That’s a Lot of Fruitcake: What You Could Buy with Your Student Debt

The holidays are here! Well, at least they’re closer, even if you’ve been hearing “Jingle Bell Rock” since Labor Day. For a lot of us, it’s a happy time, meaning travel and seeing family, possibly too much in the way of treats, and here in South Florida it means short sleeves and brunches on the patios of our favorite restaurants. However for some, it’s a little less happy and a lot less merry because they’re under the weight of massive student debt. It can be a huge cause for worry, and puts an understandable damper on the holiday season when the average student debt is $35,051 and the mean starting salary for the class of 2014 is $48,127. Though seriously, that’s less of a concern than how long it’s actually going to take to pay it off. Let’s crunch some numbers.

Let’s say that you graduated in 2014 with the exact average of student loans and are paying the following interest rates. If you are $35,051 in debt, and repaying that debt with a combined average rate of 4.5 percent at $150 per month, you can calculate that you will not only end up shelling out for the original debt, but $48,693.39 in interest for a total of $83,744.39 over 558 months – or 46 and a half years.  In short, you will be in your sixties, your own children will have graduated from college, and your grandchildren might be checking the mailbox for their own fat letters. If you up your payment to $200 per month, you cut the total repayment to $57,207.07 over the course of a little under 24 years with only $22,156.07.

As a comparison, let’s see how much fruitcake that will get you from a variety of vendors or the perennial holiday favorite.

• Swiss Colony offers it’s classic fruitcake in a five pound size. You can get 584 of these $59.99 behemoths for $35,051, which works out to 1.46 tons of fruitcake.
• At the other end of the market, Neiman Marcus offers its more modestly sized 2 pound cake, which advises that it will serve 20 people, for $35.00 each. That’s 1,001 fruitcakes. Insert jokes about holiday dinners with relatives here.
• If you are looking for some artisanal swank, do Zingerman’s Vintage Rare White or Dark Citrus Fruitcakes, made and cellared in California, these will take $90.00 a pop, and will give you a stack of almost 390 vintage fruitcakes.

That, my friend, is a lot of holiday cheer. Or a lot of fruitcake. Or if you really like fruitcake, a lot of holiday cheer. Now, if you need help in wrangling your loans into order, forget the fruitcake and call us at Van Horn Law Group for a consultation, and let’s start making your holidays merrier and happier a lot sooner than when you’re eligible for Social Security.