Will You Still Have a Student Loan Balance Five Years From Now?

I received some interesting comments on my recent post titled Paying your loans off quickly has hidden benefits.

Here’s one of the comments.

“Pretty utopian point of view. I assure you, if it were as simple as “just pay off the student loans and be happy,” I would. I see blogs and articles all over linked in about paying down student loans, but the fact being ignored in every one of them is that student loans are not the only bill that has to be paid. The game isn’t how fast you can pay them off, the game is staying out of bankruptcy.”

The comment is true in that a person’s ability to pay their student loans off quickly differs. Everyone is in a little different place in life and faces different challenges at whatever phase of life they are in.

What many people ignore though is that in many cases the reason a person has so many other bills is poor decision making. When you buy into the BS that student loans should be dragged out for a long time you are buying into the same logic that compels you to become a good little “consumer”. You spend your extra money and buy more and more stuff that only makes it harder and harder to get rid of your student loans.

Here is another comment I received.

“Hmmmm….I take a contrarian view….I purposely pay my student loans off as slowly as I can because the rates on them are so low! I’m paying less than 3% on them. I graduated with significant student loan debt from my first graduate school experience (more than $80,000 in institutional loans) and I did work hard to pay the higher interest ones off early, and I was able to do that within a year or two.

Now I just have the Federal loans left on that initial grad school experience…and I’ve taken out more loans for a new program. It is my opinion that the federal student loan program is some of the cheapest money around….and it’s always worthwhile to invest in your own human capital.”

This comment speaks to my post not long ago titled Student loans and CRAP: A fun look at the amazing similarities.

In that post I provided some quotes from a super fun article that set out the two philosophies most borrowers choose.

Philosophy #1: I Can Never Be Fully Free Unless I Have No Debt

Philosophy #2: I Will Always Have Debt, So Let’s All Just Live Our Lives

Read the article here.

Which goal excites you the most? Freedom from student loans? Or freedom to keep your debt as long as you please?

They are both achievable in America! Choose wisely.