I Have 4 Degrees And $260,000 In Student Loan Debt

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. I am in total $628,000 in debt. I have a home that I purchased a little over a year ago for $335,000. I have student loan debt of $260,000 and I have credit card debt for $33,000. I had two jobs at one point. My second job, I no longer work as of six months ago, so now I'm just using my primary income. And I was trying to figure out the quickest way to pay this debt down. Things are getting tough, which means paying the minimum amount of credit card. $260,000 in student loan debt. Are you a doctor or a lawyer? I'm in the legal profession. Close to a lawyer, but not. I do legal research for lawyers. What'd you spend $260,000 to become? I have four degrees. In what? I have a associate's degree in biological science, I have a bachelor's degree in English, I have a master's degree in library science, and I have a second master's in intellectual property law, which is a law degree. So that's where all the debt came from. Is that not a master's in jurisprudence can't you set for the bar? Yes. I'm not sure. I haven't done that research on that. It's like law school, right? Law school's a master's. You've got a degree in research, I heard. You should probably look into that. Yeah, I don't know. After a phone call, I will. Oh, that's nasty. No, I mean, it's right there for me. So what do you make? Right now, I'm over six figures. And then the second job, I was making close to 25,000 a year. Doing what? I was consulting in the library world, doing consulting work, helping them build their libraries back up, libraries that are having issues. They either don't pay much or you weren't working much, 25 grand, huh? Yeah, I wasn't doing a whole lot, maybe about 15, 20 hours a week, if that. 15, 20 hours a week for 25 grand a year is not much. That's horrible per hour. Wow, okay. Well, what is apparent is that you have a lot of education and a lot of upside potential, therefore, on your income, if we can figure out a way to apply that education in a way that makes you more money, which is what you need, is more money and not more degrees. You have plenty of those. So, yeah, I mean, you've got, it's an income issue, really. And you don't go buy a $300,000 house when you have $300,000 in student loans. That was badass, backwards. But the, are you single? Yes. Okay. How old are you? Single parent. 45. Okay. So what I would start asking myself is what use of some of this education can I do in the marketplace to make the most money? And what combination of that? So if library consulting only pays a dollar an hour, I don't really wanna do that, okay? But if I can get some serious money going for some of these different things that you know how to do, that you're knowledgeable in, even if it's two things or three things, I don't care, but I want some serious money. And you don't really have serious money coming from any of these, given your level of education. I mean, making 100,000 bucks or 120,000 bucks or whatever with 14 degrees is not, I mean, you're not, this is not working. So do you need to sit for the bar and become an attorney and make 300,000? Or do you need to apply your master's in library in the form of education and make an extra 100,000 as a professor on the side doing that? I don't know. I don't know what the answer to this is, but it appears to me, I don't think we can sell off enough stuff here to fix the underperformance of your education without fixing the... Now, if you get all those things going and you wanna speed it up and sell the house, that'll be okay. But how much equity do you have in the house? I think about 15,000. Yeah, that's not enough. Just bought it. What is your actual income? You never, you just said six figures. What's the actual number? Around 115, 117. Yeah. Instead of consulting with libraries, which is a dead-end business, and I'm not trying to be unkind, there's just no growth there. There's no income there. What can you do in that additional 15 to 20 hours a week with the expertise and experience you have to make some real extra money in the law space, legal space, what can you do? Intellectual property. I mean, that's a solid... And you don't have to answer it, but that's the homework assignment for you is how do I make an additional 50 to 75,000 while I'm deciding what the passing the bar looks like? That's what you've gotta be thinking. Sandra, I might be wrong, and I'll give you a 50% chance that I am, okay? And so you don't have to take this directly on the chin unless it applies. But it sounds like you fell for the lie that if I get education, people will hand me money, and they're not, and you did. And then you went and got another piece of education, and then another piece of education. You've collected more degrees than a thermometer. And so, you just keep collecting. But that's people that do that generally are one of two things. They are trying to hide, and they wanna stay in school, and they're trying to hide from reality. And so they just keep, they're a professional student. Or they fell for the lie. I think you're in the second one. I think you fell for the lie that if I was just told by my mama, if you just get a college degree, that life is gonna be great, and that's a lie, okay? And so you've got to think about how the knowledge that you have gained, and you're a very knowledgeable person. You've got, we can poke fun at all the degrees, but you also have a breadth of knowledge that's pretty impressive. And so you gotta think about how I can actually, from a utilitarian perspective, take that knowledge and use it to make as much money as possible. And if that had been your goal from the start, you probably would have a different list of degrees and fewer. And so, and it's a mistake people make all the time. They think, if I just would go to college and get a four-year degree, that the degree is useless. The knowledge you get while you're getting the degree, ladies and gentlemen, now that knowledge is great power, assuming it is power, assuming it's knowledge that the marketplace wants. And to your point, not picking on libraries or anything, but we live in a digital age, and the Dewey Decimal System is not exactly high on people's knowledge list right now, or usage. And so. Well, you've got public libraries, the key word there is public, and therefore it's government funded, and libraries are way down the list of the politician's budget items. And so that's why that's really honestly a dead end. You know, I'll just add one thing to what you said, Dave, because a lot of people listening want to expand this to a larger audience. Here's the voice of temptation you will hear if you find yourself in a situation like this. I'm not doing anything because I don't know what I want to do. So I should probably do something. And I know if I don't know what I should be doing, I should be doing something valuable. And you quickly go, oh, if I continue learning, at least that's valuable. And what happens is you exchange uncertainty and the fear that comes with that for certainty, and what you think is the future for that. And to Dave's point, that is not a good exchange. Accept uncertainty, and know that I can at least get out and step out of the uncertain, and I can be active, and I can connect, and I can do some work while I'm figuring it out. But continuing to push uncertainty down the road ends up in this kind of financial liability. That's really the temptation. A lot of good people, smart people do this. And I'm telling you, avoid this. Avoid that. You know, when we were doing the documentary Borrowed Future, we had a lot of discussions of people like me that I was the first in my family, in my generation, in my immediate family tree to get a four-year degree. And if you're the first, a lot of times you value the wrong things. What you should be valuing is the knowledge, not the actual degree, and the application of the knowledge in the marketplace. And that keeps you from signing up for too expensive a degree and the wrong degrees. Create your free every-dollar budget today, the simplest way to budget for your life.