that it was that easy elsewhere.
Seriously, if you know of a good area to get such a job or method to land such a job, please share the information.
And as far as escaping debt goes, I had a friend years ago who went to a debt counselor after racking up a lot of debt. She talked with the credit repair person, saw what they were doing, and decided she could do that herself. She called her creditors and arranged a payment schedule on a reduced debt amount without paying a third person a lot of money. Obviously, ymmv.
Stepsongrapes: that may be true about public interest law positions, but I figure those have longer hours than non-legal stuff, so why bother? I don’t know; I’ve never heard good things about positions like public defenders or anything, and I did get a summer offer to be a PD before.
Jafisob: I guess it depends on your area; I’ve got some feelers out and it seems I’d be welcome.
The JD alone would’ve been $100K cuz of scholarships. Then I switched to JD/MBA. Instead of six semesters in law school, they switched me to five semesters, plus three semesters in b-school. Then they saw fit to cut my law school aid by $16K on the technicality. Fuckers. If I ever make any money ever (unlikely), I’m never donating to my grad school; just my college, which I went to for free.
The worst thing is being in my last semester of four years of professional school, taking nothing but classes on VC, PE, IPOs, M&A, and other rich people stuff, and realizing I’ll never get to work in this subject area.
Did you know ahead of time that the MBA would cost you $150K (or even $134K considering the scholarship surprise)?
Well, essentially, yeah. My law school financial aid person was really unhelpful, unresponsive, and uninformative, so it was also a bit of myself being a fool and rushing in. For example, she never told me about how taking out a private loan one semester would disadvantage me, compared to a federal loan.
Anyway, it’s still cheaper than an MBA on its own. But my law school dean encouraged me a lot, too, because I’m a minority and I’m the only JD/MBA graduating this year. Lot of good that did me. At this point I might as well get an LLM in taxation and try to get a job with the IRS or something; if it’s all federal loans, I’ve still got the 10-year escape.
Have you looked at the details of the loan forgiveness program carefully? It sounds painful as hell (e.g., having to pay 10 full years first).
Also, are you sure all of your $250K are qualifying federal loans? I didn’t think you could qualify for 60K+ a year in federal loans.
Honestly, it sounds like you haven’t done a huge amount of homework either on the public interest law side or the high school teaching side.
No, not all of it is federal. I have $6K in private loans from a summer externship, $7K from a private loan one semester, and $15K from a bar study loan to float me while I look for a job. The rest is federal.
No, I haven’t done a huge amount of homework, but that’s because I’m trying to keep my grades up right now; I can worry more about alternatives later.
Still, though, I have a JD friend with a 3.7 who has no job, and just got turned down for JAG even. Law school seems hopeless, at least for people who graduated this year…
In any case, 10 years seems perfectly preferable to 25 years if I work in most any private sector job.
I don’t think people realize how hopeless it is. Those non-ACLU/U.S. Attorney options out there that pay a half-way reasonable teacher’s salary? Those don’t exist either. Or perhaps better stated, a small handful of them exist, and the guys in the middle of their class at Harvard who suddenly cannot get jobs at law firms are now applying alongside you for those low paying public interest jobs.
It’s really, really freaking desperate right now for new law grads. The only hope is some signs that the hiring has trended up at least a little bit in the last six months or so. But even that may be akin to saying that new grads are drowning, and now they have one nostril bobbing in and out of the water.
Frankly, I completely understand why IBR is so attractive right now.
Mortages are certainly not to be regarded a dept. It’s more of a future investment.
Hahahaha, that’s a great plan. Fortunately the rates and interest don’t add up.
It was really bad for the class before Mogg’s, and his doesn’t have it all that great either.
However, summer classes this year are going to be fair-sized (roughly 2006-ish) levels, at least at the Vault top 25 level. Many firms made very, very good profits last year. I don’t know how well the mid-level or smaller firms are doing, though.
Sadly for Mogg, his class is in a “lost generation” of law students, along with the 2-3 classes right before him.
This is how I got myself out of all debt besides student loans. At one point, I had nearly 6K in credit card debt. I was able to pay the smaller amounts down first, and then transferred that payment to the next highest one. I have tried to explain to my husband, who carried debt from his mom’s cancer treatment on 2 cards, that he needs to pay off the smaller one first, and then the larger. He pays more on all of them, but this reduces his income, and drags out the process. Psychologically, it’s important to see one cost be eliminated.