Apart from a crushing mortgage, I am now debt free after paying off my student loans this past week.
I was lucky enough to get through college without taking out loans, but graduate school was another story. After having been told that my program didn't admit students they didn't have funding for, I signed up only to then find out that my particular year was "exceptional" in that two of us were out of luck money-wise. I didn't have a job lined up and I had already signed a lease, so my only option was to suck at the teet of the federal government.
Student loans were remarkably easy to obtain, and so I did ... often. They enabled my relatively extravagant (for a student) lifestyle, and the convenient payback deferral meant I didn't have to worry about it so long as I remained enrolled in courses. I ended up finding a decent-paying graduate assistantship after a while, so I gradually became less dependent on aid, but by that time I had already dug myself into the hole.
But now, just over eleven years after bidding adieu to my life as an academic, I am officially "Paid in Full."
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