I’ve got a bit of a confession to make.
It’s something I don’t tell a lot of people about (in fact, I’m pretty sure my parents have never heard this).
You see, I haven’t always made the best choices in the world. Sometimes though, it’s helpful to look back so that you can learn from your mistakes, and to see how far you’ve come.
That’s what I’m going to do today.
Most of my debt is in the form of student loans. I don’t think student loans in themselves are a bad thing. They’re just another other tool. If used appropriately, they can really help you. If not, they can hurt you equally as bad.
I only have two private student loans: both were originally for $25,000. One was taken out in 2006, the other in 2007. I wasn’t completely dumb at the time; I knew they had to be paid back. 18-year-old me just didn’t know how hard that would be. I didn’t count on things falling through like they did.
Related post: The Financial Reality of Being a Broke Biologist
Today, my student loan balance has grown from the initial $50,000 to $56,541.79 due to interest charges. I’ll be paying interest on it for quite a while before I even bring the total back down to the original $50,000.
This brings me to my confession. Obviously, I paid for school, but I used it for living expenses as well. In my 19-year-old brain, I thought this meant I could use it for anything I wanted, because obviously I was alive. Duh.
I also know that I’m not the only one. According to a survey by LendEDU, nearly 31% of college students expect to spend some of their student loan money on spring break. Come on, guys, learn from my mistakes!
Contents
The Worst Student Loan Purchases I Made
Three months of “free” living
I was the worst college student right out of the gate. I had to repeat my first two years entirely.
Thankfully, once I got going I got my act together in a hurry. By the time I graduated I had been nominated by the professors as the best student of the year in my degree program.
One of the worst things I did was stop going to class entirely during my second year. It was just too cold out and my bed was just too warm.
In one of my least-brilliant moves, I didn’t put in for a partial refund or anything. I paid for the semester in full even though I didn’t attend. I didn’t even have a job at this time, so for the next three months until the spring semester started, I lived entirely off of student loan money.
29-year-old me to 19-year-old me: Put some big girl panties on and be an adult! I’m giving up all of my extra book-reading time now to pay for your extra naps!
Vacation to visit a boyfriend (now ex-boyfriend)
‘Nuff said.
29-year-old me to 19-year-old me: You can do better. Financially and in the man department.
Related: If you have student loans too, it never hurts to check if you can get a lower rate. It could save you thousands of dollars over the life of your loan. I love LendEDU (affiliate link) because you can compare a bunch of lenders for free and it won’t hurt your credit score. Booyah!
SO much yarn
I am a knitter, and yarn used to be my retail therapy. Any fellow knitters know what I’m talking about; ask them about their stash.
Unfortunately for my finances today, I didn’t buy your garden-variety yarn. I had an expensive habit that could rival that of any drug addict. I never liked the cheap stuff; only the finest virgin baby alpaca/rambouillet yarn would do. I would go out at least once a week and buy the prettiest yarn just for the sake of it.
I still buy the expensive stuff today, but my methods have changed. I’ll only shell out the big bucks once every year or two now, only if I have a pattern already selected, and only if I’ve already saved up the cash for it thanks to our budget.
29-year-old me to 19-year-old me: I know the rambouillet is soft and fun to knit. But not having to work days and nights for the next twenty years is even more fun.
Spinning wheel and drum carder
THIS is my $1540 drum carder and spinning wheel set. It’s a nightmare to clean when the cats decide to make a nest on top of it.
For the grand finale, I bought a brand new spinning wheel and drum carder for $1,540. You probably don’t even know what those are, and that probably speaks to how important they are for a newly-released “adult” to buy.
A drum carder is used to comb fibers from a raw sheep’s fleece into something you can then spin into yarn, using the spinning wheel.
My 19-year-old mind thought that I was going to make a business out of it, which was basically the excuse I used whenever I wanted to try an uber-expensive new hobby. I made a grand total of $0 on any of the yarn I ever made.
I still keep these around today because every once in a while I do like to break it out of the closet and spin some yarn. There’s something badass about making your own stuff.
It’s something that I keep telling myself I’d like to do more of when I retire, and I don’t want to have to buy the whole damn set all over again, so I guess I’ll just lug it around with me for the next 40 years. Sigh.
(Note: since writing this post I sold this set for $1,000. I used it to bolster my emergency fund. Woohoo! Besides, I’m too busy freelance writing and side hustlin’ to have time to spin yarn now.)
29-year-old me to 19-year-old me: Words. Fail. Me.
Was it worth it?
That’s a lot of wasted money that I could be using today for other things, like not being in debt. Was taking out the student loans really worth it?
Ultimately, I do think the student loans were worth it. I wouldn’t be here today—wherever that is—without them.
But, at the same time, I do wish I would have spent my money wiser. I just didn’t realize how much blood, sweat, and tears would go into paying them back. To have the burden lessened even a little bit would save me a world of problems today.
Guys, don’t leave me hanging. What were some of your worst student loan purchases? What would you tell your younger self? Leave a comment below!
At one point in college, I considered taking out loans to just have extra spending money. I’m glad I didn’t.
Good for you! You’re smarter than I was. 😀
I used my student loans only for the necessities (which for me was books and class). However, I do regret using student loans for my Master’s Degree. For me, IMO, getting my Master’s (especially in CJ) was a waste of time and money. And truthfully, I only went for it to see if I could do it (with the argument “surely it will help me in the future when applying for jobs!”). I don’t feel like it has helped me professionally and set me back $15,000. If I could go back a few years (I graduated in 2009) I’d tell me self “Girl, you’re smart! You don’t need a Master’s degree to prove it! Save yourself the time and MONEY that way you can become debt free quicker!” By the way, the smartest thing I did when it came to student loans is to privatize them. I was in the same boat as you with the government loans-where first several years I was paying straight on interest and not the actual loan. So overwhelming and discouraging. Now I have a lil more control over the loan and it’s easier to get the money to the principal vs the interest!
All of my loans are private too – I’ve been paying on principal and interest since I started paying them back, but still, I won’t pay the principal back down to where it was for a long time.
That’s great that you realize now that you didn’t need a master’s! Sometimes they’re really not necessary. In my line of work though, it’s sort of a minimum requirement. I just got my first job – two years after graduating – with my master’s, and it’s only a temporary 3-month job! It’s looking more and more like the minimum entry requirement is even moving to a PhD…. 🙁
I brought club clothes. Smh. There was a lot of mall shopping back in those days.
Ugh, mall shopping…. I used to go with my mom a lot when I was a kid. Now I can’t stand crowds. 🙂
Like you, I used some of my student loan funds to fund my lifestyle (dinners out rather than eating at the dining hall, groceries, concert tickets, dates with my soon-to-be wife). I learned from my mistake in undergrad and didn’t repeat the same errors with my grad school loans.
Me too. I was lucky in that I didn’t have to take out loans for grad school; it was fully paid through being a teaching assistant. I think my undergrad loans make up for the difference though
My son (also age 29) made some of the same choices you did in accepting far more in student loans than he needed and bought himself some nice “toys” such as a flat screen TV (much larger and nicer than my “box” style TV at the time) as well as other luxuries. Yes, he is steadily making his monthly payments and whittling away at his debt. In retrospect, he realizes he should have made different choices. Live and learn!
If nothing else, I’ve learned from this mistake and I won’t be repeating it with any other potential loan money in the future!
That’s what mistakes are for – – to learn and hopefully, make better decisions in the future. You seem to be doing just that!
I spent 2 grad school summers off, courtesy of student loans. I didn’t get any work done and It took years to pay them off. I would have been a lot better off getting a job of some sort…even waiting tables. There are so many things I’d like to tell my early 20s self.
Me too! At least we know better now…
I don’t know how common your student loan problems are but if there are lots of people like you out there maybe you shouldn’t be able to get loans that don’t have the check given to the school rather than to you. I know apartment living can be cheaper than the dorm/cafeteria but if that student loan check had gone to pay the school to educate you, feed you and house you, and nothing else, you wouldn’t have had the opportunity to waste it on such foolishness. There is a problem with allowing a barely adult to take out huge loans like that without oversite. Sorry you are going to be paying for so long, hopefully you’ve learned something.
I agree – sort of. How would you decide the maturity level of the person? Different people at that age (and even older) vary in their capability to manage money. I had none, and so denying me personal management of these loans might have been beneficial. But if you applied a blanket ban on this across the board, then it would hurt people like my husband, who is currently using student loan money in a responsible manner. Plus, I would NOT live in a dorm with him now if that were the stipulations of the student loan disbursement. 🙂 This reminds me of credit cards – even fully-functional adults can’t manage them sometimes, while others can.
Do you think your younger self would ever have listened to your older self? I often wonder this because I remember being a teen and thinking I knew it all, and I remember watching teen friends royally screw up (buying a timeshare when you’re in college with over $50K in student loan debt? WOW priorities yo). And I remember thinking, well, I can’t say anything, they won’t listen to me. Nor would they listen to the adults in their lives, or they wouldn’t have done half the foolish things they did, wasting money and/or endangering life and limb.
I’d like to think that my younger self would listen to older me because I would be going through what I was about to experience…if that makes any sense. 🙂 That being said, I definitely would NOT listen to most older people. I had a bit of a fractious relationship with my dad because of this – he would often preach to me about why I should do what he said, but his only reasoning for doing so was “I’m smarter than you,” which was not a message I was receptive to back then (or even today). There are much better ways to get messages across to people, but that is generally not one of them.
I feel for you, but I’m also glad to hear that I’m not the only one who wasted money (and time) in college. Unfortunately, I didn’t figure things out until graduate school. Luckily, I was an engineering undergrad which gives you lots of leniency for getting into graduate school when it comes to grades.
Recently, I wrote a whole article about all the regrets I had from my early days. One of the biggest was leaving my first job too soon. After finally figuring things out in graduate school and getting a good job, I was impatient and wanted to advance faster than the system would allow. Rather than wait things out, I jumped for a new opportunity.
Things worked out, but old me would tell young me to be patient.