Hillsdale’s financial aid counsellors met with graduating seniors last week to review the state of their student debt and prepare graduates to pay off their loans.
While the class of 2016 has been finishing papers and applying for jobs, last year’s graduates have had a year to work hard and make progress on paying back those dreaded debts. According to Director of Financial Aid Rich Moeggenberg, Hillsdale students in 2014 left with an average of $25,502 in student loan debt.
Chris Pandolfo ’15 said he has no regrets about the loans he took out to attend Hillsdale — one private Hillsdale loan, and another from Wells Fargo — even though his payment is nearly $600 a month.
“Things are going pretty well,” Pandolfo said. “I haven’t missed a student loan payment.”
He has no other loans right now, and lives in Greenville, South Carolina working for Conservative Review, a start-up media outlet, where he only pays $400 a month in rent and food is equally inexpensive.
His trick to success? A budget. Pandolfo said he doesn’t have an excel spreadsheet, but he has a general idea that gas will cost him about $22 a week and groceries around $200 a week. He has a certain amount set aside for savings, tithes, and bills.
To keep track, he assigns his paychecks to certain bills that are due. His Hillsdale loan is due on the first of the month, the Wells Fargo bill on the fifteen, his rent after that, and his credit card on the last week of each month.
“I’m probably living a little more unhealthily than I should be, but I can’t cook,” Pandolfo said. “Crock pots are your friends.”
He also said he works at building a savings account, depositing $50 each month. He blew a tire after a couple months of saving and was able to pay it off with what he had in the bank instead of racking up credit card debt.
He added that he uses his credit card like cash — he only puts groceries and gas on the card and then pays it off at the end of each month.
Because he doesn’t plan on getting married in the near future, Pandolfo said he is putting off buying a house.
“I don’t want to have this debt for ten years,” Pandolfo said. “As soon as I’m able I’m going to increase my payments to get it over with.”
Shaun Lichti ’15 has also been making his payments each month. He graduated from Hillsdale in three years, so he does not have huge student loan payments. He has three separate loans with fairly low interest rates.
“If I had $50,000, I’d probably be very freaked out about it,” he said.
That makes paying it off early less pressing, however, Lichti said. It’s easier to put off. He plans to start paying it off more aggressively in September.
With interest, Andie McGowan ’15 owes $81,000 in student loans. To date, she has paid $9,180 toward her loans, but only $1,500 of that has been from the principal. She has been making timely payments each month.
“My goal is to never miss a payment so that my credit remains unblemished,” McGowan said via email. “My eventual plan is to have an investment account that generates enough to make payments each month at larger increments so I can pay it down faster.”
Linda Edelblut ’14 will pay off all $36,000 of her student loans, including interest, next month, exactly two years after graduation and 18 months of full-time work later.
She took two years of community college so she wouldn’t accrue too much debt at Hillsdale, and even with a half tuition scholarship and an RA position for three semesters, she came out with more than the U.S. average for student debt.
Edelblut said her parents couldn’t help her pay for college or co-sign her loans, which is why she had one loan at 14 percent interest.
She married Tim Edelblut ’13 after graduation and they now live near Boston, where they live off Tim’s salary and put hers toward paying off her student debt. Between parental contribution and scholarship, Tim graduated debt-free. He had a savings of six months’ salary for their emergency fund when they married, and Linda Edelblut said she was tempted to use that to pay off her loans.
“It was important to him that we had that buffer and that I paid off my loans myself,” Edelblut said.
She and her husband live frugally — they don’t have a Netflix account, or even a television, and they rarely eat out.
Her advice to other students?
“Live in poverty, get debt off your back, and then you are free,” Edelblut said. “I’m going to go spend money with my next paycheck. I’ve never been able to spend my own money.”