College Students Bamboozled into Debt

First Person: How I Got Myself $80,000 in Debt

December 12, 2011

Yahoo! Contributor Network – I have to say getting myself into acres of debt was really easy. In fact, I accrued most of it during college. Some of it was due to paying for school, but the other part was my own stupid mistakes. Here's how I got myself into $80,000 worth of debt in eight years.

Student Loans

The vast majority of my debt was due to student loans. I went to college for a bachelor's degree from 1995 to 2001 and then a master's degree from 2001 to 2003. The bill for those degrees combined was $60,000, and I paid for every bit of it with student loans. I maxed out my loans every year for eight years, and it wasn't that I didn't work during that time. I had work study for the four years during my bachelor's degree, but at $6.25 an hour for 20 hours a week, it was only $125 a week.

What I should have done was get a second part time job at 10 hours a week for $8 or $9 an hour which would have been an extra $80 to $90 a week, and I should have put that money into a savings account to help offset my student loans once I graduated. At the end of four years, I could have easily paid off $13,000 of my student loans. To date, I still owe almost $60,000 in student loans, and I will likely be paying them off for the rest of my life.

Credit Cards

This was my second college mistake. By the end of my bachelor's degree I had six credit cards and somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000 worth of debt. I charged everything from flight time and books to clothes and gas on my credit cards. My first degree was in aviation, which is the most expensive degree at the college I went to.

In hindsight, I never should have applied for a credit card much less six of them, but the free money was addicting. I didn't pay these off until almost 13 years after I opened the first account.

Medical Bills

My health insurance coverage has been spotty my entire adult life. Most of that is due to changing jobs every year or two, and the delay in coverage when starting with a new company. Over the course of 10 years, I incurred almost $10,000 dollars in medical bills that weren't covered by my insurance plans. The smaller bills I paid as soon as I got them, but the larger ones for hundreds and thousands of dollars sat on my credit report for years because I wasn't making enough income to do anything productive with them.

To date, out of the $80,000 worth of debt I incurred between 1995 and 2003, I've paid off almost $10,000. Some of it was through debt settlement agreements. Some of it was due to consolidations, and another $1,500 was due to my paying ahead on my student loans. Unfortunately, that still leaves me with $70,000 still unpaid, and most of that is student loans. If I didn't have my student loans, I'd only have $10,000 in debt.