Don't Go to Harvard

I don't really have anything against Harvard. It has a lovely campus. It was nice to say that my husband was completing law school there. Now that student loans are coming due, I realize it wasn't worth it.

Harvard offers no scholarships. Their financial aid application requires that you include financial and tax information for your parents unless you have not been claimed as a dependant on their tax returns for seven years. They then factor into your application how much money your parents make and how much they SHOULD be willing to contribute. According to Harvard's goofy formula, Tyler's dad should have been giving us $30,000 each year. Since he gave us nothing, we had to take out loans for this portion, as well as the tuition and living expenses. (If Tyler's dad had been living in a box, we would have had grants and decreased tuition costs. Some of our friends only took out loans for living expenses. Not fair.) Needless to say, we took out a lot in loans.

And for what? A diploma, in Latin, that sits framed on the floor of our closet. Pretty expensive piece of paper.

Why am I bothered by this so much? Because we took out our loans through Citibank. Citibank has a payment option called EZPay. With this, theoretically, you give them your checking account number and they automatic deduct the payment amount each month. This works well unless they decide that they didn't receive your application for EZPay (even though they took out the first month's payment without problem) and thus have cause you to not make your payments for the past two months. I didn't think to check if the EZPay was working.

Now, I'm totally paranoid. I've spent the past three hours making sure all our payments to all the companies we make payments to have been occurring as scheduled. What's the point of having automatic payments if they don't occur automatically?

Moral of the story? Don't go to Harvard or don't trust anything or ask for tax information before agreeing to marry someone.