So I’ll just lay it out there. When I graduated high school I was 17 and had to do all of my loans and such myself and had no financial support from anyone, and no grants as my parents made good money, but none of it contributed to my college. I went to an expensive music school which is a super dumb idea but I was 17. Anyways, now I have a bachelors in music and I’ll have a bachelors in computer information systems this spring, as I went back to school and paid out of pocket for my second bachelors of science at a good but cheap school.
I have a child with my ex wife and right now it’s about a 50/50 split in custody and I only pay $30 a month in support. I can’t move more than 100 miles away without custody being changed.
I also have $150-160k in student loans, which honestly I can’t even estimate within the nearest 5 grand anymore. The interest rates are around 12% and they keep increasing at just an laughable rate. All of it is from rent and tuition for a music school.
I have a paid internship this summer and the job after will most likely pay $60k a year before taxes and any additional bonuses.
Clearly by the time I start working at a full time career in the fall my loans will be even higher. So if I paid my loans, even at the minimum each month, I couldn’t even afford low income housing. Much less food and transportation for even myself.
I understand paying off highest interest rate debts first and living frugally, but at the current rate I’m going to be living in a cave and unable to pay what will most likely be a few hundred in child support. Because I was 17 and wanted to go to music school and had to handle all of the financial stuff myself.
Honestly the situation is so absurd I can’t even fathom what can be done on my own.
There are no jobs in my town so I have to move to a city an hour away, which is a gorgeous little city with a good amount of tech jobs, so it’s not bad at all. I will have my daughter about the same time each week but will be making significantly more than her mother who lives at home, which probably means more child support. So I can’t just stay with my parents and not have a rent due.
Submitted December 31, 2017 at 12:09PM by Falkarr http://ift.tt/2EoJp2g
