Here's my "story"...
After a decade in university, changing majors a couple of times, taking a year off, then going back for a graduate degree, I settled in Toronto with well over $60,000 in debt, $18,000 of it being a private loan. After over three years in Toronto, and a series of poor lifestyle choices, I had defaulted on three of those loans, and also owed CCRA both GST and income tax arrears. A real mess. Quite honestly, the cost of debt servicing and the cost of living in Toronto, combined, began to make my situation unchangeable.
Basically, I hit a kind of "rock bottom", when I realized that, absent some serious lifestyle changes, and some serious cost reductions, I would never climb out of debt, much less save for retirement. A scary proposition.
I chose to move to a less "sexy" city (a "905" bedroom community), with higher pay and at least one-third cheaper in terms of living costs. Through living more like a student than I was when I was actually a student, and systematically denying myself certain "wants", I've managed to decrease the debt to about $35,000 in a short while.
My point is that it took a severe lifestyle change, to wrest back control of my financial life. I've come to the conclusion that, no matter what your income is, if you can't live frugally, financial burden will always haunt you.
Of course, this only works if your education gets you a relatively high paying job. But - - there are a lot of broke professionals out there, and there are a lot of well-off "lower middle income" families, because some professionals never learnt to manage their finance....
My 2 cents...
Paul
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