Dear Student Debt...

By: Zara Lewis

Dear Student Debt,

The majority of us are dreading the time when we have to begin to start paying you off. For me, my student debt is just an imaginary number, stored away on computers that I don’t want to have access to, and that I do not want to know the balance of. I’m sure you can relate when I say that paying off that dreaded debt is the last thing I’m looking forward to when I finally manage to secure a job.

In the meantime, living in student debt is a life where every dollar counts. It is a joyous moment when that extra tooney is found at the bottom of your bag and you can afford to buy a Tim’s coffee to accompany an exciting breakfast of dry toast. Ok, so I might be painting the student debt picture a little too grim, there are some perks of living in ignorance on behalf of the bank’s generosity. But all in all, at the end of the day, it boils down to the simple question: how well can you stretch your budget? Whenever there is the latest offer at Metro where pasta is only 88 cents for a pack, do you and your friends hurry on down to get every last pasta shell to stock the cupboards with? Or, when toilet paper goes on sale, do you stock up to your hearts content as if you were never going to leave the toilet for the rest of your life? Yes, it is these very tactics that we poor students have to embrace in order to make our way in the world of student debt.

But instead of ending this rant on a depressing note about student debt, I think that the one thing living in student debt will teach all of us students is how to make a lot out of something little. For example, those nights that we don’t remember anything except going out with fifteen dollars and having the best night of our lives - who knew it was even possible? So yes, living in student debt is certainly not ideal, but we might as well work at having a laugh and taking advantage of the sales of Metro whilst we’re poor, in debt and, most of all, young.

Yours Sincerely,

An optimistic broke student