We’re going to talk about one of the questions that we get asked a lot…“Can I graduate from college without any student loan debt?”
Well, yes, you can, and there are a lot of options with being able to have money to pay for college. Some start early in your life.
Number one - maybe your parents can help you out.
When you were born, did your parents set up any type of college savings account for you? Typically, there are 529 accounts. If you didn’t get any type of scholarship, maybe your parents can help by just paying out of pocket.
Or, different states have savings accounts that you could set up and then utilize to take advantage of tax-deferred growth. You can use it within the college of your residence.
Oftentimes, if somebody comes to us and their kid might be a year or two into college and they haven’t done any savings - well, then it’s going to be a lot harder to be able to graduate without any debt, unless they’re able to take advantage of certain things like, maybe, some financial aid.
Some of our clients may take a military option, where they commit to joining the military at a later date after college, and some of their classes can be taken care of through the United States government via the military.
Other options could be - utilizing community colleges for the first couple of years.
I know here in Memphis and in the state of Tennessee, there are really inexpensive options to help pay for community college. These will help you qualify for the later years of your undergraduate school.
Another option that we see is working throughout your college years.
I know it can be really hard and difficult, but I’ve had a lot of clients who have worked part-time or even worked full-time and have been able to stretch out the years that they have been in college because they were having to pay for it year by year.
So, there are many ways of going about doing it.
Many of my clients have student loans because they may have pursued professional schooling later, such as medical or dental school. Those are pretty hefty price tags. And student loans are something that, oftentimes, 95% of the people are going to have to utilize because they don’t have those hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for that professional schooling. If so, talk to a financial planner. Talk to somebody about taking on student loans before you do it so that we can help you make the right decision. Whether it’s going to be a private loan or a public loan, we want to make sure that we don’t make bad decisions on the front end. It makes paying them off later on in life a whole lot easier.
Also, there are so many ways to pay off your student loans once you are done with school. For the people who graduated and are looking at a large student loan bill - that’s one of the first things we want to tackle - how does that play into your financial plan, and how can we adjust that and start paying it off? These are some options that we’ve seen throughout time to help pay for college.