Crush your student loans.
If you live in America, like me, and attended college and maybe even grad school, too, you’ve probably got student loans. Maybe you even have student loan stress and anxiety that just keep getting worse as the years go by (I used to have this BIG TIME.)
Does it feel like you’ll never pay them off? And/or do you spend a lot of time feeling angry that they exist and raging about it? I used to spend a lot of time being deeply upset about my student loans. For years, I shed many frustrated tears over this one issue. First of all, I totally believed I wouldn’t ever be able to pay them off. And on top of that, I felt incredibly resentful that I even had student loans in the first place. I had this idea that I shouldn’t have to have them, that they shouldn’t have been part of my higher education experience.
Fast forward to now, and I am happy to report to you that my loans are paid. in. full. And they have been for 2+ years.
How the hell did I get here from my previous state of resentment and hopelessness? I am dying to tell you about it. Because I want for all of you what I created - freedom from your student loans, yes, but even more importantly, the emotional freedom that comes from changing how you think about them.
And that is actually exactly how I got to where I am. I changed how I thought about my student loans. That sounds much too simple, right?! Like, what do thoughts have to do with anything??! But if you’ve been following my work for a while now, you know that thoughts are the key to everything. Because our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings create our actions.
When I felt stress and resentment about my student loans, that did not lead to my best strategizing and problem solving efforts. Stress and resentment don’t feel super comfy. When we experience stress, most of us want to get away from it. And how do we get away from uncomfortable feelings? There are many answers, but younger Kori’s path of choice was, yep, a glass of wine and a change of topic. Or a glass of wine and a long, intense rant about how grad school should be free, damnit. Which brings me to my other feeling back in the day: resentment. The untrained brain wants to get away from stress, often with a numbing or avoiding behavior. But when it comes to resentment, the untrained mind does something else: it wallows and feels sorry for itself and blames everyone else. Now, if this were helpful, that would be one thing. But again, it doesn’t lead to our best strategizing and problem solving.
Don’t get me wrong - I do think the cost of higher education should be revamped, not to mention the way interest is handled. But my resentment and stress were not impacting policy or leading to any other actionable changes in the world at large, nor were they helping me cope or make useful choices.
Changing my thoughts about my student loans meant a few things. For starters, it meant taking responsibility. (Womp womp.) While I may believe that higher ed should be available for less money, it was also my choice to attend a grad school where the out of state tuition was $25k.
Even though I wanted to be able to go to grad school for less (or for free!), that was not the offer I received. I felt resentful about that. But it was also me who said yes instead of taking another year on applications or working to get in-state residency before starting the program. No one made me say yes, and I had to remember that in order to let go of some of that resentment. It helped with the stress, too. A lot of that stress and resentment was about feeling out of control, like I’d agreed to some deal I couldn’t possibly uphold. Taking responsibility gave me some power back and helped me see that it wasn’t that I couldn’t uphold my end of the deal (paying back all that money, and interest). It was that I didn’t want to. Moreover, I didn’t think I should have to. But my resistance to my student loans wasn’t going to make them go away or pay them down any faster. So I decided to release the idea that I shouldn’t have to pay them. Again, not because I condone the cost of higher education these days. But because it wasn’t helping me get the result I actually wanted: student loans paid in full.
When I stopped feeling sorry for myself and pretending that I couldn’t handle the situation, much of the drama went away and I was left with a very simple math problem. There was how much money I brought in. There was my cost of living. And there were my student loans. When I stopped thinking the loans shouldn’t be there, I could pay lots of money to the loans month by month and feel good about it. When I thought the loans shouldn’t be there, even big payments felt like they weren’t enough (and I resented spending money on them vs the other things I wanted at that time).
If you have student loan stress and resentment, you can change your thoughts, too. Changing your thoughts won’t make your student loans go away overnight. But it will change your whole experience of them. It will help you feel good as you pay them down instead of feeling like you’re bleeding money.
Ready to pay those student loans off and crush some other goals, too?
I’d be delighted to help you out with that. Also, bonus: my coaching packages are totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience (and yes, I’ve worked with people who are not native English speakers with great success). Learn more here.