Photo prompt #3: Take a picture of the most expensive thing you own.

I was asked to take a picture of the most expensive thing I own. What is the most expensive thing I own?

My apartment? No, I rent. My car? No, even though I got a reasonably priced used car, I am years of loan payments away from owning that. My laptop? No, I had to take out a loan to buy that, too. My bike? Maybe, but I didn’t buy it: After three years of biking frustration, my boyfriend bought it for me because my cheap, heavy, beater of a bike made it impossible for us to ride well or far. My cell phone? Yes, I think my cell phone is the most expensive thing I own.

I’d never thought of it that way before. It certainly makes me value my cell phone a bit more. It also makes the rest of my material life feel a bit more tenuous, like the performance of a novice tightrope walker — a little too much financial wobble, and down I go. I think that most of my adult life has been spent hanging onto the “tightrope” of financial stability by one hand.

I have had my moments of “free fall,” and can say without hesitation that I have been unable to make important purchases because of debt. At 23, I couldn’t afford rent and groceries month to month, let alone utilities or anything extra. At 24, I was unable to pay all of my bills all of the time, and typically ended each month short by twenty to a hundred dollars. As I near 26, I hoped that this would be my first year of solvent and self-sufficient living. But that was before I took on the loan I mentioned in my first post. Now I’m not sure when that’s going to happen. Maybe in the next year or two or three? If I get a raise? And if I find a highly paying summer job? Maybe.

I am by no means optimistic about paying off all of my debt. By the time I finish grad school next year, the net sum will be right around $90,000. To lay it all out there, this breaks down into: $16,000 in undergrad loans; $6,000 in auto loans; $1,000 in private educational loans to replace my laptop for work/grad school; nearly $16,000 from the family member’s fraudulent loan; $50,000 in graduate loans; and $1,000 in credit card debt.

The undergrad loans are about $10,000 below the national average and the graduate loans will be about $15,000 above. The graduate loans, though, are also funding two professional trainings that I’m doing as part of my program of study. Because I am participating in these trainings rather than courses directly through Lesley, I may be able to receive reimbursement from my university (the school’s decision on that is TBA).

Because I am still in school, I am not yet paying off — but, rather, in the process of accruing — the graduate loans. I have thought about whether or not a graduate degree is worth this new debt. I have ultimately concluded that, in education, the range of positions and salary ranges available to me is very limited without a Master’s. In the same way that people say “pink is the new black,” I think that the Master’s is almost the new Bachelor’s — the new baseline of education desired by employer’s in a very competitive job market.

The laptop loan was unavoidable, as I need a laptop to be able to produce large amounts of written work, in multiple locations, for both my teaching and my studies. The car loan was the only loan I could get through the only dealer (of the twelve I looked at) willing to work with my trashed credit score, courtesy of the unpaid and fraudulent family member’s loan.

The credit card debt is the accumulation of three years of resigned, “I’m short x-number of dollars this month” grocery purchases, usually made a day or two before my next paycheck, but a day or two after I’d run out of food. “X” was usually an infuriatingly small number, sometimes as low as six dollars, that made me feel as though no matter how carefully I budgeted in a spreadsheet, something would always come up to ensure I was in the red.

When you can’t afford groceries, the idea of savings is almost a non sequitur. I did have a small savings account when I graduated from college, but I ate through that within a few months. With so much debt, not savings but simple month-to-month solvency and self-sufficiency become the aim. It’s been over three years since I’ve managed to “save” anything. Having started in the middle of a financial storm, it seems impossible to shore up that recommended six-to-nine-month financial cushion for “rainy days.”

So, do I believe that I will eventually have enough savings and money to fund the lifestyle I imagined for myself? Not for at least another ten or fifteen years. In the meantime, the idea of being able to make a down-deposit on a house — something I would have otherwise wanted to do in the next five years or so — seems like little more than fantasy. For now, I put so much into debt repayment and monthly bills that I can’t save enough to pay first, last, and security on a rental. That being said, I’m not sure that “being able to afford the lifestyle that I would like to have” is a realistic aim. I’ve more less ruled out “lifestyle” in favor of more immediate goals: month-to-month solvency, financial self-sufficiency, and debt reduction. “Lifestyle” comes later.

But I don’t think that an emphasis on “being able to afford the lifestyle that I would like to have” is the most productive way of framing my thoughts about all of this. I want to conclude on a slightly different note this week:

I’ve been mulling over the title of this project, “Generation Stuck”.

I’m not sure how comfortable I am with labeling myself “stuck”. On the one hand, I do feel trapped by a catch-22 in our current educational system: I am limited by my undergrad debt on the one hand, but am compelled on the other hand by the need for the incursion of further graduate debt in order to progress professionally and financially in the long-term. The cartoon below sums up my thoughts about this system:

That being said, even in the areas in which I do feel “stuck,” I also feel confident that I’ve been doing all that I can to ameliorate the situation. And there are many ways in which I don’t feel “stuck.” I am, compared to most of the people I graduated from college with, comparatively settled and established. I’m in a long-term, very healthy relationship with someone older and more financially established, who is generous enough to take care of some of those “lifestyle” concerns that I otherwise have to neglect.

And, while my current salary still leaves things very tight at the end of each month — more the fault of my debt than the salary — I do have a decently paying job that I love.

I think, then, that the issue is not so much that I’m “stuck.” The issue is, rather, that I’m uncertain: about my finances month-to-month; about when, if ever, I’ll be debt free; about my ability to contribute financially to my relationship; about my ability to buy a home; about my ability to eventually provide for and raise children; and about my ability to eventually retire or support myself through old age.

Which isn’t comfortable, but isn’t exactly the end of the world either. Things could be a lot worse.