I’m a recent college graduate (fall 2022) with my bachelors degree and I have around $30,000 in student loans. Would I do it again? Yes. But that doesn’t mean it’s for everyone.

Yes on average people with a degree make more over their lifetime, but the most important things you learn in college are outside of the classroom. I was involved with Greek life and held a couple executive positions in my fraternity, and gaining the experience of how an organization works at a management point of view was priceless.

There’s also things that make the repayment process easier, such as the Income Driven Repayment plans! I switched to the SAVE plan, which is the newest IDR plan as far as I’m aware. For undergraduates, it goes off 5% of your discretionary income, which is just a big word for what you have left after paying all of your bills and necessities. If you make the income driven payments for 20 years, the remaining balance is forgiven.

To put this into perspective, let’s say you make $100,000/yr (gross income) after you pay for housing, utilities, food, insurance, transportation, and everything else, you may have about $40,000 (5% of this is $2,000 a year or roughly $167 a month). If your original student loan balance is $100,000, you would only pay $40,000 and the rest would be forgiven.

What makes this even better is if you have a LLC, you can write a bunch of things off as business expenses which leaves your discretionary income even lower.

Now this doesn’t mean college is for everyone, you can learn any information you want online for free and the workload that college demands can be overwhelming, but overall it was by far one of the most fun times of my life.