Can Writing Pay Off Your Student Loan?

Original Principal Balance: $39,077.28.

Holy shit.

That’s how much I owed the day I graduated. Forty thousand dollars, for a liberal arts education. And that’s not counting grad school. Since I wanted to be a writer, I refused to get a “real” job, like a responsible person, and instead just dicked around, taking minimum wage jobs that left me plenty of time to write. Oh, and let’s not forget my fave method of survival, mouching off gainfully employed relatives and friends.

Really pathetic, now that I think about it.

Was it worth it to go to college? Did I need to pay $40,000 to learn to write? Honestly, I don’t know. I did learn to write much better in college, and I learned to do historical research, and I learned to identify bullshit, of which there was quite a lot. (Don’t get me started on postmodernism.)

The real question is, can writing ever pay off the debt incurred? I avoided the issue by being so poor, I could defer payment, or by going back to school to defer payment. When I married, I still owed pretty much everything. My husband, bless his patient soul, essentially took over paying the debt for me. That’s not fair to him, though, and I’d like to be able to pay it off myself with my own earnings.