Debt Free- by Darylynn Starr Rank
October, 2006

I have a friend.  She’s in her mid-thirties now.  She went to university at the typical age, late teens, early twenties.  Her parents helped her as much as they could but these days there was no way they could support her for the whole five years.  It was supposed to take her four years, but exactly because her parents couldn’t pay for everything she had to work to help pay for it.  So school took longer, and she worked a series of waitressing jobs.

She also had to take out student loans. 

When she finished school, she considered her options – grad school, get a job.  Because of her loan debt she felt too guilty and too overwhelmed with the idea of paying it back, to continue school right then.  And she wanted to pay back her parents a bit as well.  More guilt.  So she got a job.  Not an ideal job, not a career type job (she wasn’t quite sure what that would look like) and she worked hard to pay off the loans.

But she had to live, too, so it didn’t work out exactly as she had hoped.  Life just cost too much.  So instead of catching up, she had to take on even more debt to pay off her student loans properly.  And on and on.  But all she really wanted was to go back to school and go into something she cared about deeply. 

I can’t begin to count up the number of hours we talked about it.  How much she cried.  How much she struggled.  Trying to justify (her word!) going back into school.  Building up more debt.  She was panicked and heartsick about the whole thing.  It was a terrifically hard struggle to watch!

When my husband and I were undergrads and then in grad school, we worked hard and managed to do it without any student loans.  Or any other kind of borrowing.  (Until finally we broke down, right towards the end, and borrowed money from friends to take a holiday we desperately wanted to take...)  We were always proud of ourselves for accomplishing what we did without any other loans.  I have to admit, that at first with my friend, I was a tiny bit unsympathetic.  You know how it goes.  “Well, we managed it, why is it so tough for her?” 

But then finally I realized it just isn’t possible any more.  School’s too expensive.  Life’s too expensive.  Times have changed!  Practically everyone we know struggles enormously to pay their way though school these days.  And struggles enormously afterwards with the debt.

It was an important lesson for my husband and me.  To learn that how much money times have changed.  Money flow has changed.  Taxes, savings, RSPs, investments, costs have all changed.  Just think of the cost of buying a home now!  So the way people cope with money has had to change as well.  Money management has become much more complicated. And difficult.  

Even the old saying, ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’ seems to be more true now.  There’s a whole lot of money in the hands of a few.  (The urban legend I love/hate the most is that if a particular well-known computer billionaire were to drop a ten-thousand dollar bill on the street, it would not be worth his economic time to bend down and pick it up…)  And the rest of us manage as best we can.

So I seldom judge anybody any more for how they deal with money.  And I try to be gentle with myself as well.  It Money, debt, financing all cause endless practical difficulties and endless emotional difficulties for almost all of us. 

The good news is my friend did go back to school in what she always dreamed of doing and is about to graduate.  And she’s coping with the debt without hating herself.  So it can be done!

Take care, all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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