Tag: guest post

The Other Student Loan Crisis: Half of Parent Cosigners Facing a Shaky Retirement

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[It’s a pleasure to introduce Laur (Lauren) Davidson today. Laur is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in English and Communications. She wants to build a portfolio as a freelance writer and agreed to write a guest post for us – perfect timing because the ERN family is on vacation this week! The post is on a very timely topic: student loans and how they threaten even the parents’ finances if they cosigned their kids’ private student loans. Take it over from here, Laur!]

Half of Parent Cosigners Facing a Shaky Retirement

By Laur Davidson, a soon-to-be graduated freelance writer for hire

The sheer magnitude of the mountainous $1.4 trillion of debt weighing down 44 million Americans is rightfully grabbing headlines as a looming financial crisis. The devastating economic and social impact of student loan debt on borrowers, their families, the communities in which they live and the nation is well documented. Less known, but no less devastating is the impact student loan debt is having on well-intentioned parents who are suffering financially for having helped their students by cosigning their private educational loans. With the number of students unable to repay their private loans increasing each year, more and more parents are having to rethink their retirement plans.

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Five Unfortunate Facts about Student Debt in America

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Our first guest post on the ERN blog! Ever! Let me introduce Drew Cloud who runs the fascinating blog studentloans.net. Not too long ago, I remember U.S. student loans surpassing one trillion dollars (a one with 12 zeros!) for the first time. Now we’re at $1.4t and the amount just keeps growing. Make sure you check out Drew’s blog, too, especially the treasure trove of data on the topic. Take over, Drew!

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A quick online search of student loan debt in America reveals the astonishing truth about the widespread, increasing expense of attending a college or university. Currently, more than 44 million borrowers have amassed over $1.4 trillion of student loan debt, and each year, the total continues to climb. While taking out student loans is now firmly embedded in the college experience for the majority of students, the picture remains bleak for borrowers. Here are five unfortunate facts about student loan debt in America to prove that point.

StudentLoanChart
Student Loans Owned and Securitized, Outstanding. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

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An addition to the ERN family portfolio: Preferred Stocks

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Last year in December we noticed that one of our Municipal Bond mutual funds had short-term losses. That’s not a huge surprise after the post-election bond yield surge and hence it was time to harvest those losses. If you’re not familiar with Tax Loss Harvesting, we wrote two earlier posts on the topic, one dealing with the general concept and one dealing with the implementation. In any case, after we sold the underwater tax lots, where do we put the money? For 30 days we can’t invest in the same fund (or different fund with identical benchmark) or we’d run afoul with the IRS wash-sale rule. There was one asset class that we had never owned but had definitely been on our radar screen for a while. Finally, we took the plunge and invested in… drumroll …

Preferred Stocks!Read More »

Guest Post on Budgets are Sexy: My Top 7 Disagreements With Personal Finance Experts

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J. Money, the personal finance blogger who runs Budgets are Sexy and RockstarFinance asked yours truly to write a guest post! Wow, what an honor! And, it turns out, this is actually my first guest post ever (not counting the “Christopher Guest Post” on the Physician on FIRE blog two months ago because that’s actually an interview). What did I write about? Initially, I proposed to go on an all-expenses-paid trip to Tahiti to review some luxury resorts and report back, uhm, some time later this year. But J$ had another brilliant idea: write about my favorite finance pet peeves. And it got published today:

My Top 7 Disagreements With Personal Finance Experts

Of course, to read it all, you’ll have to head over to Budgets are Sexy. But please see below for supplemental material, i.e., some of our blog posts on the seven topics:

  1. Safe Withdrawal Rate:
  2. Robo-Advisers:
  3. Emergency Funds:
  4. Bonds to diversify equity risk:
  5. Bond vs. Stock Risk:
  6. Cash as bear market insurance:
  7. Tax loss harvesting: