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From Vox
Here are the 9 most interesting conversations I had in 2021 -
Amanda Northrop/Vox
The conversations that challenged me the most and got me thinking about a difficult problem or provocative idea.
My job at Vox is to talk to interesting people. And in 2021, I got to talk to a lot of really interesting people.
Nine conversations in particular stick out to me. They were the ones that challenged me the most, got me thinking in a new way about a difficult problem, or just explained what the hell was happening in yet another disorienting year.
There’s no unifying thread tying all these conversations together, but each of them, in its own way, left a strong impression on me. One of my favorites was with Elizabeth Bruenig, who talked about why it’s so damn hard to forgive and why so many us struggle to do it even though we know we should.
My interview with Andreas Malm about the existential stakes of the climate fight and the limits of peaceful resistance forced a collision with some very difficult questions that, even today, I can’t really answer. I also enjoyed my interview with Spencer Ackerman about how the war on terror eroded the institutional armor of American democracy and left the country defenseless against its own pathologies.
Conversations like the one with Heather McGhee offered a productive way to think about the politics of race and class and how we might overcome the barriers to a truly multi-ethnic liberal democracy.
Whether you’re interested in the environment or politics or the incredibly weird history of moral panics in the US, there’s something in these exchanges for you. So without further ado, here are the nine most interesting conversations I had this year.
“I do think that the past experiences of social struggles suggests that if you’re fighting a very powerful enemy, you need to engage in tactics that can impose costs on that enemy. This usually includes forms of property destruction and confrontation with the ruling order that goes beyond absolutely peaceful civil disobedience. I don’t know of any relevant analogy or a parallel struggle in the past that has succeeded without an element of more militant methods.” —Andreas Malm
“We were founded partly by people who thought that Satan and demons were part of everyday life and were constantly trying to tempt them. And that character has just been with us since the Puritans came. So it seems as if Satan is maybe part of our national DNA in a way that, as we entered into the latter half of the 20th century, the time of science, the time of the Space Race, this was also the time when evangelicals came into the White House, when Reagan let them in through the back door. And this was the time when we started to see real power, real money, and evangelical voting blocs. And that coming as a response to this era of science and progress and technological innovation seems relevant.” —Sarah Marshall
“The Afghanistan war didn’t rebuild Afghanistan. The Afghanistan war rebuilt Northern Virginia. The Afghanistan war, like the war on terror beyond it, enriched a very small and exceedingly politically powerful private interest, which is the defense industry. The defense industry functions as what I think you could say is the American variant of state capitalism. This is an enterprise that operates as a tremendous force, not just for inertia in the American empire, but its growth. Obviously, we paid for the war on credit. … What would you rather have spent that on?” —Spencer Ackerman
“We’re also in this resurgence of organizing and we have to double down. Ordinary people have experienced a rebirth of civic life. Whether they’re doing it for their own survival, or because they’re making minimum wage, or because their moral sense of self has been violated by America’s inequalities, people have decided that a part of being an American and a human being right now is to organize. And that is the space that has always changed lives and changed history. And we are in that space right now. And that’s what’s exciting and hopeful to me. It’s why I say in the book that there are solidarity dividends to be had, but only through cross-racial organizing.” —Heather McGhee
“Democracy forces us to allow anyone to seek power. So it allows into the space of politics people who seek only personal power. And then freedom of speech allows them to do whatever they want. Plato warns us that democracy will lead immediately to tyranny. Someone who should never be in politics in the first place will come in with an appetite for power, spread fear of foreigners or internal enemies, represent himself as the only protector, and then seize power and never give it up. I think of fascism as the modern version of the demagogue Plato warned us about so long ago.” —Jason Stanley
“We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn’t pick up state legislatures. So let’s not have an argument about whether or not we’re off-key in our messaging. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off.” —James Carville
“I guess what I’m saying is that certain folks never had the luxury of being comfortable. So now we’re at a place where we’re trying to figure out how to be more intentional in acknowledging our history and its consequences, and that means that discomfort is going to have to be shared in a way it hasn’t been up to this point. And if we’re going to talk about how to unify the country, the onus can’t just be on the people who are the descendants of enslaved Black people and displaced Native communities, whose forced labor and stolen land were the primary factors of production in building this country. This is something we all have to encounter, and it’s going to be discomforting for everyone.” —Jarvis R. Givens
“Most people go into policing out of public spirit and idealistic reasons. A lot of them get that beaten out of them. But the people within policing who care about changing it do tend to have a much clearer sense of what will work, what will not work, why things are the way they are, and if you want to change something you have to understand it. … The more we just vilify cops, we are driving away some of the very people who could and should be some of the most effective advocates for change. The project of transforming policing should involve building bridges to the many, many people within policing who also feel like the system is broken and needs change. We need more of these conversations and we need them as soon as possible.” —Rosa Brooks
“I think there are things a person can do to another person that make the likelihood that they will ever be forgiven zero percent. But in my view, a person cannot actually eliminate the value of their own life, no matter what they do. It’ll always be the right thing to do to allow that person to live. I understand, though, the feeling of not being able to forgive. There are some things that just exceed the moral capacities of even the most morally heroic person. But I think we should always keep in mind that those are very, very rare instances.” —Elizabeth Bruenig
NFTs are fake and so is money -
Rich Uncle Pennybags, the Monopoly game figure, shows some of his “funny money” as he prepares to strike the opening bell at the American Stock Exchange in New York in February 1995. | Bob Stron/AFP via Getty Images
The market feels like a bubble. Does it matter?
Calvin Becerra went viral earlier this year for a less- than-ideal reason. He got bamboozled out of what he claims is some $2 million in cryptocurrency and NFTs and complained on Twitter about the incident. Scammers pretended to be interested in buying one of his NFTs in a Discord channel and tricked him by saying they could help him fix a problem with his crypto wallet. During troubleshooting, they raided his wallet. The experience, he says, “felt like death.” He’s gone to great lengths to get the stolen digital assets back, paying hundreds of thousands more dollars to retrieve the tokens, including, most importantly, his three bored apes.
For many outsiders, it’s hard to grasp paying so much money for a trio of cartoon monkeys once, let alone twice. At some point, you’ve just got to let sunk cost be. But Becerra, 40, insists it’s worth it — he believes in NFTs, or at the very least, the moneymaking power of them. “They’re important to me because of the value that they will continue to increase by,” he says. “They’re huge.”
He’s right that NFTs — non-fungible tokens, little digital assets that exist on a blockchain — are having a moment. What’s not really clear is why. Then again, everything about money feels a little strange at the moment. Between NFTs, crypto, and GameStop, AMC, and other meme stocks, money has rarely felt more fake. Or, at the very least, value has rarely felt so disconnected from reality.
The concept of value is a fuzzy one, and valuation is often more art than it is science. Psychology has always played a role in money and investing — and there have always been bubbles, too, where the price of an asset takes off at a rapid pace and disconnects from the fundamental value. As Jacob Goldstein wrote in Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, all money is sort of a collective myth. “Money feels cold and mathematical and outside the realm of fuzzy human relationships. It isn’t,” he wrote. “Money is a made-up thing, a shared fiction. Money is fundamentally, unalterably social.”
The social aspect is clear in much of what’s going on now, whether it be a group of investors on Reddit trying to take down a hedge fund betting against GameStop or people paying thousands of dollars to claim ownership of digital art they could effectively have for free. But why certain groups of people have trained their focus on certain items is hard to parse. Becerra insists there’s a utility to the apes — there’s merchandise, events, and he sees having them as the “new world flex,” like a watch or a nice car. “Everything’s hype, a social media world, right?”
Lately, the hype aspect of money has felt more true and important than ever.
It’s been a weird year in money
Historically, the economy was theoretically based on labor and value creation at the individual level, and on the structural level, voting shares in companies based on their financial fundamentals and future value, said tech industry veteran Anil Dash, CEO of the programming company Glitch. But that idea died long ago. “A machine is what it does, and the purpose of the system is the output of the system. And the purpose of our financial systems … is to create ever more detached financialization that can just generate what the industry calls wealth and what the rest of the world just doesn’t see.” In other words, the confusing status of value today is a feature, not a bug.
You can see this clearly in the markets in 2021.
One of the first big stories of the year was the GameStop saga, and it was a fun one. An army of day traders on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets drove up the price of the game retailer’s stock in a matter of days, forcing halts in trading and costing some hedge funds that had been betting against the stock quite a bit of money. They rallied behind a guy who goes by Roaring Kitty; in one YouTube video about GameStop, he pretended to smoke a cigar while wearing a cat mask.
There have been all sorts of efforts to ascribe some bigger takeaway to the GameStop story — perhaps it was a populist uprising or a sign that there was something very broken in the market. But generally, most of the efforts to pull a concrete meaning out of GameStop fall flat. It was a relatively ephemeral incident where, as is often the case in investing, there were some winners and some losers. GameStop’s stock price has remained relatively high, compared where it was before January 2021, because enough investors have stuck around to keep it there.
GameStop has come to epitomize an era of meme investing, where ordinary investors are piling into stocks and cryptocurrencies and digital assets not necessarily because they believe in the underlying value of the thing they’re buying (though some do) but instead because it just seems like a thing to do. Dogecoin or NFTs or stock in theater chain AMC get popular online or in their social circles, and they turn around and think, why not?
“For a huge swath of the retail world, the mentality has merged of what is trading versus what is investing versus what is essentially just gambling,” said Tyler Gellasch, executive director of Healthy Markets, a nonprofit.
The scenario has generated quite a bit of finger-wagging from Very Serious People who say what’s going on is beyond the pale, that investing is supposed to be about underlying value and the real, tangible worth of a thing. NFTs and Shiba Inu coin, they say, are clearly fake. At the same time, so is so much of what’s going on in finance and the economy already — including the spaces the Very Serious People occupy.
During the 2008 financial crisis, for example, exotic financial instruments created out of subprime mortgages among Wall Street and banks helped take the economy down. They also revealed regulators to be asleep at the wheel. Very recent history makes it hard to take the Very Serious People in finance and government seriously as responsible stewards of the global economy. The financial industry has gone to great lengths to create new financial products with the potential to do more harm than good in the name of making more money.
“To have a boomer burn down the planet and then have them wag a finger that crypto’s bad for the environment? Please, that’s absurd,” Dash said.
“Money feeling strange in 2021 is based on a decade of money slowly feeling strange for lots and lots of different people throughout the world,” said Lana Swartz, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia who focuses on money. “We’re at a stage where the government and financial institutions are revealed to be less dependable than we ever imagined they would be, so why not YOLO?”
NFTs might be bizarre speculative bullshit, but what isn’t? Aren’t we all just finding ways to turn everything that exists into something we can make money off of? I might be throwing away thousands of dollars on NFTs, but you’re throwing away thousands of dollars on TSA PreCheck or lottery tickets or donating to political candidates or raising children. Critics will say NFTs are wasteful and can be used for fraud and other crimes—fine, yeah, find me something that isn’t?
The view may be nihilistic, but in the current scenario, it isn’t entirely wrong. So much of the economy feels like a scam — the gig economy, student loans, the hope of retirement, a 9-to-5 job. Consumers are always being tricked and squeezed by corporations. The promise of the middle class is fading fast, so for a lot of people, it just feels like you might as well lean into whatever financial chaos is available to try to hit it big. If housing prices are so high you’re never going to be able to own a home, why not try your hand at real estate in whatever the metaverse is?
Crypto feels like a scam. So does a lot of the economy.
It’s easy to be dismissive of the current state of casino capitalism, where random people are just tossing random money at random anything. It’s also relatively easy to recognize that this landscape is likely to be one where there are few winners, and the winners are probably going to be the people who were already winning, financially.
“For every one person that makes money, you have 100 people that have lost money. It’s basically just a giant wealth redistribution scheme,” said Stephen Diehl, a software engineer in London who recently laid out a scathing and widely read critique of the crypto asset bubble. “Why it seems so fake is nobody can quite figure out what these things are, and they’re being presented to different people with different stories.”
Dash is one of the originators of the NFT concept, but he worries about the clearly fraudulent nature of some dealings in the market. “They had to coin the phrase ‘rug pull’ to describe the fraud that happens in NFT communities because that type of thing is so common. What does that tell you?”
Value is ultimately a story, one we tell to ourselves and to others. In the United States, we’ve convinced ourselves of the story of the dollar, which is backed by the full force of the US government. But it’s ultimately just a piece of paper. Cryptocurrencies and NFTs and AMC all come with their own stories, which, admittedly, can be on the kooky side.
There’s more to the current money landscape than dogecoin and meme stocks that makes the whole thing seem a little fake. The stock market soared during much of 2020 and 2021, even during the depths of the pandemic, making it hard not to wonder what the whole thing is for. The federal government was able to deliver a lot of money through monetary and fiscal relief to keep the markets — and regular people — afloat. It’s a lesson that when the government needs to find money, it can. But whether or not the influx makes money feel fake depends on your perspective.
“Isn’t this the year that money has felt most real?” said Mike Konczal, director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute. “Child poverty cut in half, unemployment insurance capable of giving workers actual bargaining power for a change, real wage increases across the majority of people, wealth doubling in the bottom 50 percent.”
It’s a strange place we’re in, which might explain why these tangible improvements don’t seem to dislodge national feelings of alienation. The state of the world and the economy can feel really hopeless. There’s mass distrust in institutions and in government, and economic mobility is increasingly hard to achieve. We’re in the midst of a pandemic that doesn’t look like it’s ever going to really end. NFTs feel like a scam, but then again, so does everything.
Becerra appears determined to stick with NFTs, despite having been very publicly scammed. After all, he’s gone to great lengths to get his bored apes back. When he talks about them, he vacillates between speculator and true believer, in one moment saying he plans to sell them if the price gets high enough, in another talking about them with quite a bit of affection.
“I’m not holding this forever. I don’t care about those apes that much, you know?” he said. He knows the hype could fade. Maybe that will take the sudden value of his cartoon monkeys with it; maybe it won’t. However, he considers the apes to be “blue chip” NFTs, a designation that in the stock world would put them on the same level as well-established major corporations such as Apple and Berkshire Hathaway. “That’s why someone like me, who has money, invests only in the blue-chip ones.”
Most of this is probably a bubble
Becerra, who describes himself as a motivational speaker, high-performance coach, and entrepreneur, compares the current moment in crypto to the 1990s. “This is our dot- com boom,” he said. Of course, the dot-com boom ended in a bust.
It’s impossible to look at what’s happening in investing now and not think that that the prices on many of these assets are divorced from their actual worth. The value of random NFTs and cryptocurrencies skyrocket seemingly out of nowhere, sweeping up hundreds and thousands of people in the process. Sometimes, the bubbles burst fast because the investment falls out of fashion or it winds up being a pump-and-dump scheme, where fraudsters are creating a buying frenzy around certain assets only to suddenly dump them and flee. The broader crypto bubble is still inflating.
If NFTs and crypto, as a concept, prevail, it’s unlikely all of the current projects and fads will. Everybody’s hoping they’ve got a golden ticket, or at least a gold-plated ticket, that they can sell before everyone else realizes what they’ve got is a fraud. Some people in the industry acknowledge that most of this stuff is likely to implode.
“The parallels with the dot-com boom are very apt, the reason being that like 99 percent of these coins out there are going to be worth zero in 10 years. But the ones that remain, the companies that remain … those are going to survive and create long- lasting things that change our lives,” said Jim Greco, managing director of crypto trading at Radkl, a digital trading firm. “Amazon survived the dot-com boom.”
If you buy into the idea that a lot of this investing is pretty divorced from reality, then the question is how long this lasts. For now, the music’s still playing, so people are dancing. How long the song keeps going depends on how long the people holding onto the assets can keep singing.
“It’s really incumbent on people who hold these investments to perpetuate their value, whether that’s through evangelizing to other people or by building systems to make it usable and useful and relevant,” Swartz said. “But then in order to realize the value, to translate it into money, you have to sell it.”
If and when the bubble around some of these hyped investments bursts, a lot of people are going to get hurt and lose money. In NFTs, evidence suggests those who are already wealthy and powerful are the ones ruling the roost, just like in the stock market. While there are true believers in crypto projects, so much of it is just speculation, and venture capitalists and hedge funds are more likely to win the speculation game than the little guys caught up in the mania.
Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who specializes in financial regulation, said the risk around so many speculative and contrived investments on the market is more tied to the potential ripple effects. Essentially, is the current moment the dot-com bubble or the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis?
“If it’s just a dot-com bubble, it sucks for the people who invested,” she said. “But if it’s 2008, then we’re all screwed, even those of us who aren’t investing, and that’s not fair. It really depends on who’s getting into this and how integrated it’s getting with the rest of the financial system.”
How 7 people spent their money when they didn’t have to pay student loans -
Getty Images/iStockphoto
Borrowers welcomed the Covid-19 loan freeze and benefited financially.
At the outset of the pandemic, millions of Americans with federal student loans were granted a brief reprieve: Donald Trump’s administration waived interest rates and allowed borrowers to pause their payments, initially for 60 days and then until January 2021. The pause was extended by President Joe Biden, first through January 2022 and now through May 1.
Some 45 million Americans owe more than $1.7 trillion in private and public student loan debt, according to the Federal Reserve. Most student loans are federal, but an estimated $140 billion — about 8 percent of loans owed — are private. The average student debt for a bachelor’s degree hovers around $29,000, according to NerdWallet, and around $71,000 for a graduate degree. Based on data from the New York Fed, the average balance overall, regardless of degree, is about $35,000.
Until recently, the student loan freeze was set to expire at the end of January 2022. The White House initially resisted pressure from Democrats to extend it, declaring that it’s time for business to get back to normal. On December 10, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a press briefing that “a smooth transition back into repayment is a high priority for the administration.” However, on December 22, the Biden administration reversed course under continued pressure. In the coming months, the administration said, it will make sure borrowers “have the support they need to transition smoothly back into repayment” in May.
President Biden has resisted calls for him to cancel student debt through executive action — some Democrats on the Hill have urged him to forgive up to $50,000. And while Biden has publicly expressed his support for student loan forgiveness on the campaign trail, the president wants Congress to take the first step.
Additionally, we should forgive a minimum of $10,000/person of federal student loans, as proposed by Senator Warren and colleagues. Young people and other student debt holders bore the brunt of the last crisis. It shouldn’t happen again.
What happens when loan repayment restarts an open question. From an administrative perspective, it could get messy. Before the pandemic — and when the economy was ostensibly in a stronger position — people were already struggling to pay. During the 2019 federal fiscal year, which runs from October 1 to September 30, over 1.2 million student borrowers defaulted on their loans. That means one borrower defaulted on a federal loan every 26 seconds. According to Ben Kaufman, head of investigations and senior policy adviser at the Student Borrower Protection Center, that’s more than four times the rate of mortgage foreclosures.
Many borrowers have welcomed the pandemic-driven student loan freeze and, in some cases, benefited financially from the pause. Without looming monthly payments, they’ve been able to pay down other debts, take vacations, build up their savings, and make important purchases they’d held off on. Some have continued to chip away at their federal loans; these borrowers have taken advantage of the interest freeze to make large payments and reach the principal debt amount they owed after years of paying accumulating interest. Others have used the time to divert their efforts toward private loans, which weren’t ever paused.
We spoke with seven student borrowers about what the pause has done for them — what they’ve done with the money, whether it’s affected their lives, and if it has or hasn’t, how. Their answers, edited for length and clarity, are below.
Several people Vox spoke to for this story requested that their last names be withheld to protect their privacy.
Cheryl Patton, 43, living in Texas
Master’s degree, clinical mental health Owes: about $51,000 through federal loans
I had to do some emergency repairs on my home because I had a sewer pipe break. It literally happened the day after I had surgery, and my refrigerator broke the following day. When it rains it pours. It’s hard to save money when you have a student loan payment every month that’s equivalent to a BMW payment. I’m very fortunate that I don’t have a car payment right now, so that’s been helpful. But I work a part-time job just to pay my student loans every month, which means that I get to spend less time with my kids, less time with my family; it’s just what I have to do to survive.
With the pause, I was able to save some money, and I went on a vacation by myself to South Dakota to visit my cousin and see the place where my grandpa was born. My cousin’s father worked on Mount Rushmore. It was the best therapy for my mental health and well-being. I did some car repairs and just a few different things around my house that needed to be repaired, some drawers and cabinets.
The pause has also enabled me to spend a little bit more on my health care because I’ve been able to better afford copayments. Medical care is expensive, and any kind of specialty care has at least a $40 copay just for me.
I am a single mom, and both of my sons are on the autism spectrum. My oldest son lives in a group home about 15 minutes away because I have to work two jobs, and I don’t have immediate family in Texas. Because I work so much, I spend less time with my disabled adult son who could so greatly benefit from having his mother around a lot more. My younger son turned 18 in February, and to file for legal guardianship, I had to put down a $5,000 retainer for an attorney. Life is just so expensive. I did pay on my loans some $3,200 to take advantage of the zero interest.
I’m more than willing to pay my debt, but just give me a fair chance.
Alex Warneke, 31, Washington
Master’s degree, sports management Owes: $87,499 through federal loans
I have upward of $85,000 of student loan debt. With the forbearance period, I was finally able to pay into some of the principal of my loans. I was thankfully employed throughout the pandemic, so I’ve been continuing to pay. So far, most of what I’ve paid have been excess payments that I can allocate to whichever one of my loans I see fit. I started paying the interest down on my high-interest-rate loans and am actually getting into the principal of those balances. That’s really exciting for me. Since I graduated in 2014, I haven’t touched the principal because the interest rates were so high through the federal government and my loan servicer.
I’ve been paying off my debt for six to seven years but until now, I haven’t paid off the principal. It’s the way that the monthly payments are distributed; the amount I pay gets divided among each loan I have so that it’s never enough to pay off the accruing interest. I’m not alone in this. You commonly hear people complain about their loan balance going up even while they’re paying consistently.
My income level might’ve gone up after grad school, but that doesn’t necessarily correlate to the amount of dead weight I’m still holding financially. Even if there is going to be some sort of debt cancellation, there might be a stipulation that you have to make under a certain income level. I’ve been on income-based repayment for my entire pay period. The issue is that if you’re in a lot of debt, your payments increase along with your income, so you’re not able to save any money. I know I have to pay some amount of interest on these loans, but the interest rates right now are almost punitive.
Rebecca Bailey, 30, New York
MBA in accounting Owes: about $75,000 total, $65,000 are private loans
It definitely gave more flexibility in my budget. Prior to the pause, my federal student loan payment was $378 per month, and that’s in addition to private student loans I’d refinanced, so I was paying over $1,000 a month and still am doing that. I took the opportunity to reflect and pause on other debt that I had to reduce the interest associated with those other debts. I did a couple more private student loan refinance deals and was able to get the interest for that to under 3 percent, which was really great. And then I also refinanced credit card debt consolidation. That was at 8 percent before, and now it’s somewhere around 5 percent. I really just used the other money to put it toward other debt.
Previously, I was just putting state tax refunds into a 529 account, [a savings plan to help pay for education], but I was able to allocate some of my monthly budget into a 529 in hopes that I can make a lump sum payment into student loan debt. I’m the account holder and beneficiary right now, but the good news is if I do have kids, I can switch it to one of their names as the beneficiary.
My credit score has increased by more than 40 points, and my previously nonexistent net worth has increased to above $150,000.
What most people don’t realize is that for federal student loan payments, if you’re on an income-driven plan, that payment is based on your adjusted gross income from your taxes that you file every year. Most people with student loan debt are so afraid to allocate a ton of money to retirement thinking that they just can’t afford it. They don’t realize that if they contribute more to a 401(k) through their employer, it reduces their student loan payment for income-driven plans. Especially for younger people, it just makes a lot of sense because the more they contribute and the earlier they contribute, the more opportunities they have. Most people don’t understand the connection for that, or which levers to pull and how.
Sarah R., 35, Minnesota
Doctor of Pharmacy degree Owes: about $270,000, mostly through federal loans
The pause came at a really good time. I’m a health care worker, so obviously, I was still employed during the beginning of Covid when a lot of people were getting laid off. I was able to keep working and set money aside for maternity leave. I had a baby in June, and I was on maternity leave for three months. I used two weeks of paid vacation for that, but otherwise, the rest was unpaid. My student loan payments were about $1,100 a month, $500 private, $650 federal. I was saving that $650 a month during this whole time that it’s been paused.
When we were filing our taxes for 2020, I realized I’d only paid off about $10,000 last year. It was depressing, but it kind of made sense because I had taken some time off. It was at that point in time, in May, that I decided I was going to tackle that $25,000 that was sitting in my private loans as long as the federal loans were still paused. I tried paying it down using [personal finance expert] Dave Ramsey’s debt snowball strategy, paying off the smallest debts first. My next paycheck is Christmas Eve, and in between that and my Christmas bonus, I’m anticipating paying off the last $2,900. That’s going to be my Christmas present, New Year’s present, starting off the year with no more private debt.
My plan for this year, instead of doing a debt snowball, is to use the debt avalanche method. Because my federal student loans have varying student rates, my highest student loan interest rate is almost 6.5 percent, and that’s about $40,000. My goal for this year is to pay off that $40,000 and keep making minimum payments on the rest. The next highest is 5 percent, and I’m going to work my way down until my lowest one.
Noé Madrueño, 24, California
Bachelor’s degree, human biology Owes: about $53,000 in federal loans
The forbearance period gave me a lot more flexibility to spend money without added pressure. I graduated from college during the pandemic, but I was able to find work. I made the decision to save money because I had this window of flexibility.
I was kind of hoping Covid would lead to some debt forgiveness, so it didn’t make sense for me to start paying early. I went to college as a first-generation student, so I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about how loans or financial aid worked. During this grace period, I became more financially literate, so that I can also help out my younger sisters who might go to college in a few years. Currently, I’m on track to pay off my loans over a 25- to 30-year period, which amounts to about $200-$350 worth of payments a month.
It was nice not having the thought of student loans constantly in the back of my mind. I was able to invest, go on vacation, buy a car, and spend a bit on myself. At one point, I even thought about putting down money for a house. I had around $15,000 in my savings account then, but I had an unexpected medical emergency, which the savings went toward. Still, I wasn’t as concerned about money because my loans weren’t due every month.
Victoria D., 23, Arizona
Bachelor’s degree, psychology Owes: about $36,000 in federal loans
I graduated into the pandemic and was living by myself during the first year of forbearance, so I still had expenses to pay for rent, food, utilities, and insurance. At one point, I was working three part-time jobs. I would work two main jobs during the week that were more career-focused, and I had a retail job during the weekend. After spending four months applying for jobs, I finally got a full-time position and was able to purchase a car.
I wasn’t banking on the fact that my student loans would be forgiven due to Covid, so I started looking at future career options that can help me with these loans long term. I plan to go back and get my master’s degree in social work in the fall, which will push back my loan repayment. It’s a six-plus-year plan, but after I get my master’s and start working for the government or a nonprofit organization for a few years, I can qualify for $50,000 to $75,000 worth of loan forgiveness in Arizona.
The forbearance period allowed me to focus on paying for my essentials and maintain my standard of living, since I didn’t have to funnel my money into loans. Even without Covid, I knew that I had to start making payments six months after I graduated. I’ve been working two jobs throughout my entire college career. I tried to scale back how much money I took out, even though I was allowed more, but I’ve been living paycheck to paycheck. I’m always focused on making sure everything is paid for the month, so I haven’t been able to budget much.
Kaitlin Phillips, 33, North Carolina
Master’s degree, journalism Owes: about $35,000 in private loans
My student loans are refinanced under a private lender, so the Covid forbearance didn’t apply to my situation. My husband also lost his job during the pandemic, so for a while, our finances were pretty tight. I still have about $35,000 left to go.
I completely understand the focus on federal student loans and how confusing the system is set up to be. But there’s also this subset of private borrowers who aren’t given as much attention and are also struggling with high interest rates. I didn’t start out with entirely private loans. A couple years after I finished grad school in 2011, I tried to pay off my loans through an income-driven repayment plan. For some reason, it didn’t take into account expenses like rent, so I was being asked to pay thousands of dollars a month.
I ended up consolidating both my federal and private loans through Earnest, and locked in a 6 percent interest rate for the life of the loans. What I pay every month doesn’t change with my income, and the rate is pretty good compared to what it was before when all my loans were from different providers. I was finally able to pay into the principal of my loans with consolidation.
If I was mostly paying interest this entire time, that would’ve been, psychologically speaking, a lot harder. And although I’m just a few years away from being done with my payments, I don’t want other people to have to go through that. I’ve wasted so much money paying off interest. I have worked in the nonprofit sector for several years, and because of my private loans, I’m not eligible for the public service loan forgiveness program. Most people don’t realize that.
From The Hindu: Sports
Rohit, Ashwin among four Indians included in Cricket Australia XI of 2021 - Keeper-batsman Rishabh Pant and left-arm spinner Axar Patel are the other two Indians in the team
Iron Age and Lagarde please - Iron Age and Lagarde pleased when the horses were exercised here on Friday (Dec. 31) morning.Inner sand600m: 2/y/os Sierra Dela Plata (Neeraj), Emper
U-19 Asia Cup | India limit Sri Lanka to 106/9 in rain-hit final - The Sri Lanka batters looked completely at sea against the Indian bowlers
Australia’s Travis Head to miss Sydney Test after testing positive for COVID-19 - Head is asymptomatic and will remain in Melbourne with his partner for seven days as per the Victorian government’s health requirements.
BCCI president Sourav Ganguly discharged after COVID treatment, to remain in home isolation - Ganguly was admitted to hospital twice earlier this year and underwent emergency angioplasty after having some cardiac issues.
From The Hindu: National News
Rahul Gandhi slams Government on vaccine backlog, Chinese standoff - Congress questions failure to vaccinate entire eligible population by end of 2021
44 more Omicron cases in Kerala - Tally rises to 107, most patients from UAE, U.K.
IRCTC launches two air packages from Visakhapatnam - Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) Ltd., has launched air packages — Ganga Ramayan Yatra and Amritsar Dharmasala Dalhousie — from
Heinous crimes see dip in Villupuram - Strict surveillance on history-sheeters and anti-social gangs was the reason behind the decline, says Superintendent of Police
Rape cases shoot up by 23% in Telangana in 2021 - There were 1,934 registered rape cases in 2020.
From BBC: Europe
Ukraine tensions: Putin tells Biden new sanctions could rupture ties - The US and Russian presidents spoke by phone for almost an hour amid rising tensions over Ukraine.
Covid: France suspends transit ban for UK nationals during Christmas period - EU-based Brits trying to get home will be allowed to cross France during the Christmas period.
Covid: Woman isolates in toilet for five hours after positive mid-flight test - A US teacher says she spent five hours in the toilet after testing positive for Covid-19.
Russia orders health and drug checks for foreigners - Business groups criticise a new law requiring mandatory fingerprinting, drug tests and STD checks.
Citroën removes Egypt ad accused of normalising sexual harassment - The carmaker apologises for an Egyptian commercial in which a woman is photographed without consent.
From Ars Technica
TV Technica 2021: Our favorite shows and binges helped us combat pandemic fatigue - From dark comedies to classic sci-fi adaptations, here’s what we loved in 2021. - link
Researchers built a gecko-bot to study how geckos glide and crash land - The findings could help improve robotic locomotion, making bio-inspired robots more robust - link
New data on using J&J vaccine to boost itself - Two draft manuscripts look at long term protections offered by this vaccine. - link
Children’s hospitals are filling nationwide amid tidal wave of omicron - Omicron’s severity in kids is still unknown, but more cases mean more hospitalizations. - link
End of the line finally coming for BlackBerry devices - Key services, including network provisioning, will shut down January 4th. - link
A Teacher asked her young students to get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it. The next day, the kids came back and one by one, began to tell their stories. There were all the regular type of stuff. -
But then the teacher realized that only Janie was left. “Janie, do you have a story to share ?’ ’’Yes madam……My daddy told me a story about my Mom” “OK, let’s hear” said the teacher.
“My Mom was a Marine pilot in Operation Desert Storm in Iraq and her plane got hit”. “She had to bail out over enemy territory and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol and a survival knife”. “She drank the whiskey on the way down so the bottle wouldn’t break and then her parachute landed her right in the middle of 20 Iraqi troops.” “She shot 15 of them with the pistol, until she ran out of bullets, killed four more with the knife, till the blade broke and then she killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands.”
Pin drop silence in the class !!
’’Good Heavens" said the horrified teacher “What did your Daddy tell you was the moral to this horrible story ?”
Did you hear about the shy guy who called an escort service? -
Well, a beautiful woman knocked on his hotel door and he let her in. He tells the lady, “I must tell you ma’am that I’m hung like a baby.” Instantly she likes the poor guy and says, “now don’t you worry. When I’m done with you, you’re gonna feel like a man. Now you just go and get undressed and crawl into bed there and I’m going to freshen up in the restroom but I’ll be right out, ok?” Well, he shrugs his shoulders and did as she asked. A few minutes later the door to the bathroom opens and there stands this incredible, stunning woman. She goes over to the bed and crawls in and isn’t there for but just a few seconds when she screams, throws back the covers and looks at the guys penis! “I thought you said you were hung like a baby?” She asked… He answered, “I am! 8 lbs. 21 inches!”
