If you haven’t already read last week’s post where I laid out all my income and expenses for a typical year at uni, here is the breakdown: I currently owe over £30,000 with a few more years to go and I get given about £4000 a year that I don’t have to pay back.
This weird balance of borrowing money and getting given money has led to a quite blasé attitude as I’ll explain below. tl;dr: none of my money is mine, so I feel less of a sense of responsibility towards it.
Borrowing Money
Since I have no hope of repaying my student loan any time soon, my debt is just a ballooning number to me.
I don’t have an emotional connection to this number yet. This might be a good thing because it means that I don’t get too stressed about money, but it also means that I don’t feel too bad about spending money.
Student debt is also often referred to as a fixed sum – the average student will graduate with more than £50,000 of debt. This is a life-changing amount of money – but university is a life-changing experience. I would certainly not get as many opportunities educationally, socially or career-wise, if I had not gone to university.
As a result, I often find myself justifying spending if it enriches my life, which it often does (I spend sensibly most of the time, ok?) but I am not spending as if I’m in an emergency.
I guess I have the typical complainy-pants excuses: I’m enjoying my short time at uni; I’m making lifelong friends and forging relationships with people who might help me out later (of course I’ll help them out too); I’m already so socially-awkward that if I don’t follow social norms, I probably won’t make any new friends; I’ve already borrowed so much money for uni so what difference does this little coffee make?
That’s the strange thing about ‘good debt’ – it makes it more difficult to see which spending is net positive and which is negative. At the moment, I value spending time with my friends and developing my interests more than I value the length of my ‘far-away’ career. This may change in the future, and that’s ok!
The maintenance loan that sits in my bank account also gives me a false sense of security: I have an emergency fund, but it is borrowed, and every year it sits in my bank account, it costs 6.3%.
Financial Help
I am lucky that a big proportion of my income comes in the form of scholarships and family financial help. I don’t have to pay these back, which has really alleviated any money worries.
However, these have made my ‘debt emergency’ even less of an emergency. This hasn’t led me to spend every penny I have, but it is less difficult to justify going out for dinner for my friends’ birthdays.
Conclusions
Luckily, since most of my friends are students and we are all broke in one way or another, we don’t spend too much anyway. I will continue to make the most of the time I have at uni, hopefully through more low-spend activities like board game nights or making dinner together.
As MMM says, these debts are ‘small potatoes’ compared to the sums that you can save over your lifetime – which doesn’t excuse debt but certainly gives me hope!
How did your view of money evolve over time? Is there a way to uphold some social norms while being frugal? Please let me know in the comments!
