The 100 by 30 project

Obvious PF statement of the day

"Maguire meets up with a friend, Keith Erzinger, in a campus coffee shop. The two met in a campus Christian group and have become friendly, though their backgrounds are quite different. Maguire attended public school. He is at Amherst with loans and financial aid, and he has a work-study job. Erzinger attended a private school in Colorado. His father is a financial consultant, who pays his tuition with money he set aside. Last summer, he worked at the New York Stock Exchange – the kind of job you get using connections. He understands that rich kids have advantages, but he tends to see class as less important than Maguire does."

Chit-chat

During my bus ride into school yesterday, I chose a seat next to an elderly man. He didn't say a word for the first ten minutes of the trip, but then he turned to me and opened up with this:

"I have two granddaughters who graduated from the University of North Carolina, and a third who is a senior who a senior and about to graduate. And do you know that if I hadn't helped their parents pay for it, they'd be drowning in debt right now?"

Unique small talk, no? Maybe he could sense the presence of another personal finance hobbyist. We went on to talk about "kids these days", consumerism and materialism, soaring tuition prices, etc.

What really struck me is that towards the end of the conversation he mentioned that his daughter and son-in-law were planning to take an early retirement soon. Either the man is overselling the magnitude of his contribution to the education fund, or the two of them are really underfunded for this early retirement, or they were early adopters of the "your kids can get loans for college but you can't get loans for retirement" strategy. I wonder how he feels about his daughter and son-in-law having him pay for their daughters' education while simultaneously preparing to retire at 60.

Man, the details of other people's financial lives are so interesting. No wonder we all like blogs so much.

In some ways, young adults' financial future less bleak than I suspected

I was reading this story on ABC News about young adults and debt. One statistic struck me as especially good:

Among all twentysomethings, the fastest-growing group owes $20,000 or more in student-loan debt. Though it's a small group, its proportion has doubled in the past five years to 3%.

Three percent seems really low. Granted, that's relative to all twentysomethings, not just the ones who went to college or took out loans to pay for it. And granted, one of the surest ways to rack up a ton of student loans is to go to grad school in a professional program (e.g. law, MBA, med school), which many people put off until they're out of their twenties. But still. Is it good or bad that I expected the number to be much higher? At least half of the people I went to college with graduated with that much debt, and I went to a pretty wealthy college where many people had Mom and Dad footing the full cost. Because of how my school structured financial aid, if you had any loans at all you were pretty likely to have at least $20k: the first $5k of the financial aid package each year was student loans. So before the school gives you any financial aid, you're already in the hole $5k, no matter how poor your family was. (Or maybe I should say especially if your family was poor, because they were less likely to be able to help you out even if they couldn't fully cover the tab.) So I suppose the 3% seems low to me because I'm used to thinking of "needing any loans at all" as synonymous with "needing $20k in loans".

Daddy, I did it all by mysewf!

Apparently Jared Kushner believes he bought the New York Observer with "his own money". Strangest appropriation of the bootstrap creation myth I have ever seen.