Student loan debt a huge burden for millennials

What’s keeping millennials up at night?

It’s not just Netflix–it’s student debt.

Millennials most worried about college debt

NPR’s Morning Edition recently asked young adults, members of the millennial generation, what their biggest concerns were.

The results were telling: almost two-thirds responded that college debt was their biggest worry.

Student loan debt is a huge burden for all generations, but millennials have been hit the hardest due to fast-rising college costs and the recent economic recession.

In the clip below, David Greene talks to three young women with student debt ranging from $18,000 to over $120,000. They explain how they’re dealing with the debt, the sacrifices they’ve had to make, and what they wish they had known before taking out so much in student loans.

Millennials expect to spend decades paying for college

Though their ages were not revealed, the women were at least a few years out of college and said that they didn’t expect to pay off the debt for at least a decade.

Two of the women expected that it would take them 30 years or more to pay off all of their student loans.

Because they expect to be paying off their debt for so long, they expressed that they’d had to put off over expenses and milestones, such as buying a car or a home.

This is a trend we’ve seen among this generation due to the difficulty in finding stable, good paying jobs and saving for future purchases or retirement while also paying high student loan bills.

Young adults don’t fully comprehend student debt

The women also agreed that they didn’t fully understand what it meant to take on so much debt to pay for college. As Emily Garvey, a millennial who ended up defaulting on one of her private student loans, put it,

There’s a lot of confusion and I think it’s because it is 18, 19 year old, 20 year old students who are making these really big decisions.

I, for one, had never made a purchase like $40,000 before, so I didn’t really understand what that would entail or what that meant in the long run.

Understanding student loan repayment

Too many students end up in bad situations because they either don’t understand how quickly interest can add up or how to manage their loans once they graduate and have other expenses.

Whether you’re just starting college or have already graduated, it’s essential to understand your student loan repayment options and be honest with yourself about what types of payments you can afford.

If you need help figuring out how to approach paying off your student debt (or avoid taking out too many student loans to begin with), feel free to call us at 1-888-234-3907 or fill out this form for a free consultation.