lowquality.net

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.