“Just heard (would love to know if this is true!) that the children of members of Congress do not have to pay back student loans. Does anyone know one way or the other for sure?”

Yes. It’s false. There’s apparently an email chain (and probably a facebook repost chain the way these things work) going about but it’s not true – you can check Snopes.

From the Department of Education:

“”There are no provisions under Title IV (federal student aid programs) that provide loan forgiveness for Members of Congress or their families or staff (beyond what any other borrower would be eligible for),” said Jane Glickman, a spokesperson for the department, in an e-mail statement.”

While I understand that some cultures expect young people to move out on their own immediately, there is something to be learned from other people’s way of living. Shared housing with grown children, married or single, can be not only an incredibly frugal way of life in financial terms, but it can add so much to everyone’s life exeriences as well. Middle class Americans seem to believe that individual nuclear family housing is the only way to live. We have friends, neighbors and relatives who live in multigenerational settings, and seem to relish the family connectivity that comes with it. While our careers would not have permitted it due to frequent moves, I don’t think that living with family should automatically be seen as some kind of failure or disfunction. Friends turned the second floor of their large home into a separate apartment, for example, so that a married child and their family were close but still had privacy, as well as a much better school district, large shared yard for gardening, and lower taxes in a nicer town than the traditional single family houses they could have afforded to buy. We have other friends whose widowed mother lives with them and is a valued part of their family. Their children have a vastly different perspective on aging and care of family members than most of the other young people I know. My mother in law lived with us off and on over a period of years and when she became too ill to live alone, moved in permanently until she passed away. As the US population ages, perhaps more families will look at shared housing as an opportunity to maximize financial resources as well as enable older parents to maintain more independent living instead of being forced to move to senior housing or nursing homes. Again, while it won’t work for everyone, the assumption that every young person should move out into a place of their own could at least be looked at in a more thoughtful and critical manner.

It is amazing how many well educated, almost middle-aged people still cannot tell the difference between needs and wants. The sooner one learns to distinguish the two, the better it is.

Good Post Trent!

BEFORE entering the real world, not after. After is often too late. Every freshman college student should know how quickly their advanced education will pay for itself. Real life jobs in your field of study, not guesstimates off a pie chart from the high school guidance office or a recruiter’s folio. If jobs in your career path will not easily cover the cost of your education, choose a better major or skip college and go directly into your field of interest. Inability to pay off student loans quickly will make your adult life a nightmare before it begins. When you purchase education with borrowed money, student loans will haunt you forever if you can not pay them back – compounding interest is working against you.

I agree with the above comment about health insurance. With the recent law, you should be included on your parent’s plan (assuming they have one) until you turn 26 or get a job that offers insurance.

30 minutes of reading articles on this very blog will let a young investor know that index funds if available are a great choice for passive investors just starting out with a long time span, and that Target Date funds are also a good choice for ‘set it and forget it’ investing.

That small criticism aside, this is one of your better posts in a long time. I want to share it with my sister who is in 3rd year university.

In a nutshell: The question asked for financial information, not life advice. Not that the life advice isn’t useful (and a lot of it is certainly relevant to finances), but it’s answering a slightly different question, I think.

I would add two things:

1.Learn how to cook/ eat at home whenever possible/ grocery shop regularly. It’s really all one thing, but it is a great life habit that saves tons.

2. Always maintain health insurance. This one misstep can wipe out all the advances made by following your entire list!