"I'm an old Marine. I'm going to follow the chain of command. I can go until we hit God."
I finally went back to
Learning to be organized and persistent in wrangling my college bills is proving far more educational than any of my actual classes. I want credits for it!
Sorry for the long patch again of radio silence -- it's been a month of travel and bureaucracy. I'm in one of those stretches right now where I feel like my sole purpose in life is to facilitate the movement of bits of paper.
This week, it's New School University I'm shuffling paper around for. I'm heading into my third and final year of finishing off a degree there. When I enrolled, New School kindly gave me two scholarships. I hadn't directly applied for these and had no idea exactly what they were for or how they worked, but the financial aid office told me they would be renewed each year automatically, so long as I didn't flunk out. Excellent.
Less kindly, New School has flubbed the renewal each year. The first time, I was willing to chalk it up as oversight. Twice makes me question the competence of the financial aid office.
When I got my financial statements last year, my scholarships weren't listed. Fortunately, the problem was easily solved: I fired off an email to the financial aid office, and got an email back the next day saying "whoops, we'll fix that." A day or so later, the scholarships showed up in the online financial system info. Yay. One was for half as much as it had been the previous year, but the other was for twice as much. Since the total amount worked out to what I was expecting, I shrugged and went with it.
This year, the scholarships once again failed to show up in the records. However, this time my email about it went unanswered. So I hauled myself in to the open office hours yesterday to attempt to straighten it. Scholarship 1, I was told, should show up every year -- it not doing so this time was an oversight, and oops, they'll fix that right away. Scholarship 2, however, the counselor said, is need-based, and since my FAFSA kicked up a higher "student contribution" amount this year, my scholarship died.
Grumble. No one told me it was need-based, I muttered. But, ok. At least I have an answer, and since I do make more now than I did in past years, I suppose I can't complain too strenuously.
But when I checked the records this morning, I saw that Scholarship 1 came through for the same amount it did last year -- which is half what it paid out the first year. Last year, I had Scholarship 2 balancing that out. Since Scholarship 2 is now gone, Scholarship 1's decrease is an issue. It looks like I'll be dragging back to the financial aid office. Grr.
Meanwhile, Amex has finally just resolved the last of the complications from my April credit-card-information-theft incident. Despite Amex's "we'll take care of contesting everything" assurances, several of the charges stuck, until I called and filed another round of protests. Two were take off my bill a month later, but Amex declined to reverse one charge -- the Domino's pizza order. Its denial letter said I had apparently authorized the charge, and included a signed receipt as proof. A receipt from Philly, which I was not anywhere near at the time, signed in handwriting that isn't mind. Grr. (This entry is bought to you by the word "Grr.")
So I called Amex again, protested again, and this time it worked. This week the Domino's charge finally came off my bill, and I got an "oops, sorry!" note in the snail mail.
I'm also hacking through piles of paperwork from the ongoing medical drama. That will be another entry. But the whole paperwork stack, and the frequency with which I find myself spending time sorting out overcharges and erroneous charges, suggests that people who don't do this end up paying a lot of fees they shouldn't have to. I wasn't always as organized as I am now about finances. ("Gibbering ball of denial" would more accurately describe me and my financial strategies for the first year or so I was out of college.)
Someone (exactly who seems to be controversial) famously said that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." It seems it's also the price of financial security.
I started this blog because I didn't see a lot of personal-finance writing out there aimed at twentysomethings, people who are more worried about paying off student loan and credit card debt than about diversifying their stock portfolios. One book I keep running into is Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young, by Village Voice columnist Anya Kamenetz. Salon has an interview with her up today.
I'll have to check out the book. It's an issue I have mixed feelings on. I have plenty of friends who have been caught in the kind of economic turmoil Kamenetz describes, of low-wage, no-benefits jobs and little chance to grab hold of any kind of corporate ladder. On the other hand, I also know plenty of people like me, who moved from college into fairly stable corporate jobs, get treated decently, and have never been laid off. (I also worked at a dot-com, a company with poor management and a dicey future. I saw the writing on the wall and left before the layoffs started.) And then there's the next level up, of my college companions who went into i-banking or high-end consulting and landed starting salaries that would make anyone's head spin.
It's easy to tut-tut about "mistakes" people make. The one thing I did in college that locked me in for a fairly stable future was intern like crazy. I knew I wanted to go into journalism; I knew journalism jobs turn on clips and experience; I knew those would matter more for my future career than grades or other academic credentials. That made it much easier for me to work in a field where jobs can be hard to come by. (Though not so hard as advertised, in my view, if you're willing to work in trade or other niche areas of the media world.) I still believe strongly that anyone with the foresight to do some planning and the willingness to consider a range of jobs can come out of college with bright career prospects, in nearly any field, no matter how competitive. I also think my future would have been a lot trickier if I hadn't been lucky enough to know off the bat what field I wanted to go into.
I'll agree, though, that there are some distinctive challenges facing our generation, starting with rising college costs and too-easily-available credit. Yes, personal responsibility means it's your own damn fault if you sign on the dotted line for money you can't immediately repay, but I would also like to see strong curbs on how heavily credit card lenders can push cards with sky-high limits on those with paltry paychecks.
College costs are the more insidious problem, because the numbers involved are so scarily high. It's utterly absurd for liberal-arts colleges to be charging annual tuitions higher than what their average graduates will be making in post-graduation starting salaries. Again, yes, there's a personal responsibility angle, and yes, people can choose to go to public and other lower-cost institutions, but even those are falling prey to tuition creep. I don't know what the answer is on that front. I'm just very grateful I don't have kids' college tuition's to worry about.
I honestly don't know if we have it worse than our parents. My sense is that we have less security but more flexibility. That's a great trade for those who make good choices and catch lucky breaks, and a bad one for those whose missteps or misfortunes take them to the edge of the cliff.
Throughout January, I collect tax documents that show up in our mailbox and toss them in The Tax Pile. We don't itemize, have investment income, or do anything particularly complicated -- we each have one W-2, I have a few 1099s from freelancing, and I have a 1098-E each year for student loan interest. That's it.
So it rarely occurs to me to look for tax deductions for which some financial institution has not sent me a form. But as I was buzzing through TaxAct, the screen on tuition expenses caught my eye. Well, hmm. New School never sent me any forms, but I have tuition expenses in spades thanks to the endless Finish My Degree project. So I started researching what I can deduct.
I don't appear to qualify for Hope or lifetime learning credits, but I do nail the tuition and fees deduction, which allows you to lower your federal taxable income by up to $4,000. You can still claim the deduction on expenses you're using student loans to pay. Score! Claiming this got me nearly $1,000 extra back on my refund. New York State also let me deduct tuition expenses -- up to $10,000, this time. That notched my state refund up a few hundred.
If you're eligible, make sure to claim 'em. Maybe the memory of the deductions will ease the pain a bit next time I hand New School another of its gigantic tuition checks.
There have been lots of headlines lately about major changes in student-loan legislation that will reduce the amount the federal government spends on education subsidies. One practical offshoot of this is that rates are about to jump this summer, to 6.8% on Stafford loans, up from the current 4.7% (for students currently in school. For those out of school, it's 5.3%). Those with loans still lingering can take advantage of consolidation to lock their rates down before the hike hits.
I've been nervous about consolidation. I've heard the horror stories: Consolidate once, and you can never go back. If rates go down, you're still locked in -- unlike a mortgage, you can't refinance your consolidation.
But I'm also hearing the horror stories about waiting to consolidate and getting glued into this summer's higher rates. I decided to take my 4.7% rate and run with it. (Consolidating can also lower your monthly loan payments, by extending the repayment term. Of course, stretching the loan over a longer period increases the interest you ultimately pay. Fortunately, there are no prepayment penalties -- I'm planning to keep paying at a higher rate than my minimum. If you're crunched for cash, though, consolidation can be very helpful.)
I also held off on consolidating because I didn't think I should do it while I'm still incurring new loans. Turns out, thought, that that's actually a really good time to do it. While you're in school (or in the just-left grace period), rates are slightly lower. Also, while you only get one shot at consolidating, having a new, unconsolidated loan is a reset button. You can't redo already consolidated loans, but you can redo the process if you have a new loan to add to the mix.
Consolidation has never been easier. Instead of mucking around with long and intimidating paper forms, you can do it all online, either through the government's website or through your lender's. (I did all this through Citibank's site.) Filling out all the paperwork for mine took less than an hour, and all the info I needed was available online -- I just cut and pasted balances into the consolidation form.
Student loans are daunting, but being an ostrich about them is costly. I'm kicking myself for not consolidating a year ago, when rates were even lower. Grr.
