How Student Debt Reduces Lifetime Wealth
I&#x27;m going to take a contrarian approach and say that I&#x27;m actually really glad that I had to pay my way through college with loans. I started with ~$200k in undergrad loans and have ~$45k left.<p>First, without having taken those loans, I wouldn&#x27;t have been able to go to the kind of college I did or establish the career that I now have. Full stop. Tuition and lodging was ~$40k for my first year. My parents definitely couldn&#x27;t afford to send us there with cash, and no job or saving would&#x27;ve paid me enough to pay that note.<p>I specifically avoided going to my comm college for my first two years despite it being free because I really really REALLY REALLY needed to leave my house. I had a ton of issues with my dad that only got fixed after leaving the house. We&#x27;re cool now, but I don&#x27;t think that would have been our outcome had I not left.<p>My college (and me learning how to code) was the biggest reason why I went from graduation to a $125,000&#x2F;year salary within two years of graduating. While I might have gotten the same outcome had I gone to a comm college and transferred, the age of the people I interviewed for my job that did that did not suggest this. Perhaps I could&#x27;ve gotten a foot in the door by going to a Hacker school or dogging it on my own; I don&#x27;t know. My school (stevens tech) and my course of study (Computer Engineering) made it really easy to get interviews at top places for great jobs; that&#x27;s all that mattered to me and that&#x27;s all that matters now.<p>Also, who knows what decisions I would&#x27;ve made in those two years that I didn&#x27;t make because I left. I love my folks, but they are pretty bad with money and don&#x27;t know anything about my industry. I was also not very good at socializing with people going into college; moving to NYC and going out and about fixed that and has helped me immeasurably since. I wasn&#x27;t good at dating and kept bouncing back to a relationship with my first girlfriend to avoid having to look. She was a lovely person, but we had very different families, life goals and personalities. I am incredibly thankful for the years I spent earning how to date and branching out to other women; I would never have met my soon-to-be-wife without that experience. I have college (and the loan that enabled me to stay there) to thank for that.<p>The money thing leads me to the second reason why I&#x27;m grateful for having taken those loans. Between trying to pay these loans back, my salary and reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;personalfinance, I learned a SHIT TON about how to manage my finances. I have a spreadsheet that tells me everything about my money: who I owe, what I owe, what services I have, how much they are, when they started and stopped, etc. More importantly, I can copy it, edit some numbers and instantly have a model for what my finances will look like if I buy a house, have n kids, buy an additional car, etc. It&#x27;s paramount in helping me negotiate salary and helped a lot in predicting what my finances would look like after moving to DFW from NYC.<p>The ONLY reason why that spreadsheet (and my financial health, which needs work) exists is because of student loans.<p>Now, it would&#x27;ve been GREAT if I didn&#x27;t pay for college like my peers did. But I wonder how much money I would&#x27;ve wasted had I been in that situation. I could&#x27;ve done a wa better job of using the money I made from my time in cooperative education paying back my loans. Didn&#x27;t have the financial discipline. When looked at from that way, I think learning how to manage my money through student loans INCREASED my future worth because I can now make better and more confident decisions about how I spend my money.