This afternoon my mom and I did a little math.
My student loans from Berklee (and my car loan) total about $1930.00 every month. I drive a Toyota Matrix so don’t go thinking that total is based on a financed BMW 7 Series or anything like that. I make about $33k a year which, after taxes, works out to $1979.40 a month. Obviously, I can just barely make my bills with little left over. The loans I used for ECPI have not come out of deferment yet. I am 28 and I live with my parents. I have a job which would support most anyone my age, but for me it is as good as not working at all. In fact, if I were to stop working completely I would no longer have a paycheck for AES, Sallie Mae, or Collegiate Funding Services to garnish. They’d be out of luck, but I’d still be living with my parents. If I need to buy clothes for work, or pay for my State Inspection or something as extravagant as lunch at Wendy’s I simply cannot do it. Sometimes putting gas in my car completely derails my finances.
My girlfriend makes slightly less than me, but it seems as though she has gobs of liquid cash oozing out of her pores compared to me. She pays for everything. It’s to the point that I feel like a little kid. I can’t take care of myself. My parents are having their own set of worries and, apart from covering my car insurance and putting a roof over my head, aren’t really able to help me either.
This situation has spiraled out of control to the point that I have no more alternatives. There isn’t much hope in bankruptcy for student loans– and it sickens me to live in a country that will forgive any jackass with a credit card who buys 40″ televisions, designer clothing, and jewelry they can’t afford but stonewalls people who went to school to better themselves and can’t get jobs that cover the amount. Higher education should not be like the stock market. I feel like I can never have a normal life because I made this horrible mistake to follow my dream to attend Berklee College of Music. I blame myself for my pig-headed insistence on going to an expensive music school, and for having, really, no frame of reference as to how expensive Berklee really was until I was already there. I thought I was doing the right thing in trying to finish my education. I should have known better, but I didn’t. I regret that and I regret that I keep focusing on the past, but it is so obvious to me that I made a really bad decision and that I can’t really recover from it. Do I regard my experience at Berklee as a waste of time? No. I learned so much and made some lifelong friends, but the resulting misery this financial situation has put me in has seemingly outweighed all of my positive experiences at Berklee. I can’t even take gigs for fun anymore. I mean, I switched careers to pay for my music education that I can’t afford to use. That doesn’t even make sense. Actually, my decision to go to ECPI and work in the IT field has compounded my problems. Not only do I have more student loans to worry about but I was actually told by a bankruptcy lawyer that going into the IT field hurts any case I would have to prove that I could never make enough money to pay my loans. The IT field is obviously more lucrative than the music field and it costs me the angle of “I’m a poor musician, I can’t pay my bills.”
I won’t be getting by until I’m making $50k a year and even then I will be hurting pretty badly. When I make $50k a year I will finally be living like someone who makes $25k, and in this area of crappy wages there is no telling how long it will take me to have that kind of income. Some people never make that much in their whole lives, by the time I do, the minimum wage will be higher and the entire economy will shift so I will probably not be doing any better.
I have resigned myself to playing some gigs here and there to make a few extra dollars, and Kim is trying to make an effort towards saving for us to get an apartment. I can’t really be a part of that effort right now. It makes me really depressed. Basically, I am depressed all of the time because of this shit. I try to forget about it and occasionally I do.
I have a shot at getting into an auxiliary version of one of the area’s more successful show bands. I think I could it and I could stand to make a few extra dollars doing it. I should be more excited about the prospect, but I am just not. I’m miserable. I want all of this shit to go away.
