Four years after graduating from Syracuse University, Dan Kaplan's first
priority each month is to pay his student loans, hindering his plan to
save for an emergency fund or to buy a car.
After borrowing $25,000 for his bachelor's degree, the marketing and
communications employee for a New York government organization shifted
his spending and saving habits. Kaplan has maintained a "fairly strict,
$300-a-month approach to my payments" and has allocated nearly all of
his end-of-year bonuses from previous jobs and holiday gift money from
family members toward the loan balance.
While this dedicated approach has helped him whittle down the amount of
his debts so that they will be paid off by early 2016, Kaplan has also
felt the strain of not having a personal rainy day fund for unexpected
expenses or other goals such as buying a vehicle or "an eventual home of
my own, which has really started to hit home as friends and family
members around my age have begun buying these things."