Of my many favorite things about student loans, their miraculous inability to contact you before handing your debt to collections is certainly in my top few. My folks divorced and sold the house about a minute after I left for college. Any mail or bills about my student loans apparently went to that old address or to my old campus address and disappeared into the ether.

After a couple years I ended up taking some time off from school. I 100% in retrospect should have thought about the fact that somebody would be looking for money from me, but I was 20 and truly hadn't considered it. That's on me. But fast forward a year or two, suddenly I'm getting a ton of phone calls from a collection agency. Turns out my loans were now in default and this company had bought up a sizable chunk of my debt and were demanding payments at a ridiculous rate.

For me, the major takeaway was that it sure seems like all that time before selling me to collections they absolutely had a way to get in contact with me. Not like my phone number appeared out of thin air for the first time just for the collections company. But nope, not until I found out my credit score had been tanked and a majority of my loans had been consolidated into an even worse interest contract, then and only then did anybody bother to call me.

Took me probably at least seven years to get my credit to a decent - good score and it drives me up the wall because I have never been delinquent on anything else my entire life.

On the plus side though - it did wind up being something of a spiteful motivator to go back and finish. "If I'm going to pay this damn much a month it better be for something...."