No, nixy, I did not advise anyone to put off getting married for 10 years. I advised exactly the opposite - that putting off marriage until 35 is, in most cases, neither feasible nor desirable. Read my original post again carefully. My point was to caution 0Ls against assuming a "best-case" 10-year PSLF loan forgiveness scenario. In most cases folks will repay more - significantly more - than the minimum once you factor in career changes and marriage, one or both of which are very likely to happen to most folks within the 10-year PSLF timeframe. My point was that PSLF + LRAP isn't a magic bullet that makes student debt a nonfactor.nixy wrote:This boils down to personal preferences I think - I find the idea that you would put off getting married for ten years, if you otherwise wanted to get married, to avoid paying more on student loans, when the system is designed for you to be able to afford to make payments, sort of baffling and sad. Paying more than you originally intended isn’t necessarily a problem when the trade off is handling your personal life as you’d prefer.
My point about the 10 years was more that people have LOTS of time left in their careers after that, and people change careers all the time. Check in with the people on this site as to where they are career-wise 10 years from now and the majority are likely to be in something completely unanticipated.
I agree that overall minimizing debt is important and people shouldn’t treat PSLF/loan repayment as a panacea. I just think there can be a little too much scaremongering about PSLF.
People can change careers, of course, but if you start out your career doing PI and spend the next 10 years doing PI, you're going to face some challenges transitioning out of PI. This is putting aside the fact that some folks may find - say, after doing 4 years of PI - that they would rather, I dunno, join a small family law or criminal defense practice or whatnot. If they have a heavy debt load and had been counting on PSLF, that option may not be open to them and they may be effectively "locked in" to PI for another 6 years after they otherwise would have left.
The irresponsible scaremongering about PSLF involves the claim, which pops up from time to time, that the program could be modified or terminated by the government at any time prior to forgiveness at the 10-year mark. That's not true. The program could be modified or terminated at any time for folks who have not yet started law school, but once folks are in, they are going to be able to stay in. The government can't just tell someone 5 years out of graduation that they're being booted out of PSLF. So I think that's where the scaremongering comes in. But I think it's equally important to combat the view that taking on debt doesn't matter because it'll all be forgiven anyway.
That's if you even can, since your humor is so dry
