Albatross Unslung

I paid off my student debt last week.

Only after starting law school did I hear the truism that you should never undertake a total student debt larger than what you will earn in your first year’s salary. Boy did I wish I’d heard that before I started. To this date, I have never earned $100,000 in annual salary. I have worked in my field continuously since graduating. Some of my classmates did earn that much in their first year. But what’s often ignored when discussing the worthwhile pursuit of social justice lawyering is that it pays far less than the salaries required to quickly repay the cost of most law schools in Canada. I also happened to go to the second-most expensive law school in the country, which didn’t help me out here. What did help was that I had no undergraduate debt. Yet it still took me seven years to repay my law school debt.

To begin, let’s rewind a little bit. Law school was often a difficult time for me, in a few different ways. Yet the only time I cried at my law school, it was about money. And that’s likely still the only time I’ve ever cried about money (don’t get me wrong: I love a good cry, just not about that).

I was about to graduate and had almost run out of money. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it through to my first articling paycheque, since I had been living off my student line of credit and it was close to spent. In hindsight, I realize I was also freaking out a bit about the looming prospect of repaying the six-figure school debt I had accumulated.

I was in a seminar with one of my favourite profs, as class was about to begin, and I couldn’t keep in my tears when he noticed something was up and asked if I was okay. I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t about to tell him that money was the problem. I think he would’ve understood in some sense, but he was also netting a law professor’s income and had upper class habits like asking people — me and other students — where we were travelling that summer [answer: nowhere, unless you’re paying for it].

So, instead of divulging my financial woes, I beelined for the bathroom and composed myself in order to make it through class normally. I did manage to budget carefully and arrive at that first paycheque without borrowing more money or really sharing these worries. But the weight of my debt was hitting me anew since I had learned to deny it as a coping mechanism to carry it (and watch it grow exponentially) for the previous three years.

It is a strange feeling to finally be free of a debt that totaled $100,000 and took seven years to pay off. I do feel unburdened, but a bit less so than I may have hoped. Perhaps because I knew I would be able to pay it off this month, since I have meticulously budgeted for debt repayment for many years now — although I didn’t do quite as well at that in the early years.

I will be candid, in the hopes of serving anyone (…Bueller?) who comes across this post and is considering law school, or other expensive education, and wondering if it’s worth the cost. Frankly, I’m not sure that it is.

Part of the tangle of student debt lies in how it makes you constantly question whether or not the benefits of the degree were worth it. Repaying thousands of dollars per month in loans, from both the province and the bank, was a constant reminder of the cost of my education. It’s hard for the learning to measure up.

One tip I wish I had been told was not to keep up with the Joneses. I have generally been good about avoiding that particular bad habit, but I took far too long to realize that many of my classmates came from way more money than I did, even when they didn’t act like it. I had a predilection for assuming that my friends aiming for non-Bay Street careers, like me, were living off of student loans, like me. So I went out for lunch as often as many of them. And I went out for drinks as often as many of them. I’d wager I bought as many clothes as many of them. I knew my rent was cheaper than many of theirs. My apartment more out-of-the-way. But I failed to realize how many of them were slow to disclose their family wealth, or the fact that one of their parents was a judge, or that their parents owned their apartment and they lived there rent free. This was stupid and naïve of me. I could not afford those lunches/drinks/clothes/widgets like they could. I would be repaying them for years. They were not worth it.

Of course, I am proud of myself for finally repaying my loans. It took a while and it could’ve taken far less time if I’d behaved more frugally while a student. That said, for a few years now, I’ve often put half of my monthly pay towards my debt. Full disclosure: my parents surprised me with a $25K cheque at my graduation, to help me repay my loans. I cannot imagine the saving they must have done to accumulate that much money in three years, while doing the same for my brother. Fuller disclosure: I did not immediately put it all down on my loans, as many would say I should have done.

I already knew I was unlikely to love practicing as a lawyer, and I had no savings, so I kept it as a safety net in case I had to abruptly quit working. And that is exactly what happened. It took a few years, and I had used some of the money for debt repayment by then, but I still had much of it. That’s what let me leave my associate position at a firm without having another job lined up, because my mental health had deteriorated so much that I didn’t know what else to do. Without that money to rely on to make my monthly debt and rent payments, there is no way I could have quit without another job. Fortunately, I found another gig within weeks; it paid less than the last one, so the parental presence in my account enabled me to take it, too. All this to say: I had help, and it was crucial.

What is the point of all this navel-gazing? I’m not so sure. An acknowledgement and a celebration, I suppose. Also a lesson in cost-benefit analysis, which I’m still learning, and hope others can learn from too. If your education takes many years to repay, you’re stuck in the student life for those years too, and it becomes harder to see the benefits of that education, which many expect to include some level of lifestyle promotion and perhaps even class treachery. Until now, I have had very little of either of those (not that I’m interested in the latter). I still live in the same apartment I moved into a decade ago to start law school. Because it’s affordable. In order to repay my debt at my salary, I couldn’t justify paying more. In many ways, my budget has resembled those of students for all of these years; I spend less money now than I did as a student. People assume I have all sorts of expendable income, because I’m a lawyer, but I never have.

I still won’t now, because the next albatross looms before me: a mortgage. Is it worth it? You tell me. I haven’t learned enough yet to say.