How Debt Can Destroy a Budding Relationship
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I've paid off almost all of my debt and she will take care of hers once she graduates. Even if we both had 100k+ in debt, it wouldn't make a huge difference to our standard of living. We'd simply be paying off debt instead of adding to our savings.
Debt is a big deal. But we're all carrying around big deals, one way or another. The important part is being open and honest with yourself, so you can be open with the person you want to share your life with. Eastman was avoiding the truth of her situation, which screwed both herself and her fiance.
You could just as easily say "How having prior children can ruin budding relationships." And sure, they can discourage them. But a relationship where the kid situation is known up front is very different from a relationship where the kid is disclosed a few weeks before the wedding.
That said, marriage is about two people joining their lives together into one, and that means combining your financial lives as well. That means it's our income, our cars, our debt. Disagreement about money is one of the leading causes of divorce. In separating your finances, you are prone to living more like roommates than a married couple.
For some perspective, 1 year of undergrad at CMU this year (tuition + room and board) is now $50k.
I graduated CMU in May. I have quite a bit of debt, but got a good job straight out of school and aim to have the debt paid off in a year by living like the graduate students I live with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_benefit
(Though realistically the total sum is only enough for paying rent, so most people still end up having to work somewhat during their studies.)
1. You will live on less than you make 2. With the extra money, you will pay off your debt. 3. Once done with that, you will build up savings so you won't need to borrow for emergencies.
You correctly point out that communication is the largest issue here. However, before these couples can even communicate about their financial situations, they will need to understand them first. I think that anyone that does not have at least a vague understanding of what their financial situation is not yet mature enough to be married.
For someone who has the ability to make 80k a year, debt seems like something that can be managed away. If you have no hackerly skills, and work at minimum wage (like a large number of north americans these days) - what hope do you have of maintaining a relationship that is purely controlled by a debt collector?
For the love of my life? I'd work 3 jobs and work overtime.
Having hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt is fine. It's a curse of the middle class, at one point or another--a mortgage if not student loans. You're supposed to realize what you're doing when you borrow that kind of money, though. Running up hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt without fully recognizing what you're doing seems irresponsible. You're mentally evading your responsibilities to others.
I can't even comprehend the mindset involved in that. How can you spend years paying for anything (even a car!) without even once trying to keep track of where you stand in terms of paying it off?
Seriously, though, in most schools tuition is the same regardless of the major. I hear it's $40K+/year for tuition alone at many private schools.
I don't think GP's surprise was based on the idea that a bachelor's degree in such a major would typically be cheaper than others. I think GP was surprised that someone would be willing to take on so much debt for a degree in that major.
It's 25K-26K per year, so even if she paid nothing out of pocket and had no financial aid, she'd owe slightly over $100K when she was done. And the rest of it has compounded.
But yeah, most people don't do the math and don't have a realistic view of their career path when they enroll in their programs. I think depression would be a lot more common, if they did...
The best advice is to pay the minimum you can unless you get a shot at going to harvard. And if you do, some of these school now are offering free tuition for people making less than X amount of money.
I might be biased because I have a degree from a state university but that never prevented me from getting work.
I went to college and it sure wasn't for photography. Photography just happened. I have a BS in Computer Science, and I also have no debt resulting from it. Rather than pursuing a software developer job, which I expected I would be doing, I opened a photography business and have been quite comfortable. Software is now just my hobby, but it's a very useful one.
Knowledge of business and accounting will get you far further in almost any industry than a specialty degree will.
http://www.allisonbrookephotography.com/#/client/content_pag...
I think his point about business knowledge is a good one. If you want to be a successful photographer, you're probably better off getting a degree in marketing, communications, or business management, and minor in photography.
This is a problem with most practical, art-based practices (except at the high end). The customers don't have a good critical eye and will frequently choose a photographer or artist by price, prestige, recommendation, or by merely liking one of their earlier pieces - rather than on any technical merits.
I suspect someone with no photographical experience but strong business savvy could make a good go of being a professional photographer with the right equipment and just a little training in basic technique. I'd love to watch a TV show about such an experiment - it'd be like Faking It.
(And before I'm accused of cheapening a whole industry with the last paragraph, I believe the same about my two industries - publishing and programming. There are more than a few "copy and paste" developers making good money out there. It ain't noble, but it can work.)
I think they'll be OK with me saying this much: the data do not agree with your conclusion, for any sensible value of "liberal arts."
Now photography, that is another story. My research methodology totally missed it as a major choice, because the obvious occupation (photographer) doesn't require a degree. Looking at the BLS source data though, egads, $170k to become a photographer is a bad call economically. The median annual salary (note: for photographers at all stages of their career) is $19k. The overwhelming majority are part time only. If you give generous assumptions as to future income growth, the NPV of being a photographer is $410k.
That compares disfavorably with every degree I actually have in the data set. (Including, most relevantly to her situation, the associate's degree you need to become an X-ray technician, which you can get for less than $5,000. Spend another $10,000 on camera lenses, bam, you're an X-ray technician doing something she loves as a hobby.)
The deliverables are drastically different between different photographers as well. The wholesale cost difference between our upper-end album and the lower-end one is about 600%.
I don't remember the article to reference it here, but the current cost of weddings was started largely by the introduction of gift registries. It snowballed from there.
The wedding photographers have some clever ways to sell you more stuff too. Most of them want to retain the rights to the photos that you pay them to take, so they can sell prints to your guests or license them as stock art and stuff. I actually got into a shouting match with one photographer over that -- I insisted on treating the photos as works for hire under US copyright law. One guy had "his and her iPods" that he would load up with wedding pics at the end of the reception. The cost? $1000. Yeah, no thanks.
I won't go into your second paragraph, though, because that mostly boils down to a difference of opinion.
Obviously there are expenses that come out of the basic fees, but when I was doing this, the people I talked to at the lower end of the cost spectrum seemed to operate without some of the expenses that came up (ie, home studio, little/no advertising).
The point I was trying to make was, wedding photography is competitive but potentially lucrative if you can establish yourself, particularly in markets like SF.
I think there'd be a few people who get into wedding services expecting it to be lucrative and then find it a lot more difficult than they expect. I've mentioned on here before (check comments history) a client of mine who got married, noticed the huge prices, bought a wedding services business and then sold it within six months - more hassle than it was worth!
I'm saying that but my wedding photographer had just come out of college. We paid $750 for the photos and it was a pretty good deal, she had some shots taken during school, they were pretty good and that was all we needed to decide. I think we were her first customers of her new company. It was a risk but now days, every aunt and uncle comes with a digital camera.
I read the article one or two hours ago and the NYT has switched both the main article picture (it used to be the small one that can be seen once scrolling down) as well as the caption below the image.
I wonder why/how often they do that.
Makes a good point about the potential pointlessness (and lack of financial feasibility) of higher education. Makes me question getting an MBA.
4 years went by really fast, and before you know it, you're in great debt. I don't think that people are totally irresponsible. Here in the US you were taught to at a very young age to "follow your dream" and the rest would come. For a 18 year old girl or guy, being so young and naive but having no clues about finance and the real cost of money (your life!), of course she/he would make a decision of following their dream. However, undergrad debts are understandable. If you make a wrong decision and can't get a job with a high enough salary to pay back the debt, at least it's early in your life so you can recover. But if you're 25 and want to further defer the real hard life by getting a master degree of something you want (but probably don't need to), and along the way get in tons of debt, then you're financially irresponsible.
Higher education should not be this big of a financial burden for students, but it's pretty profitable and the US education system is still the best in the world, so there's a huge premium to go study here. From my own experience, foreign students make really good and conscious choice about where to go and how to get a scholarship. A lot of my international student friends got full scholarship to top schools, but this may not be the case for every one. But they and their parents really come prepared to pay every dime for a good education that can help hem make the most out of their professional life after graduation. I was too an international student.
My point of view in life is: time is money, debt is negative money, thus you're subtracting time from you life to pay for debts. And that's the real cost of debt.
Those who I have been with (counting 2 now) I would have moved the world for. I only left the first one because I didn't think she even cared I was there (and her actions didnt show it).
If their marriage was a convenient way to get tax benefits and other marriage related tax burden reductions, so be it. Enter as a business arrangement, which is what he seemed to have done without understanding liabilities.
It also might wind up providing new insight on their character.
Something to think about, this might be controversial but I'm going to try to put it as well as I can because I think you'll be better off if you think about it - you said you'd have moved the world for a woman you were with, but it didn't even seem like she cared if you were there.
Those two things might be related. These days, much of the media and movies show women falling in love with men who are attentive, kind, loving, and affectionate with no strings attached, and even if she isn't good to him in the beginning he eventually wins her over. Purely dutiful and attendant sorts of men. However, this is a fairly new set of affairs - not long ago, women's expectations and judgments on a man were based on a mix of pragmatic considerations (politics, division of labor), shared values like religion and community, and the man accomplishing tangible things.
It's possible that if you expressed more external drive to change things in the outside world, and less pure devotion at all costs even when it's unreciprocated - that a woman in your life would love you more, serve you more, and actually feel happier being with you. Also, in such a state of affairs, you might be happier too.
Maybe I'm wrong! I don't know, it's just worth thinking about. I see a lot of people talking about preferences for certain things while actually choosing and being satisfied with something a little different.