RAVE: RobinHoodFund.com, please vote!

Yesterday I found a great website- robinhoodfund.com. You can enter a wish and, depending on how many people view your wish, you could have it granted. I entered a wish of "Paying off my student loans" under the name Mags (see previous entries of "Rant: Evil Student Loans" etc.). If you are bored at work/school/home today and would like to vote, please go to robinhood.com. I will post a direct link once it is up for voting. i think you might have to register for your vote/view to count, but it is quick and painless, requiring minimal details.

It only takes a few seconds and hey, it might actually work. At any rate, I really appreciate anyone who can take the time. Voting on my wish starts at noon today MST and lasts for the weeks.

DCTXn thanks you in her ever-continuing fight against The Man.

RANT: Student Loans III

OK, so I shouldn't be ranting about how I can't afford stuff I don't need, like a bigger house or new shoes. That's just being bratty. What I do care about is that I can't really plan for the future with the amount of loans I am paying off. Since I have been paying off my loans I have been able to save very little and have put nothing towards my Roth IRA/retirement.

There is an excellent recent article from the Washington Post by Michelle Singletary from September 24, 2006 titled "Lesson for Students: the Best Debt is None," which talks about the myth of "student loan debt is bad debt". She ends her article with this:

I think all the questions, on some level, stem from the belief that student loan debt is good debt. It's not. Debt is bad, even when necessary. Conventional wisdom should follow this old Chinese proverb, "A good debt is not as good as no debt."

RANT: Evil Student Loans Part II

As my brother so politely pointed out in his comment below, yes, student loans are considered to be "good debt," meaning that you can deduct the interest payments from your federal income taxes. However, when it's not the interest payments but the principal payments that are killing you, this is of little comfort. All I know is: we can't afford to get another car so both husband and I can drive to work (one of us has to take public transport), can't afford to go on vacay, can't even really afford the gym payments we were making so had to quit, can't afford a bigger house/house in a nicer hood. Even the mundane things that shouldn't be big become big.... I need new sneakers but they cost so much. Why? Because about 10k a year is going into my loans.

At least when you get your mortgage, you know that you will be paying it for the next 30 years. However, when you are in school and your parents suddenly cut you off from tuition payments, but also won't let you quit school, you suddenly find yourself desperate to get a loan, any loan, to keep going to school. And there's not exactly a lot of options for the student loan payments- you can't really shop around as much as you do for your mortgage. There's the minimum amount of federal loans that you can get because your parents make X amount of $ (even though they aren't giving any to you), and then there's the private lenders who are looking to make as much off of you as they can. You don't realize when you sign that loan check to keep going to class that you are really signing away the rest of your life to the evil corporation that is the American education industry.

So, any multi-millionaires out there (Paris, hello, I'm your new BFF) who feel like being charitable, let me know.