Ahhh, New Year's, the time when old men's thoughts return to financial survival! At least mine do!

As usual, I am stressing big time over huge college costs and the resulting student loans for my kids. Throw in that I am nearing retirement age, so as Homer Simpson says, it just gets worse and worse! But time for the tough to get going, I suppose!

As much as you can get involved in a philosophical debate about how long to support your progeny (20s? 30s? OK, 40s and they are out!), to me it sort of comes down to survival. So far I have followed the usual advice to consider your own retirement first, but it kills me to see my daughter head into 5 years of low paying residency and letting those loans compound like a cancer if she has to do income based repayment. So my original plan was to cover the payments for those 5 years, but now that it is nearly time, I am getting a little sticker shock here! But mainly it is the fruitlessness of just paying a ton of interest every month. In retrospect, I certainly wish we had entered an "austerity" budget 4 or more years ago and paid as we went, but the costs were just so high that I guess I froze up and took the easy way out. So the only thing it looks like we can do now are somehow refinance and/or just try to pay them down.

I am bothering the forums asking about this, and I am getting some good input, like the loan forgiveness plan that was apparently put in place around 2007 for people in public service occupations, so I am doing some research, but it appears that most of the residencies my daughter is considering do not meet the requirements for that plan.

OK, sorry for such a bummer post to start the new ear, but I need to work on this and you guys are one of the best support systems around! Thanks for listening, if anyone is still reading, that is.

Oh yeah, to add a touch of positivity, I did FINALLY manage to lose about 10 pounds last year, so that proves that longstanding problems CAN be successfully addressed. Like finance, it is a matter of simple math, but both can still seem to be wicked problems!