BEACH SLAPPED
Owe no! Local coeds are racking up debt by blowing student loan money on spring break
When Dan, a 23-year-old graduate student, was making springbreak plans last year, he didn’t let unemployment stop him from taking a weeklong jaunt to Puerto Rico. After all, he had money on hand — his student loan.
“I deserved to enjoy myself since I would be studying for the rest of the semester,” said Dan, a political science major at a local university. (He did not want to use his last name for professional reasons.)
So he spent a $500 student loan check on plane tickets and barhopping all over town with his pals.
“I’ll eventually pay it back at a later date,” Dan said. And a new study has revealed he’s not alone in his party-now, pay-later philosophy. The report from LendEDU found that 30 percent of US students plan to use college loans to fund getaways such as spring break jaunts.
“A lot of students overborrow in their first semester and think they have this ‘extra money’ sitting around. They feel flush and spend on frivolous expenses,” Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, author of “Zero Debt: The Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom,” told The Post.
That was certainly the case for Hunter, a 20-yearold college junior. For last month’s spring break, he used $300 of his loans for a weeklong bender in Panama City, Fla. — and doesn’t regret a thing.
“Live it up while you can and pay back later,” the English major at a local university said. “I’m living liberally in college. I’m going to live conservatively once I graduate to pay it all back.”
Khalfani-Cox said this borrowing trend has been on the rise, in part because parents don’t teach their children proper money management.
“We don’t teach them the right thing,” she said. “So many students use college loans as the default to bridge a financial gap, when it should be your last resource.” Just ask Jeffrey Skinner, a 28year-old real estate agent and finance coach in Bed-Stuy. In 2008, when he was a freshman at Miles College in Alabama, he blew through $1,000 for a spring break in New York City.
“Part of our [campus] culture was that people would wait around to get their refund checks so they could spend it” on frivolous items, Skinner said. He dropped a chunk of his borrowed dough on shopping sprees and nightclubs.
But now that he’s working to pay off $35,000 in student loans, Skinner regrets it all.
“I’m actually against student loans, and I’d advise people to just go to a state school because it’s more affordable,” he said.
Kelly Foster, an attorney in Bridgewater, NJ, is likewise kicking herself for behaving like the party-hearty grasshopper in Aesop’s fable — as opposed to the save-for-the-future ant. Just after graduation from law school in 2014, she blew her last $1,000 loan check on a trip to South Africa. But it doesn’t seem so fun now that she’s in the red for $98,000 in student loans.
“[Students] don’t want to be reminded of the looming debt they carry — that’s not fun to think about,” said Foster, who’s in her 30s. “They just want to get away from student loan debt, and vacation is one way to do that.”
And though she had a blast touring Johannesburg and Cape Town, Foster doesn’t advise using loans for far-flung getaways.
“It’s just going to put you further behind on your [student loan] payments,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s worth it.”
A lot of students overborrow and think they have ‘extra money.’ — Money expert Lynnette Khalfani-Cox