A couple of lessons I learned in life that might be useful.
If you get married and you and your spouse both have student loans and later get divorced. Those students loans stay with the individual that originally took them out.
If you get married and you both have student loans, and then you consolidate the loans because having a dozen or more identical looking Sallie Mae payment slips every month is confusing {Big inhale} and then later get divorced you will both be responsible for 100% of the total consolidated loan.
I finished school owing 40k.
My now ex-wife finished school owing 350k.
That was an expensive lesson.
After 10 years of me paying off loans that were not really mine, she married a millionaire. The guy didn’t like her having debt on her name so he just paid it all off easy-peasy.
Part of me was: Rich jerk doesn’t understand what it’s like to be middle class.
part was: Oh thank dog my crushing debt is gone.
And then I met him him and he was actually very nice and down to Earth. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I didn’t know they’d do that. I do know that they’ll take them out of your income tax refunds, which is actually kinda convenient if you’ve moved a few times and your debt has been sold and neither party knows how to contact the other anymore. My loans and my wife’s are paid off now and this year we got our first tax refund in many years.
I’m not that worried about social security because the media’s been crying wolf about that at least every year since I was born (if not long before) and both political parties consistently use it as a boogeyman to scare voters. It was supposedly ‘teetering on the brink of bankruptcy’ 40 years ago. Sure, it always looks in bad shape, but it keeps teetering along.
