Hi Jenn:

I think everyone’s given you good advice so far. I hang around a lot on some personal finance forums (reddit.com/r/personalfinance) and unpaid student loans are not an uncommon problem. There are plenty of posts where people in your boyfriend’s position come to the forum to say “My significant other revealed to me their debt, what do I do?” And the key thing (that a bunch of strangers care about anyway) is whether the significant other is now willing to take charge of the situation.

I think the first thing you need to do is forgive yourself, for anything that makes you feel bad inside about this debt. Maybe you are beating yourself up because of the degree you got, or because you’ve ignored it for some time (just basing this on what you mentioned), so forgive yourself for these things. Your degree sounds really interesting, and I bet you got a lot out of it, even without working in that field. Your parents don’t sound like they managed money well, so it’s no wonder you tried to just not think of it.

Once you have forgiven yourself, then you can make a plan. You’ll need to look at where you spend your money now, and see if there’s anything you can reduce and put towards your loans instead. Even finding an additional $50/month is a good start. Secondly, you’ll need to find out what you owe on the student loans, and if they are in collections you’ll want to talk to a credit counselor to help you figure out how to deal with that (there are steps to make sure that the collections agents are telling you the right amounts). Once you have some ideas for how to change your budget, and you know who to pay and how much, then you need to actually execute and start making the payments.

I think if you went to your boyfriend somewhere in that process and said “I’ve got loans, I want to take care of them, here’s my plan” that will be a very different conversation than just “I’ve got loans.” I also think that while you should attempt to come up with a plan of your own, it is fine to ask him for help improving the plan, and you’ll need his help to change your budget, for example, if you like to eat out together and you decide to stop eating out to save money, then you’ll need to tell him why it’s important to you to change that behavior, since that will affect him too. As Anita said, I agree that your boyfriend may take this in a positive way.

Kel