Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Single mom masterminds $700K swing from debt to savings
When Takiia Anderson graduated from Boston College Law School in 1999, she was a single mom with a 2-year-old child, nearly $100,000 in student loans and a new job as a government attorney that paid $34,102 a year. She didn’t like that math.
“People are talking about 20 years to pay off a student loan, and my daughter is going to college in 16 years,” recalls Anderson, now 47 and based in Atlanta. “I didn’t want to be in a situation where I’m helping her pay for college while I’m still paying my student loan.”
Today, Anderson’s student debt is long gone. She has nearly $500,000 in retirement savings, and her daughter, Taje Perkins, finished her third year at Spelman College in Atlanta with no student loans to cover its nearly $30,000 per year in tuition and fees.
How did she do it? She set a series of targets and kept a laser-like focus on them that, even though she later became a highearner and has ridden a surging stock market, can serve as a lesson to others today.
“Any time I got a raise, a bonus or a tax refund, I put it toward my debt, my daughter’s education savings and then retirement,” Anderson says.
Tough choice: save for retirement or college?
Many financial advisers would advise flipping those last two priorities: “The same way that airplane announcements tell us parents should put on their own oxygen masks before assisting their children, parents should prioritize saving for retirement and putting themselves in a good financial position before saving for their children’s
Once Anderson paid off her student loans and credit cards in 2008, she began saving $12,000 a year toward her daughter’s education. By the time Taje started college, Anderson had saved $56,000 and added another $22,000 during her first years.
education,” says Paul R. Ruedi, CEO of Ruedi Wealth Management in Plano, Texas.
Yet more parents like Anderson are prioritizing saving for college over retirement — 56 percent are doing the former vs. 54 percent the latter, according to a recent survey by Sallie Mae , one of the nation’s largest student loan lenders.
“Although college wasn’t as expensive when I went in 1989, I know what it’s like not to have to pay those bills, and that’s what I wanted for her,” says Anderson, a Howard University
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