After Nicole Medham, an attorney based in New York City, finished paying off her $180,000 student debt, she announced the news in a [tweet]...We asked Medham, who graduated law school in 2010 with $180,000 in loans, to explain her strategy.The tl/dr version of this Super Dave Ramsey strategy is that she went to Columbia, nabbed BigLaw, and lived at home until her mid-30s. Going without them daily Starbucks purchases and primo cell phone plans, most law school students can effortlessly replicate this task and, most importantly, avoid the social opprobrium associated with default and shirking one's financial obligations to God and country. Your Boomer Uncle paid his $15k loan over twenty-seven years; why can't you do the same?
On a broader level, who needs early adulthood, anyway? Trust me, it kinda sucks. Wouldn't you much rather have illusory financial independence with those beautiful plump zeroes staring back at you than have the actual personal independence of being a grown-up in the relative prime of life as our forebearers once had to suffer? Building careers and families and nest eggs at age 24 like a schlub! What's the point of earning six figures if you can't blow an extra twenty grand every year to make your credit report glisten like your life's report card while ensuring that fingers can still be pointed at student debtors everywhere?
Don't say the billions in student loan debt haven't given us anything but a generational wealth transfer while reinforcing the same inequalities they sought to eradicate. (Piffle!) They've enhanced the neo-capitalist religion of borrowing an obscene sum of money to work like a dog, eventually paying it back and being left with nothing but a great American sense of accomplishment. Like building a demolition car or a nuclear bomb. You may have only a fraction of the savings that you should, may have relatively little for whatever sacrifices have been made, but by gum, it's going to feel amazing and get you all sorts of likes around the internet.
180, as per usual.
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