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Student loans are the worst. Much like a mafia bruiser, Sallie May comes calling every month, demanding her cut of your hard earned money, and if you don’t pay, you’re gonna catch a beating. I know I can’t complain, because compared to doctors, lawyers, or anyone who chose to go to grad school, I’m paying off a paltry sum. Nevertheless, the average college graduate owes $30,000 in student loans by the time they finish furthering their education. That is an almost incomprehensible number, so to really help you understand it, I decided to make a list of all the things you could buy with that money.
1. 3,125 Chipotle burritos (with guac). Chipotle is undoubtedly one of the tastiest fast foods available, but it’s also one of the priciest. If I didn’t have student loans, I could be eating my standard order (chicken, brown rice, pinto beans, every single other topping) every week for the rest of my life. Sixty straight years of once a week Chipotle. Your plumbing bills will probably go up, but so will your morale.
2. Thirteen glorious years of the best cable package money can buy. I couldn’t find an exact number on this since the cable company websites like to hide behind the smoke and mirrors of “bundle deals” and never tell you exactly which channels you get with each package, and I didn’t feel like spending eight hours on the phone with a call center representative for this article. However, I think I’m being generous when I say you could live the next thirteen years of your life having access to every single channel on your TV, including all premiums, all sports, and the Mecca that is Redzone. You would host all the viewing parties, and therefore, run your friend group.
3. One year of personal training (every other day). Yes, this is a near-impossible commitment. Training every other day AND having to eat the shitty healthy food the trainers make for you sounds like hell. But after one year of this, even the flabbiest of us would be transformed into a ripped-up Adonis; a perfect human specimen. You would have an ass like Jen Selter and abs like Channing Tatum. Your ugly double chin Snapchat selfies would be fit to hang in the Louvre. Your #Fitspo Instagrams will hit quadruple digit likes, and LuLu Lemon will hire you to be their newest spokesperson.
4. Bomb-ass vacations for the next 15 years. Want to sip wine in Versailles? Done. Get your tan on in one of those island huts in Tahiti? No problem. Ski (sip spiked hot chocolate in the lodge) in the Swiss Alps? May as well fly first class. Your coworkers would all live vicariously through you/hate your guts every time you applied for PTO. Hell, you could even go big and use it all on one three-night stay to that underwater hotel in Dubai. I’m sure after a few hours the rush of having sex in what feels like a giant aquarium would wear off and you’d regret your decision, but hey, it’s your hypothetical money.
5. A brand new car. Literally a whole car fully paid in cash. You can make it rain on the salesman if you want to. Get your hands on a 2016 Chevy Camaro and channel your inner Fast And Furious a quarter mile at a time (RIP Paul). Pick up a Mini Cooper, perfect for a finding a parking spot in the city or hauling stolen gold through the subway tunnels a la The Italian Job. Get a Ram 1500 and cure that low-T that you’re too scared to go to the doctor to find out if you have. As someone who is still driving a 2000 Toyota Camry with different color fenders, this sounds extremely appealing.
6. A fucking house. You know, the things our parents bought that we can only dream of? The things we couldn’t wait to move out of, and now after years of shitty apartments, would do anything to go back to? Depending on how bad you want to be fucked on your mortgage, you could use your student loan money for the down payment on a house of your very own. 30k isn’t going to get you a lot, but there are places in the country where you could find something pretty nice. You could pick up a humble 2-bedroom ranch house in Wyoming, a regal 5-bedroom Tudor in Flint, Michigan, or even a studio apartment in San Francisco (assuming you don’t mind sharing with another family). Granted, it will be a money-pit, and you’ll lose your mind and all of your savings keeping it from falling apart, but you’ll finally feel like an adult.
7. Just the greatest Vegas weekend of your life, man. A personal favorite of mine. Savings and investments are for the sheep. Be a wolf. Wolves go to Sin City and blow 8k on craps before they even check into their hotel. Wolves go to Drais Beach club and purchase the bottle service package with fireworks option. Wolves stay in a penthouse that costs the same per night as the yearly income of an Ethiopian family. Wolves pay the hospital bill when they nearly kill a stripper from the sheer amount of paper cuts she receives from having 20k in singles rained down on her. Wolves wake up after four days in the dumpster behind a Long John Silver’s, hungover and destitute, and regret their spending decisions for the rest of their lives. Be a wolf. Viva Las Vegas.
I’m not going to lie – after writing this article, I drank several stiff bourbons and left a 13-minute crying voicemail to a random Sallie Mae representative just shamelessly begging for them to erase my loans. .
Image via Unsplash
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Nick Arcadia
The opposite of a life coach. Email or DM me if you want some bad advice: nickarcadiapgp@gmail.com
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As someone who works in college in admissions for a major university, this article simply reminded that I’m a worthless POS enabling the poor financial decisions of our youth. PGP.
I legitimately can’t deal with this kind of article today
As DC guys this just makes me cry knowing that none of this will happen
The worst thing about student loans is the absurd amount that just goes to interest. Fucking robbery.
Bruh, sounds like you need to optimize those loan payments in Excel.
Have you looked into refinancing? I was able to go from a 6.8% fixed to a variable rate currently sitting at 1.88%.
This is something you have to do within a few years though. Once you hit about 4-5 years out of a 10 year loan, it doesn’t make financial sense to rewind the clock for the lower payments.
Depends on your plan I guess. Didn’t take out any more money and kept my payments basically the same so more went to principal. Wasn’t chasing the lower payment.
Well yeah, it all depends on someone’s situation.
I don’t know which is worse. Being reminded of all the stuff I could do with that money or learning that I have more than double the average student loan debt…
Living cheap as fuck for the next 4 years just so I can get them paid off by 30.
This hurt more than Monday.
Like most of us, I’m in so much student debt that I now look at my balance and just nervously laugh out loud to myself when I see it. I dodge Sallie Mae collection calls like the best god damn dodgeball player on the planet. I’m like a fucking ghost. Sallie Mae is basically a shell company for the US government to launder our money through so they can help pay for things like F-22 Raptors, drones, surveillance technologies, and up keeping/maintaining our nuclear arsenal (which is around the same cost of the national student debt amount prorated out over 30 years) under the guise of education. Meanwhile, only about 10-15% of the the money we pay back gets reciprocated back into the education system. It’s no wonder why we can never get rid of this debt and why our education system and infrastructure is falling apart. I know you’ll down vote this into oblivion but they didn’t hire me to do one of those “The More You Know” commercials with the little rainbow star trail thing so I am forced to use this platform to educate the masses.
1. I understand if you don’t want to drop the money on chipotle every single day but really if you can’t afford like 11 bucks once a week as is, then check yourself and your other spending habits.
4. Assuming your 15 years of vacation means once a year, thats $2k per vacation. You are not going to the alps or tahiti on that. More like the six flags in the next state over.
6. Title should have said “A house somewhere that sucks”. Its more like a really nice downpayment on an actual place worth having in a non shithole city.
Decided to see just what kind of Camaro my student loan payment can buy. V6 2LT, with leather and a sunroof, according to their payment calculator…
V6 Don’t bother.
I could get a 2005 Ford Focus. Air conditioning not standard.
Doubling down on loans for med school. PGP.