I was just thinking, it was around this time 15 years ago that I finally finished my nursing course. Wow, I’ve been a nurse for 15 years. It doesn’t seem that long!

I guess I should have happy memories of that time, but it was a little stressful. You see, just as I finished my course and began my new nursing career my husband went back to school. So here I was, a young nurse just building a career with student loans to pay off and I’d also become the breadwinner for the household since my husband went back to school.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure when I was going to school and my husband was the only one working it was hard on him too … but he wasn’t in a new career. At least he had that going for him.

When Chris finished his course I was still paying off my student loans. We then had to start paying off his too. His were higher than mine because he’d gone to a private school for an IT course. In fact I’d say his student loans were about 10 times mine! I’d had a couple of scholarships too so that helped keep mine reasonable, but still, our loans together were a heck of a lot of money.

We struggled through the payments. I never realized that we could have applied for a school loan consolidation. If we had we more than likely would have ended up reducing our total monthly payment and saving money because there’d be less interest on our total as we payed what we owed each month.

Well I guess you could say we learned our lesson the hard way. Now that I know you can consolidate student loans I”ll certainly be telling others that appear to be struggling to pay off their loans as they start out in their new careers.