Page created 26 Nov 2002 by ulyssess00 , last modified 26 Nov 2002 by ulyssess00
URL: http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0513/p17s01-wmpi.html
i know a guy from sweden who went to school at NP free of charge but has recently started grad. school in new york. because of the loans involved, he will be close to $100,000 in debt when he is done (no i didnt accidentally type another zero).
i propse an experiment: considering the day, age, and culture we live in, and considering the average age and college/post college status of most of the diners' customers... i am interested in how much DEBT we are all in. i know that most of you are not the materialistic, credit-card- crazy, shop-a-holics that society makes us out to be. but i know some of you have got to have school loans... and possibly house payments, car payments, etc. or if you're like me, you at least have a few bills that have gone unpaid for more than just a few months.
so, lets calculate it. i dont want to get too personal and pry into others' financial situations... just get a general idea. just post how much money you owe, and and then post the running total. you can give a brief summary if you want, but it is definatley not nessicary. if you make a sizeable payment, post that, and subtact from the total.
EXAMPLE:
customer's debt: $100
diner total debt: $100
unpaid bills and school loans come to a rough total of...ulyssess00's debt: $17,000.
diner total debt: $17,000.
thank god i never got a credit card. not once.
I have to make a loan payment! Yeesh! I always forget about the quarterly one...
before that payment... the total would be....?
i owe $10,000 and change for my surgery that was supposed to be covered by my insurance through work but they weren't paying the insurance bill so i get stuck with it.
i was dumb and had a discover card so i owe them $2000.
plus i pay my parents a $200-a-month car payment. until $4500 is paid off. thats going to be a while.
running total: $33,500
Yeah so I have$4,500 in credit cards + $10,000 in student loans + $1,500 in car loans ______ $16,000 total
Diner grand total
$49,500
Just wait til I buy a house in a year, :)
law school + master's program = mountain of money
the other stuff (credit cards, computer loan) doesn't even compare to what we are paying for karna to get those higher degrees. If I had to put a figure on it, as it stands right now, I'd say around $65,000, but I haven't checked recently, it frightens me.
Diner total: $114,500.
I should preface this with the knowlege that I pay right around $550 a month towards my loans and car. Been doing that for over a year now. But I've been paying my student loans (not as much) since '98.College = $10,000 Car = $6,200
Diner total: $130,700
Okay. Debt. House - $140,000 more to pay off, not bad! (real estate in the dc area sucks. Our house would sell for like, almost double what we bought it for now. Terrible inflation.) $6,000 left on my Honda. I already paid off my student loans. No credit cards - we never carry a balance. $1000 for misc stuff - like my new washer/dryer and my new stove, but that'll be gone as soon as the interest kicks in (you know, 1 year free of interest so we'll pay it off when it comes up)I think I just kicked the diner total up to...
$284,000 - wow. I way more than doubled it. But can you really COUNT my house...?
About six or seven grand. But I don't have a house, a car, or a good education. So there you go.
so... we'll add $6,500..bringing the (rough, of course) total debt to: $295,500.
keep 'em comin'.
make that:$290,500.
and i'm in debt because i'm supposed to have a good education.
at the end of this year, I'm going to have over thirty grand in loans, and still about 120 bucks left for my computer....I'm sure i could screw myself with some more debt before too soon though..someone else can do the math
neoacerbit-slack-ass
damn it tom...$320,500.
I took ouot my second loan of...3,500...so that's um, what? $7000. Anyway, I got an extra grant late in the semester and the school has just refunded me $1000! Yippeee! Time to buy an x-box and a new TV
please em? when am i going to see you again? i don't see you enough.
So, $327,500.
I'm sorry to throw this in at this point, but just last week, Janelle sent in a big old check for 1,250 $ to close out the last of her college loans. so between the two of us, we don't add a damn thing to the total.327,500$
I do, however, owe alot of people beers.
$25,000Diner Total: $352,500.00
I'm just trying to picture a little half-captian somewhere up in Alaska, netting salmon and rolling perfectly cylindrical cigarettes with one hand.
Car...credit cards (2; lots of international travel on these-incredibly dumb)... college & grad school...Recent move debt (amazingly enormous- would think I moved to Brazil rather than New Mexico)... too depressing to do the actual math but an estimate... $50,000...
Diner total= 402,500
William was joking about child support. You'd be surprised how many people have asked me.
which is kind of a big if at this point, and if there is a tuition freeze for the four years I'm there (hahaha) I will owe between $102800 and $132600 for grad school depending on if i go in or out of state, but that that's future debt, so I don't think it counts. All I know is this year I'm paying about $2000 a month to be here. I have no idea what my running total is for the past 3 years. Probably close to $35000.Diner total = 437,500 (future debt not included)
You're not going to beleive this but I am actually on schedule to have all debt other than student loans, $8,500 payed off by next October, me and the wife are good, that and I just got a promotion, go me! And Ake that was the funniest image I've had in a while, thank you! I'll be back to decrease the Diner total in a few months, :)
i go and get a degree in art from small liberal arts college..what was i thinking? they sent me all the loan info the other day, perhaps attempting to mitigate the graduation relief..$18,500diner total=$456,000
$500. What for? It's a secret.Diner total: $456,500
i think i still owe welcome like 50 bucks or something. i won't bother to add it to the total.
My student loan debt is somewhere in the range of $16,000. Monthly payments be damned. And I owe whatever county Morris, IL is in $75.Diner total: $472,575.00
Yay!
i have $18,000 in student loans. for november's credit card bill i owe $400 and i'm sure it will be close to that for december, maybe higher. do i count the bills i pay monthly? those are about eight-hundred plus a month. but i'll just toss in my $18,400 bringing us to:$490,975
hey, since we are in the top 5 links for random subject searches on major search engines, wouldn't it be cool if some dope philanthropist found us and decided we were so cool he or she wanted to pay off our massive and growing debt? we'd have to be VERY careful about who we certified then...
Haha.
if there is such a philanthropist out there, by all means...!
That would be sweet, I could use a little debt reducing, then buying a house would be next month instead of next year.
its been done...if only i'd have thought of that first.
It's not that she's smart; it's more like there are a lot of people out there even stupider than her who gave her money.
there are PLENTY of people stupider than the diner denizens. i wonder if we could set up a P.O. Box and a website like Karyn did. just a donation to the debt of everybody fund. keep it going. and like every 3 months we all get a check or something. or put it in the bank or a cd and let it grw on interest. hmmm. not a horrible idea.
la-di-dah for karen but back here in our real world i forgot to add parental debts for one towed/junked car: $250 remaining. i also total about a hundred bucks a month in parking tickets. past due tickets on said towed car comes to $126. [a rain cloud, i insist, hangs above my car but never washes off any of the bird shit] so i'll add to our total $366 plus eighty-five for currently pending tickets. that is $451 bringing us to:$491,426
Currently about $500 but varies anywhere between that and $2500. I'd say that the average balance on the last year's bills has been around $1500 for any given month. So....Diner total: $492,000 (or thereabouts)
Heh. That should be...Diner total: $493,000
how did this karyn get people to arrive at her site in the first place? are there people out there who just look for sucker sites? Go to jeeves and ask, "what site will give me the opportunity to show my stupidity the most?" Or maybe this Karyn is truly a nice girl and made a horrible mistake and all these kind people helped her out. I wonder who kept the leather couch and laptop she put on her card?
i actually heard about the karyn thing on the radio and television news several times before i actually bothered going to her site. i think there are tons of copy-cats now.it was like when the first girl to put webcams up all over her house when that was a huge deal like 5 years ago. i think it was jennicam.com or something.
Karyn was on Webmonkey.com and a few other sites. I don't know how people found her before that. It probably had something to do with a google search for "get out of debt" or "I'm really stupid and have too much money."
I didnt know this post existed.$350 in credit card dues. (not mine. I also refuse credit cards) I think there's 54 more payments on new car @ 223 a month = 12000 bucks or so
<cr>total = 12350 <cr>diner total = 505350
Law School loans come due in a few months so i think we can bump that total up to 625k or so. ouch
My student loan & credit card balance brings the total to $650K. Sickening, isn't it?
okay i'm going to take away some of our total because i am making some progress. i paid off 3000 of my 18000 in a lump sum just to make things easier - bringing it to $15,000. since i put forth the lump sum, i've continued making payments on the 15,000 and i just got into the 14s - $14,700.so i'm subtracting $4,300.
although i didn't finish paying my parents back for the towed car yet, i did pay off all my parking tickets, etc. that's $201 gone.
i'm taking away a total of $4,501 bringing our diner balance to...
$645,499
that's still pretty awful.
the worst thing about debt is that it comes on so quickly and easily and it just goes away so fucking slowly.
my credit card debt's come and gone like it always does, but now i owe about $10,000 on a car, too.$655,499
Do mortgages count? It's not really debt... as for other debt. From my 2002 post I'd like to subtract $11,200. Still got some school loans, but my car is mine.Total = $644,229
Been debt free for awhile
12,350 debt - 12,350 = debt free
644229 - 12,350 = new total: 631,879
credit card debt's come and gone again, this time to $4000 and back. paid off a couple thousand on the car.$629,879
...that my wedding (which we've pretty much decided we can't do until January) will put that number up a little bit at some point.
Baggs, coughpicturesbeggingstuffforthesitecough
Maybe we could try something like this.
That's evil.
i saw that site a couple weeks ago. i don't think that's the route i want to take. jackie would kill me.but i need to write something up. i haven't forgotten. perhaps later tonight i will get started on it. i need to get a few digital pics to put there too. and then i will start seeing if i can get people to link to it from their site.
anybody got any good ideas of sites that would realistically consider linking to it?
...not that that's going to get you a ton of traffic.
Don't wory about links... I know magic, it's my job.
alright then...a write-up is forthcoming. and pics, hopefully.
As of today I am completely debt free (excluding my mortgage). I finally paid off all my student loans. I expect something horrible to happen tomorrow to incur an even more amazing amount of debt in my name.
jealous! and glad for you though, it must be a great feeling! as for me, i am drowning in about $15,000-$20,000 of debt that continues to climb at least $3,000 with each semester i remain in school. so that brings us up to what??? $649,879 ugh!
First of all, congrats smax. Now sell your condo, and buy your cabin in the woods!
As per my 2002 post (which considering my current moving situation makes me laugh), I worked off about 15 of that 50,000 in the past five years bringing me down to around 35,000. Of course, with my current Brazil plans (low/no income and recent over-expenditure of savings) that will probably go back up. Still, that brings the total down to 634,879 for now...
BLVD, I told you I've been looking at little cabins in the woods right? There are a few around these parts, but $200k+ for a cabin that would make the a-frame at CPBC (that was condemned and torn down) look nice seems dumb to me. I'm beginning to wonder if it's possible to find a decent place in the area that I can afford that's not a 600 square foot condo.Stan, $3k a semester isn't bad. I had quite a bit more debt than you in 2000 and that was only 3 years of college. All you have to do is move to a place with $200 rent and pay $500 towards your loans every month. =]
I know I'm very lucky. Here's to lower interest rates so maybe all the debt doesn't grow quite so quickly.
speaking of, we just refinanced our 2nd mortgage on the house with a significantly lower interest rate. and extra cash to sit on and use while Jackie is not working for 3 months. this is a major blessing as my salary on a good month is not enough to pay all our bills.it doesn't help make this tallstack go down, though.
hopefully we'll be able to pay off our credit cards with this, my extra christmas commission, and our tax refund (hooray for december babies!)...
I missed this one somehow.I will have about $100,000 of school debt when I'm done in a year and a half, but hopefully nothing else. I've only carried a credit card balance one month in my life.
Right now, counting the loans I'll be getting in early January, I am at about $75,000, so our total is $710,000. More than 1/10th is mine!
This entree goes very well with my thoughts today on working for the UN. It's one of the only jobs here that would pay enough to cover my debts. The tricky part appears to be getting a position where I'd be allowed to do something more than send memos up and down the hierarchy. If I'm going to die in an event like the b0mbing in A1giers, I'd like to at least die helping people.
I think I can take about 6 grand off the total. I think that's about what I had last time I messed with the total. I also just realized I paid off almost 3 grand this year. Soo...Total: $704.000 (with a bit of rounding and guessing)
but i can't even figure it all with out hospital bills and credit card bills and car payments. we're doing ok, and paying them all off steadily, but sometimes it's like i can feel every dollar of that $704,000 weighing me down...
I signed up for an automatic payment plan for one of my loans about two months ago. It seemed like the smart thing to do--then I wouldn't have to mail in payments or whatnot and I certainly wouldn't forget. Except that I did forget--I forgot that I signed up for the blasted program because it didn't go into effect the first month. So, this month while I was paying my bills online, I made a payment on this loan. Then, while going through papers before shredding yesterday, I found the two-month-old letter confirming that I'd signed up for auto-pay. So, this afternoon, I called the Bank to ask them not to automatically deduct anything in two days because I just paid a couple of days ago, but they couldn't stop the payment because it was already in process (for the 20th--wtf)... Now I can't actually afford a double payment, and this is going to make a royal mess of my finances for quite awhile. And the woman on the phone was not helpful; heck, she wasn't even sympathetic... And, I'm just mad!!! And a bit frustrated too.
We're down to $687K.
i currently owe $19,575.48. that includes my student loans. with my nose to the grindstone i am now making considerable progress on my credit card debt. but my old total, from 2004 [above] was 14,499 so technically i've added $5,076.48.but three years and two stuffed closets and many great adventures later i guess that's not bad.
diner total: $692,076.48ish