Hey Kids! Hopefully you are finding this BEFORE you ruin your life by borrowing obscene amounts of money for an education that is depreciating faster than a new BMW after its first fender-bender…or at least before you do it AGAIN for grad school, particularly for degrees that will augment your name with the title Esquire. Welcome to Debtor’s Prison.

I invite you to meet the fam, and by that I mean the ragtag bunch of misfits that help me write this thing. Check out their bios. To get this party started right I asked everyone to answer the question that kids of the student loan generation are asking themselves: How the hell did I get here? Now, you may be asking yourself, its odd to refer to people just shy of or on the wrong side of 30 as kids…but lets look at ourselves: We’re either still in school or we’ve been out 4 years or less (not long when you consider the 25+ pursuing that education) we’re still heavily dependent on family support and probably living at home like yours truly, and most importantly we keep relying on what people tell us rather than our own experience…because we went straight from the ivory towers of higher ed to our minimum security debtor’s prison, be it your mom’s basement or a shitty studio apartment. Meanwhile that kid you know who dropped out of high school just got approved for a mortgage and bought a mansion for nothing that a kid two years older than you with the same degree bought a year ago and lost in foreclosure because he couldn’t pay the mortgage and his student loans.

This place is for us kids. I won’t lie. For those of us rocking grad degrees and six-figure debt, its probably too late. The fourth compartment in the Titanic has been breached. We can still listen to the band as the ship is sinking and hope other boats take notice. For those in high school, college or thinking about going back to school I hope you can sort through all the whining, bitching and moaning and find the helpful hints that will keep you out of debt and on the road to being productive members of society…and even keeping a dream or two from being flushed down the pipes.