College student withOUT a student loan
As some of y’all know, I am in college working (slowly) towards a PharmD degree to eventually become a pharmcist like my mother. What some of y’all may not know is so far I have no student loans! None, nada, zip, zilch…no student loan! This is a small point of pride for me that I have successfully completed two and a half years (since January of 2005) without having to borrow money to pay my tuition.
What’s even more amazing to me as I look back is that I have done this while carrying a mortgage, a car payment (finally paid off in January 2007), and until this summer, no real job. It wasn’t easy, and there were many times I was all stressed out the week before a semester started trying to pay the previous semester’s bill so I could register for classes before the first day of class. But I bit the bullet and scraped up the money somehow each time…because I had a student loan long ago when I first went to college right after high school. I dropped out of college back then in 1992 because I couldn’t come up with my portion of the tuition. It took me until 1999 or 2000 to pay that tiny little student loan off also! A big part of that whole fiasco was poor money management and even worse planning.
To be honest, I still wasn’t making the grade in money management this time around either. Then after Christmas I discovered Dave Ramsey and his Total Money Makeover plan. I finally learned how to budget my money as my 34th birthday approached. I learned how to save up cash to have on hand when the tuition bill is due. I paid off my spring 2007 tuition before spring break…then paid off my summer class tuition before the first day of class (by two weeks even). This is a major achievement for me!
Now that I’ve had a chance to do my bragging…I am staring down the barrel of graduate pharmacy school tuition, and it’s ugly. It’s $27,100 per year ugly, as the two pharm schools within commuting distance are both private universities. Naturally, the advice I am getting is to take out student loans for this, since once I graduate and get a job as a pharmacist I will make enough to pay them back effortlessly. But I don’t want to take on student loans! I’ve been working hard for the past six months to eradicate and eliminate my debts…not go get new debt! So I have been spending time searching for scholarships and grants online, but they all seem to be written for second year pharm school students and higher. I am determined to get my degree, just as I am determined to get out of debt for good. So what happens when the two seem to be diametrically opposed?
