Student Loan Strategies: Options for Education Financing , Repayment and Forgiveness

Welcome to EWA’s Finlit podcast. EWA is a fee only RAA based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We hope all listeners of this podcast will benefit as we deep dive into complex financial topics that we will make simplified for you. And we hope that this really serves as a catalyst so that you can make the best financial planning decisions for your family and also save time. Welcome everyone to this week’s Finlit podcast, joined here by Jameson and Chris. And today we’re tackling student loans. So we’re going to cover this in two areas. One is just going to be advice for parents that are sending their kids to college and don’t necessarily have it fully funded or just giving them general direction. And then secondly, we’re going to talk about someone that has school loans. What are some of the different strategies, thought processes?

 

How do you get a financial plan in sync when you have school loans? So, Chris Jameson, thanks for joining. So, first of all, let’s talk about the stress tests that we’ve developed for some financial planning. So one examples of this would be like a house. Chris, what stress test do we have around it? Purchasing a house? We’ve got two that we make sure clients pass. Yeah.

 

The first one is making sure that the home expenses fall within 30% of your net take home. And then the second, when it comes to the loan, making sure that the total loan amount is less than two x your gross income.

 

So an example, if someone’s bringing home 20,000 a month of net income, 30% of that would be 6000 a month. So we’d want to make sure that someone’s housing expenses, including principal, interest, taxes, insurance and some general upkeep would be under 6000 a month. And then further than that, if that family is making half a million dollars of total gross income, we want to make sure the total home value is not more than a million dollars because the bigger the home, the more maintenance there is. And so we figured out that if you follow, if you fit both of these tests, this can really help us reverse engineer into what kind of down payment you should make, how big of a house you could be in. And this isn’t like what will the bank approve you for?

 

This is like what will your financial plan allow if you’re still balancing and navigating the artwork of living now, but also funding kids college and retiring, becoming financially independent at a certain age, et cetera. So we’ve now developed that for school loans. So for school loans, we found that generally the generation, this is like the first time in history, if you look at kids in their twenty s and thirty s are less successful financially than their parents. At the same time, when the parents were twenty s or thirty s, it’s the first time that this has happened more often than not. And so school loans are often a reason why kids coming out of school are really strapped and don’t have the capacity to afford a home or don’t have the capacity to even move out of their house and start a life.

 

So, in general, what we found is that if you have a school loan balance greater than one times your expected income based upon your major, you’re going to have financial issues. So for an example, if someone is an accountant major and they’re expected, let’s say, within three years, to make 75,000, that person should not exit school with more than $75,000 of loans. Let’s use the same example of 100,000. If you’re making 100,000, you’re probably netting close to $5,600 a month. And if you have $100,000 of school loans at a 7% rate, and we generally recommend you at least pay them off in ten years, your payment would be 1161 per month. So basically, 20% of your take home immediately is going to school loans. If you fall in that rule, and that’s generally where we want to see people see is 20% or less.

 

If you’re a doctor, obviously, and it’s highly specialized, you may come out with 300, but your income after you’re done with residency, fellowship, et cetera, may equate after the three year rule to that. So, James and Chris, anything to add to that one x rule?

 

I just think it’s really important to understand if you’re taking out debt to get. I just think a lot of people don’t understand the actual income that you will earn based on the degree you get. I’ll just use myself, for example, I literally had no idea. I didn’t know if what I was taking out was relative to the income I was going to make. Obviously, it worked out for me, but there’s a lot of people that take out a ton of debt and come out with they’ll spend $100,000 on undergrad in some degree that’s not specialized, and they come out making like $30,000 a year. That’s a pretty poor trade off. So really just awareness around what are you going to study and what’s the income going to be is probably the biggest thing.

 

Absolutely perfect. Well, Chris, let’s go through so if assuming someone has school loans and what are all the options? Let’s first talk about the general public. That doesn’t work for the non for profit. Let’s say that’s not eligible for the public student loan forgiveness program, which we’re going to go through in great detail. What would be some general advice we’d give and what options do everybody have out there?

 

Yeah, most of the time you’re coming out of school mostly with federal debt that’s issued by the government or less common. You can have private student loans, but say more often than not, what we see are the federal loans. And from there you can choose standard repayment plans that are set on a term of years versus income driven plans, which we’ll get to at the public service. Loan forgiveness. But those make the payment a little relative to what you’re earning so that you can afford it on a budget standpoint. But to Jameson’s point about the debt relative to how much you’re earning, that payment could work monthly, but then ten years of payments could go by and you didn’t even put a dent in the principal.

 

So really important that you’re picking a plan that makes sense for you today, but also keeping in mind how long that’s going to be in place. So maybe refinancing or picking a term based option is going to make sense in a lot of cases.

 

So we can refinance, and I would look at interest rates. Obviously we can get a much better interest rate. Refinance can be a good option. You could refinance in 510, 15 years, 20 years, whatever you want. Now, once you do this, the debt is yours. There’s certain advantages of federal loans. You can go on forbearance for several periods, whereas a bank, if you refinance, they may have some more stringent rules on skipping payments if you lose a job or whatnot. The second thing you have to consider as well is if you were going to get your loans forgiven or if there’s a chance you’re going to go to a non for profit on a ten year, anyone that has federal loans, there’s actually payment plans that you can go on a 20 or 25 year forgiveness plan.

 

The big catch, though, at the end, is that those balances at the end, if there’s a balance, end up getting taxed on a federal and state level. So if you add up all of your payments over the 20 or 25 years, then you add the tax liability. Is it, how much in total are you going to pay versus just refinancing and paying for ten or 15 years? Usually a lot more. And school loans, often, we find, are a huge source of stress. And so then you’re adding another ten years, essentially, of that weight on your back of that stress. So not every decision should be made just purely based upon interest rates or what makes sense financially.

 

You also have to look at the peace of mind factor here as well, and the ability to turn the chapter and get that debt off the table as quickly as possible. So we have analyzed that in great detail. In very few scenarios do we recommend going after the 20 or 25 year plan for the two reasons. One is all the payments for that long, plus the taxes, and then secondly is that usually people’s income will go high enough that usually in the year 15, 1617 ish, that the payments will get so big that you’ll end up paying the loans off because it’s based upon income. Typically.

 

I know there’s some new regulations with the Save plan Jameson is going to walk us through, but in general, if you’re not, work for a non for profit, if you’re not a teacher, we’re recommending, let’s go through a detailed budget. Let’s look. Does it make sense to refinance? And how does it make sense to refinance? Get these paid off in a reasonable term. In general, we recommend having a plan to get the loans at a minimum paid off in ten years. Most of our clients have gotten them paid off in like three or four years because we’re obviously working with higher income clients. So let’s now get into the public student loan forgiveness program.

 

So the public student loan forgiveness program is something that is if you work at a government or a 501, if you work full time, which is defined, I believe, it’s 30 or 32 hours per week. And if you have federal direct loans, and the other requirement is you have to be on a qualifying payment, such as an income based repayment, a repay or a save option that’s going to be calculated every year based upon your tax return. If you do ten years or 120 payments at the end, these loans will be forgiven tax free, actually. So it’s the best of both worlds. So the questions you need to ask yourself is like, if you’re a physician or someone working in healthcare at a hospital, will you be there or a non for profit for the full ten years? What happens if you change?

 

And you would have been on track by refinancing, and now you’re off track. So our general recommendation, if you do this, save the difference. So, for example, if you had a couple of hundred thousand dollars of school loans. And let’s say your payment under the PSLF Public Loan forgiveness program was 2000 a month. For you to get those loans paid off over ten years, be 4000 a month, we’d recommend go in the plan, pay as little as possible, but then save the difference into an investment account that we’re tracking the interest rate. So that other 2000 a month. So 2000 goes into the loans, 2000 goes in the investment account. And that way in year five, six, or if you want to make a change, we can take the balance of that and apply it.

 

And you’re still going to be on track for having the ten year payoff. So we don’t want to have our money temperature and our lifestyle be dependent on something that we don’t know is going to happen until the ten years is up. So we want to have that backup account locked in as much as possible. So, Jameson, walk us through how the, obviously there were articles four or five years ago about how the public student loan forgiveness program, like 98% of applicants were denied. Then Covid hit all kinds of relief. People didn’t have to make payments first, almost two years, and now the policies and the requirements have just loosened up so much. People that weren’t making the correct payments are now suddenly eligible.

 

So talk to us about generally the period of where it became really loose and then what clients are looking for or what potential people on the public should look forgiveness program, what considerations they needed to have moving forward.

 

Yeah, so a lot to unpack there. The first part you said it’s actually your boy Dave Ramsay hates on, he quotes this all the time, like, 98% don’t get forgiven. Which is true or was true, probably not now. But the reason that wasn’t true and why you read about this is people were applying that didn’t work for nonprofits or weren’t. They had private loans or they just didn’t qualify at all. So before, a lot of people that applied, they didn’t get their loans forgiven. But now we’ve had, I know all of us sitting here, we’ve had a number of clients who’ve gotten loans forgiven over the past couple of years that enrolled 810 years ago. So it is coming to fruition. It is happening. And before it was a lot more strict. You had to have certain types of loans.

 

You had to get your employment certified every year. There’s all of these things that needed to, I guess, the boxes you had to check to qualify. And so what had happened basically was during COVID March, April, whenever it was of 2020, they start paused all the payments. And all of those payments going forward for, I guess, was about three years that you weren’t making any payments, there was no interest on your loans. Those still counted as PSLF payments. So that was kind of the first thing. Then there was a waiver. I don’t remember what it was, 2021 or 2022 that was passed that basically said all these payments are going to count. And then they just started loosening up a lot of the stipulations.

 

And so things like, I’ll give you an example of a surgeon I work with that he went through four years of training and then another four years of fellowship, maybe. So eight total years of training. And he had deferred, had a family, had kids all through that. So he had signed up for the, forget what it’s called, the forbearance, where you can’t make the payments. You just don’t make enough money to make the payments because he was on a resident salary, and so he didn’t make payments for six years. Gets a job, specialized surgeon. This was in 2020 and making like a million dollars a year. So he had, I think, four years left, three or four years left on the payments.

 

And we kind of did the math and it was like, well, you didn’t qualify the past six years because you weren’t enrolled. And your income now is going to be way too high, where if you’re one of these income driven repayment plans, your loans are going to end up getting paid off before they would get forgiven. So we didn’t refinance. We were going to refinance, but then Covid hit and all the payments got paused. So fast forward now, three years. This was sometime in 2023, were about to refinance as the payments were going to kick back in. And I said, hold on, let’s recheck this, because there’s all of these regulations that they had lifted now.

 

So we called and they basically approved all of those payments for those six, eight years, whatever it was, that he was in forbearance that previously hadn’t qualified. And now with the last three years, he was working full time at a nonprofit. He just got his loans. They approved his loan forgiveness. He never made a payment.

 

So all that being said was forgiven.

 

Yeah, there’s like 400 something thousand dollars of loans that were about to refinance and pay off for someone making.

 

A million a year. Yeah, I know this is a very polarizing talk. People have opinions on that. But, I mean, in the reality, the rules are what the rules are, and we’ve had probably over the last couple of years, we’ve counted up like over $50 million of school loans forgiven for our physician clients. So glad we put in the efforts to figure this program out and guide them through. A lot of clients have gotten the loan sitting on a couple of hundred thousand dollars of extra savings so that the loan backup accounts as well. So it’s been pretty cool to see. And these are physicians who went through 1012 years of high stress to now serve their communities in medical care. So good for them, because now as a lot of people think physician, they don’t have.

 

The reality is like, they’ve delayed their life for ten or 15 years and now they need to do a lot to get it back on track for retirement and their kids college, et cetera. So it’s been a blessing for them to get this big burden off their back and be able to focus on their career paths and serve in the communities and obviously raising their families.

 

Yeah, I would say bottom line, just with all how loose the rules are now, just actionable item would just be check, call and check that payments you thought didn’t qualify in the past probably count now so you can get a bunch of payments counted.

 

So a lot of times, like you said, we had these neurosurgeons who would do the calculations. And after fellowship, after seven, eight years of training, even though there was only, if they did those payments, it was like 400, $500 a month payments for seven or eight years during residency and fellowships. The reality is the two years, the income will be so high that they’ll end up paying all the loans off in the end. But now with these changes, with the save plan, et cetera, with ability to file taxes separately to keep low payments. We’ll talk about that in a second. It’s going to make sense for a lot of people to go through with the public student loan forgiveness program. And I have a couple of examples where we helped.

 

First one, a neurologist here in Pittsburgh, he was going to Texas and he was deciding between a non for profit job and a private practice. And so basically at the similar incomes, like the private practice didn’t pay him an extra ten grand. So he’s like, I want to do that, but my loans, he was strapped with like 400 grand of student loans. And so we figured out he had, at that .6 years left on the public student loan forgiveness. So if he went to the non for profit and did six more years of like a $2,000 a month payment, his loans would be gone.

 

And so then what we did is we figured out what he would need to make over those six years higher income, then adjust it for taxes for him to self pay the loans in six years and end up being like 57,000 a year of a higher income that he would need to make gross before taxes to get to the same spot in a lower income because of the student loan forgiveness program. And so he took that back to the private practice, and instead of paying him 250, they offered him 300 on the spot right off the start. So he went with the private practice. We refinanced, we got the loans, and it was cool to see because that became a negotiation factor. And student loans like practices that want you will understand. Student loans are your biggest stress, typically financially.

 

And so they’ll want to help you and structure a contract that makes sense. Then fast forward. And we’ve had probably to all of us, probably 100 plus negotiations of contracts that we’ve used student loans as a factor. Those were back in our early days, and now we’re mostly working with clients that have on the back end of these or that have more mature in their financial plan. But it was definitely a huge blessing for us to be able to help so many clients with their student loans. And we want to do this podcast to really just learn all the tough knowledge and lessons we’ve learned along the way and how people with school loans can make this as stress free as possible. It’s a highly stressful thing. So let’s talk about some case examples that we’ve learned along the years, guys.

 

So, if hypothetically, let’s talk about three examples. So, a single person has a physician, is in a residency, and has $300,000 of school loans. A couple of things we want to do is make sure their loans are federal direct. If they’ve already made payments, they’ve got to be really careful, because if some are direct, some are not. They consolidate everything. They’re resetting their payments to zero. I know those rules.

 

I don’t know.

 

I think those rules back into play now. There was like this Covid exclusions, but we need to be careful about that. The second, not resetting your payments unnecessarily, but you need to make sure your loans are direct so they qualify towards the public student loan forgiveness program. And then you need to see, based upon the dates of your loans, what plan are you eligible for and are you planning on getting married? Because repay was a very common strategy. Revised pay as you earn took 10% of discretionary income, for example. But it didn’t allow you, if you become married in the future, to file taxes separately, so it would take both incomes into play. So let’s say you married another doctor who didn’t have school loans, and that doctor is making the same amount as you.

 

Well, that income would come into play and then force your payment to double if you were on a revised pay as you earned, so you could go instead of a 10% discretionary income, you go to a 15% base and do income based repayment. But you only have one time to flip back and forth of those. So you have to be really careful of which payment you take right off the bat. But now enter a new plan that just got introduced during COVID which was called save. And now this is very similar to repay, but also allows you to file taxes separately. So if you’re a single person, generally recommend to go on the save plan. If you get married in the future, you can sniper shot your income separate from your future spouse’s income and keep that payment low.

 

And then at that point, it’s a really detailed analysis of which is bigger, the student loan payment savings or the tax savings by filing separately. And usually the student loan savings are astronomical. And we’re losing a little bit in taxes, not a lot. And then after ten years, we’re getting more and more forgiven. So that’s the single. The other thing we’d recommend is establish a loan backup account, save the difference so that in ten years, no matter what, whether the loans are forgiven or not, you have a balance enough in that brokerage account, essentially, that’s diversified, invested properly, that you could just wipe out the balance. Worst case scenario, if you moved unexpectedly to a private practice that didn’t qualify for the ten year forgiveness program, and if the loans get forgiven. Now you have the best of both worlds.

 

Now you have a big investment account that you can allocate towards financial independence earlier on. So working because you want to, not because you have to, or potentially for college planning for kids, for future kids. So other considerations we highly recommend. Disability insurance is key for these physicians have school loans because school loans, they’re forgiven on death if you’re federal loans, but they’re not forgiven unless you meet the standards of permanent disability, basically can’t do anything. So if you’re a physician, you can’t do your physician work, but you could still do some consulting work or some, maybe some legal review. School loans aren’t going anywhere, so have a disability insurance that can come into play and replace some of your income to be able to manage those obligations still as well. Any other recommendations that you can think of in that single example?

 

Any other considerations that would come into play?

 

Example of a single tax filer? Yes. Disability insurance is huge because if you’re disabled, you can’t be employed, most likely can’t be employed by a nonprofit where loans aren’t forgiven. Yeah. We can go through the difference between the save plan if you want, but anything to add? Single?

 

Yeah. What’s the main difference between the revised pays you were in and the save plan?

 

So the big difference is you said the tax filing. So if you were on repay and you tried to file separate, there’s some nuances to this, but high level, both incomes come into play.

 

Yeah.

 

So the save plan, you can file separate, and it’s only going to just.

 

Like income based repayment.

 

Yeah. So that’s 1 second thing, the payments monthly, it’s a different calculation based on percentage of discretionary income. Usually it’s a little bit lower than repay. And then the other difference from the unpaid interest each month that you don’t pay. So money that goes towards principal and interest, but whatever’s left over interest repay, 50% of that gets forgiven on just the unsubsidized.

 

So if you look at, like, if someone has 300 grand of school loans, usually the cap on subsidized loans is really low per year. It’s like six or seven grand a year. Generally, all we’ve analyzed is a million times, not a million times like hundreds of times. But if someone has 300 grand of school loans, probably 30 grand of it subsidized, 270 is unsubsidized. So in the repay plan 270, let’s say a 7% interest rate would be 18,900 of interest, and the payment would go into that. Let’s say four grand, that would be 14,900 of interest, and half of that would be forgiven. So almost $7,450 of interest every year in the repay. And that’s very attractive. But if you end up not getting the loans forgiven, that’s less money that you have to pay.

 

If you end up getting your loans forgiven, it’s all irrelevant. But that’s a huge advantage of repay. And then real quick, I’m going to say pay is your own, which is an older plan. All the subsidized interest gets taken off the table. But again, the subsidized interest is very low. I don’t think pays you in for most people. Is that viable of an option? The repay would be the way to go. But what’s the difference?

 

Save, all that interest gets forgiven.

 

100% of it.

 

Yeah. So if you’re on repay, you automatically flip over to save, which every time I’ve seen save is more efficient than repay. There was one example I saw where the individual was on pay as you earn and pay as you earn actually was a better, lower monthly payment, was a better outcome than save.

 

And again, if you’re getting the loans forgiven after ten years, the pay is. You were an option. You’re going to have a lot bigger of a balance at the end, because only the subsidized interest is. Who cares? The whole thing, whether it’s 300 grand or 400 grand at the end, it’s all getting forgiven. The only ramification will be if you jump off the plan, then save, even though you’re paying higher will be a much better result if you end up having to absorb the liability back to yourself and without forgiveness at the end.

 

Yeah.

 

So the save is like the safest option, most flexible option, even if it’s a little bit of a higher payment than pays or. And it’s still generalities, like everyone’s case by case and generalities for someone that’s not married or married, not sure if they’re going to get married or thinking about getting married, all of those ramifications. Save is going to give us the most flexibility and the most protection if you end up absorbing that loan balance at the end. So it’s good legislation that came out by the government for addressing some of the penalties, essentially, if you’re married or not married or based upon when you took out the student loans. It was kind of crazy. All the details that went into these. We really simplified it.

 

We had clients that still haven’t gotten married for student loan purposes. So it’s like.

 

That’s true a lot of things. Think of three right off the bat.

 

It’s like impacts. Huge impact with your.

 

A lot of angry fiance. Seriously. Not kidding, actually. So thank you, government, for coming out to save plan. You just saved some future marriages. All right, so, Chris, you’ve been awfully quiet.

 

Yeah, you guys are.

 

What’s your opinion about all?

 

I agree with everything you guys are saying makes the most sense in most cases.

 

You’re a good listener because you were just listening to us. Yeah. Just taking it all in.

 

You read that book? Are you really listening? I did, yeah.

 

What are the four signs of non listening? You remember those?

 

Don’t Google interrupting one, I think.

 

Right.

 

Not letting people talk.

 

Yeah, that was one. Like making it about yourself, forming answers, like while they’re still talking, right?

 

What you just did?

 

I nailed that.

 

Similar situations experience saying, like, yeah, me too.

 

You know, the third and fourth.

 

Yeah, that was three. That was three of them. What was the.

 

Oh, it’s. You judge the situation and you give advice when you’re not asked.

 

Good book. Chris is our living example of. Are you really listening? Thank you.

 

Chris, do you have any good loan stories?

 

Yeah, I mean, definitely some big numbers that have been forgiven. A lot of that was put in place. I know, Matt, you did a lot of work early on, like, getting a lot of these. A lot of the families that we work with set up on the right path, so it’s just cool to see it.

 

Okay, let’s use an example of what not to do. So Chris interned with us. When did you intern with us? At fresh out of Ducane? Yeah. So Chris gets out of college. We offer him full time. He accepts, obviously. Happy, happy union. To Chris and Ewa. And that’s still back when were at the former broker dealer. And then next thing I know, weekend to the full time. Chris had interned for, like, two years before he became full time. He shows up with a. What car did you buy?

 

I had a mustang.

 

A mustang? Fresh out of school. We weren’t paying him that well, so now he’s managing school loans and a mustang. And since then, he’s obviously smartened up. School loans are almost wiped out. And you don’t have the mustang anymore, do you?

 

I was living at home, yeah.

 

Oh, gotcha. Well, just. Just a hypothetical example of.

 

You’re saying, don’t do that.

 

I would. No, I’m just kidding. We had fun in that mustang. It was a cool car.

 

He just took the rent.

 

You should get that back.

 

Put it towards Lyn.

 

Yeah, should.

 

A little bit of snow outside? I don’t know.

 

Yeah, maybe in the summer. Wait for the summer. Okay, cool. Well, let’s talk through hypothetically. If you’re married and you both have school loans, this is where repay was kind of a home run. Because if you’re married, you each make 300 grand, and you each have 300 grand of income. What would happen is you could get taxes filed jointly, save some taxes, and the payments would be spread out based upon your income. It didn’t even matter how long your school loans, how big a school loans you are, it was based upon your income. And so then you kind of take on and you get the best of both worlds. Now, where gets tricky is if you have a spouse that makes a ton and a spouse that doesn’t make a ton, then you have to figure out what’s the difference between the taxes saved.

 

Because the person making a ton, that filing jointly is going to really help the overall tax situation. Because especially if you’re comparing two single people to considering married, it’s really drastic. Versus married filing separately versus married filing jointly, then you have to do the calculation of the loan payments versus the tax savings. Those are very individualized. But something we’ve gotten really detailed into other considerations would be if you so save plan. Walk me through that real quick. Jameson, is there any, if you’re married, does it allow you to combine payments like repay, where it essentially looks at the household? Not combined payments. You have two separate payments. But does the calculation work together as a family when you both have school loans?

 

I think it’s based on just your income. Okay, if I can find the answer to that.

 

And there’s not a big difference. If you’re making similar incomes, there’s not a big difference. But that would be where we want to look at really in detail, save versus repay. And the other thing too is like if you have a spouse that’s not pursuing the ten year forgiveness program, this has been quite common, high income, but still has federal loans. We’ll do the repay to allow the taxes to be filed for, allow the person with the big loans to keep that payment down because then the spouse that end up needing to pay off their loans absorbs most of the higher payment because of their income. And so it’s kind of like not a fake out, but it’s essentially the government, through repay allows both payments to be structured.

 

And then we want the person that doesn’t have the forgiveness to pay as much as possible anyways because they’re going to be stuck with liability. Then we want the person that’s going to get the forgiveness to pay as little as possible. That’s obviously worked as well. If you’re married, just because you’re not a non for profit, it still makes sense for you to go act like you’re on the public student loan forgiveness program to help your spouse out dramatically with taxes and loan payments.

 

Staying low, repay is actually given away.

 

Saves replacing it altogether.

 

Yeah.

 

When does that come into effect?

 

I don’t know. Let’s see. I don’t know. We could find that.

 

Yeah. So it’s something we need to research. And if you’re on repay, are you automatically transferred to save? But obviously it’s a case by case basis. Any other closing thoughts, guys, on school loans?

 

No, I think JMo hit on it earlier. I think just being educated about what your degree is actually going to get you is huge because I think so many kids don’t have a clue on how it works.

 

So I think that’s huge, for sure. Educate yourself, be proactive ahead of time, and then have a good game plan after the fact to get these forgiven, paid off, refinance, et cetera. Evaluate all your options.

 

If you were to, both of you to go back and get a degree, and you were to go back to college and get a degree now, knowing what you know, what would it be?

 

I do exactly what I did. I do finance and accounting. Yeah, I do accounting to know what I didn’t want to do. And then finance, obviously, is what we do. Even though it was very corporate finance heavy, it was still, numbers are numbers, and it still got me in a good position.

 

I’d do the same thing. I would probably just pick a different, cheaper school. I paid for a lot of went to Duquesne here. That’s a private school. Just feel like a lot of the courses I took didn’t apply at all to what we do today. So a lot of the core, which I know is the case at a lot of universities, but I guess I wish I could just take the courses that are related to what I want to do versus taking like an art class or something. I’m not an know. So still finance, but potentially different institution.

 

Just get the same degree, but at a cheaper cost.

 

Yeah, like cutting out all the filler that comes with the college experience, I guess.

 

How about you, Jameson?

 

Quantum physics. No, I’m kidding. I probably might not regret, but I played college across and went to a school that gave me a nice scholarship, which was nice that I didn’t have very much to pay back in loans, but I probably would have used lacrosse to get me into a school that I wouldn’t have qualified to get into with academic. So, like, I tried to get into Ivy League or somewhere that I wouldn’t have gotten into.

 

Gotcha.

 

Yeah. Maybe study the same thing.

 

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us and we’ll catch you next week. Thanks for tuning in to our podcast. Hopefully you found this helpful. Really hope this is as beneficial and impactful to as many people across the nation as possible. So hit the follow button, make sure to rate the podcast, and please share with any friends or family members that would also find this beneficial. Thank you very much.