My total amount in student loans is $230,000.
I don't feel great about having that large amount of debt, but at the
same time, I don't let it hinder me and what I do in my life.
My name is Dr. Adrienne Colman.
I'm 30 years old. I make $100,000 a year and I live in Atlanta,
Georgia. I've lived in Atlanta my entire life and the only time I
left was to go to grad school in Florida.
I moved back because it's a great city.
It's one of the top cities for black millennials.
I love hanging out with my friends, going to the park, going to a lot
of my friends' events.
I have a full-time job that I work Monday through Thursday and a job
that I do PRN, which means as needed, that I would do Friday,
Saturday and Sunday. Since corona's started, I do not work at that
second job because it is at a skilled nursing facility.
So the contact of coronavirus is heightened because the patients do
live there and they do not want people coming in and out of the
facility. When I was 15 years old,
my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
After researching multiple sclerosis, they found out that physical
therapy had the best benefits for them that was not medication.
It's funny because I treat my brothers and my dad more than I treat my
mom. My parents are immigrants
from Jamaica. They've been here since about the 1980s and they have
taught me and my brothers a lot about money.
We were given an allowance starting at a young age, I think it was
about 6, and I had to sweep the kitchen.
And if we did not do our chores, we did not get our allowance.
I learned about personal finance through my mom and my dad and a few
of my friends who are in finance.
My dad is very much so, work very hard and then reward yourself with
your hard work. So spend money on yourself, travel, buy nice things
for yourself. But my mom, more so, she taught me about investing from
an early age. Asking for 10% of whatever we earned on allowance or
our paycheck and putting that into an account for us that we could
not touch. My relationship to money has changed since I've grown
older. I would say that my mom is very cheap and I used to have that
trait. But as I've grown, I've realized that I don't have to be cheap
in everything that I buy.
So I value quality over quantity.
I invest a lot of money with my friends by buying their art, buying
their clothes, buying their body products.
I even solicit them to help me with business decisions by using them
for their graphic design, for website design.
Anything that I need. I try to outsource that to my friends first and
give them and invest in their businesses before I go to a big
corporation. Since coronavirus has hit, my spending habits
have changed a lot.
I do not go out to eat as much.
I do not spend money on clothes and shoes because I'm not going
anywhere. I would travel at least once a month even if it was going
to the beach in Florida because I do work a lot.
Most of my travel money came from my second job, but since I'm not
working there currently, then I don't have that extra money for
travel. But we can't really go anywhere anyways right now.
So that's OK. So I put about $200 into a regular savings account,
another $200 into a high-yield savings account,
I put about $420 into my 401(k) through my job and they match that as
well. And then I put about $20 a month into my own personal Roth IRA
account. Coronavirus has
changed my financial goals.
I'm grateful that I still have my job, but in the event that I didn't,
I wouldn't have been able to survive past about 2 months.
My biggest money mistake is going to a private university for grad
school to get a degree in physical therapy.
I'm one of four kids, so my parents did not have the money to send all
of us to college. Being a physical therapist is a great job, but you
don't make the money compared to the amount of money that you spend
to go to school. My total amount of student loan debt is $230,000 and
that's combined from undergrad and graduate school.
Two years ago I ended with about $180,000 and now it's
grown to $230,000 because of interest.
I'd rather live my life than throw thousands of dollars into trying to
pay this debt off.
And it's so much I don't feel like right now that I just started my
career 2 years ago that I could get ahead of this debt.
I am on an income-based plan.
I pay a minimum amount for 20 to 25 years and at the end of that year,
I am able to have my loans discharged.
But I do have to pay taxes on the amount that is discharged.
I don't plan on waiting 20 to 25 years to see if that happens.
I do plan on creating things and making investments so that I am able
to tackle that loan when I do have a little bit more money.
If anybody out there wants to be a physical therapist, please go to a
state school because it's not worth it to go to a private school.
The steps that I'm taking to reach my financial goal is to pay down as
much of my car note and my credit card debt as fast as possible.
And I also have about $2,000 in credit card debt, but that will be
gone very soon.
If I can, I'll double up and pay $1,000 in a month just so I can hurry
up and get my car note out of the way as well.
He sent me a message one day and then I realized that we had mutual
friends. And then he asked me on a date and we went to the movies at
Atlantic Station for our first date.
My boyfriend and I have been together for 7 years and he is absolutely
great. He does save me a lot of money because he buys all my
groceries. Whenever we go out to eat, he pays for my food.
He buys all my drinks.
I don't spend a lot on gas because he drives me everywhere and he even
buys a lot of my clothes and shoes and bags.
So that's pretty great.
And he has the same philosophy about money that my dad has.
So if you work hard, then you should reward yourself for all the hard
work that you've done with either material things, vacation or stuff
like that. But he does invest, too.
He does day trading and he's also a fashion designer.
So he can make some of my clothes as well.
I wanted to be featured on Millennial Money to let other millennials
know that you can live the life that you want and live comfortably
even if you have a large amount of student loan debt.
I think the most important lesson that I've learned is to pay yourself
first and to invest a lot of money.
And don't let student loan debt hinder you from living the life that
you want. Because I know a lot of people in the U.S.
have a lot of student loan debt and they don't really know how to
tackle it. But don't let it consume your life.