The idea for this blog began over this past Christmas, in my first few months out of college, when I returned home from abroad to find 30 new voicemails on my phone. One was from my mother and the other 29 were from two credit card companies, each calling to ask where the past month’s payment was. I had sent the payments on time, but not calculated my expenses very well and as a result, both checks had bounced. Because I was away, the bills went several weeks without being paid and incurred various late fees and penalties, pushing one of my credit cards over-limit and incurring yet more fees. I decided that I needed to change my attitude toward my finances and focus on paying down my debt as quickly as possible. I also decided I wanted to start doing something about the situation that put me in debt in first place: the high cost of college and lack of information on options for students and grads.
So the purpose of this blog is two-fold. First, it is a way to hold myself accountable for paying back my debt as quickly as possible. It’s not that I’m not responsible about it already. I pay my bills every month and usually on time, too. I have cut up most of my credit cards and try to use the only remaining one sparingly and only for necessities. I consolidated my school loans in an attempt to lock in a lower interest rate and make paying back a little easier. The problem is, I rarely have enough money to pay any more than the minimum on each credit card and loan and I have no savings, so if an emergency arrises, a bill might not get paid. I’m limited in where I live, what jobs I take and what I do with my free time by constant worry about money and so I’ve decided to get out of this situation, starting now.
The second goal of this blog is to provide information on student loans and credit debt for other students and graduates like me. There’s a wealth of information out there on the current problem of student loan and credit card debt, but unfortunately most of the people this information could help are high school students who don’t realize what signing up for loans means, students too busy earning the degrees that will get them into debt or young graduates working to pay off that debt. None of these groups has much time on their hands to look into the causes and solutions to debt or the overaching problem of student debt in our country, so I hope to use this website as a way to share the information I find. I plan to include everything from news articles to organizations to money-saving recipes and tips. Please feel free to comment on things you like and would like to see and things you don’t and I hope it is helpful to you.
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