When I was going to college, student loans were very attractive to me.
I went to a small liberal arts college which was very exclusive, and expensive, and the tuition and additional expenses like room, board, and books were way out of my league, or my family's league, even though I had an academic scholarship that paid for half of my tuition.
Aside from my tuition scholarship through the school, I also applied for and received several smaller grants and scholarships that helped to defray the substantial cost of my schooling.
However, because of the size of the price tag, there was still a lot to be paid for and I had no way to pay it.
This is where student loans came in.
I realized every semester as I signed the new paperwork that I was getting in deeper and deeper, and that I would eventually have to dig myself out, but that realization was so abstract as to feel more surreal than real.
After all, the person that would have to deal with those debts was my future self - and not my future self from a week in the future, but from three and a half years into the future! It just didn't seem real.
So I signed and signed and signed, never truly feeling what the reality of having incurred eighty thousand dollars in student loan debt and trying to pay that off on a teacher's salary would be.
I am still paying it off and most likely will be for many years to come.
Now, am I saying that my decision was wrong? No, of course not, it opened doors for me that would have otherwise remained closed.
I just wish that I would have made a more informed decision regarding my financial future after college, so that I could have been more prepared.