The Geography Of Student Loan Debt In America
Big news today Accidental FIRE readers – I have a guest post on MillennialMoneyMan.com!
Bobby Hoyt is the man behind that blog and if you’re not familiar with his story he went from a high school band director with $40,000 of student loan debt to a blogger and entrepreneur who’s been crushing it with his blog and other projects.
I’m a mapping nerd if you’re not aware and I found a great report about the geography of student loan debt in America. Since Bobby has been passionate about the student loan debt issue I thought it would be a great post to run on his blog.
I want to thank Bobby for this opportunity – now get on over there and read it!
I love creative info graphs, too. A few things I found myself wondering:
You write that “The data clearly shows the higher the income, the more credit card debt a household has. According to this report, households with an income over $160,000 have an average of more than $11,000 in credit card debt. Lifestyle inflation is real.” I wonder what % of the HI HH pay off balances every month.
I wonder if there’s a way to track people who use student loans for purposes other than education. (I have a work friend who took out over $100,000 in student loans over five years and never had any intention of completing the courses. I don’t remember the details of how she made it work.)
Thanks for the interesting article.
-LB
Interesting comment! As I high earner who always paid off all of his cc debt I do think it’s a good point. When reports like this get their data, it’s a snapshot in time. So many or some of those families could be paying off every month.
But let’s do the math here. They say the “average” cc debt is $11,000 for those high earners. If a family had that as a monthly debt that they were paying off every month, that would mean they would be spending $132,000 per year in credit card debt alone! And you can’t put a mortgage on a credit card, so that $132k would have to be non-housing spending. I’m not saying there aren’t folks who spend this much, but I’d have to guess that to spend that much you’d have to make well over $200,000 pre-tax.
My assumption is that some of those families could be paying off that cc debt every month, but most are carrying some debt.
As for the second point, I have no idea on that one! That seems illegal and sketchy to me, to use student loan money for other things. You’d think once the loan was given they would simply require proof to see that it went to a school, right?
Look at hanging out with the big boys! Nice one mate. Shocking topic though, this is not sustainable to have education being this expensive. That debt is going to have serious issues for many people.
Ha, I’m trying Cheesy. Been writing a lot so thought I’d pitch one and he liked it. And yes, both college tuition prices and the loan culture have to stop or something bad will break. It’s ugly.
Woo hoo, congrats on the guest post! 🙂
You inspired me!