When I attended college I borrowed a lot of money. As much as I could with a Stafford Loan. My parents didn't want me to work while taking classes so I wasn't earning any money otherwise. No scholarships, although my parents gave me some funds.

By the time I graduated I had some $13000+ in loans to repay. Six years later and I still have $2000 left, but I have $7000 in unpaid credit card bills. In contrast, my sister paid off her loans -- of similar size to mine -- in five years.

So how does this happen? There are a lot of reasons, which I will try to enumerate. My lifestyle is not one where I save a lot of money. It's just the way I am, I like it. But the price is that it's an expensive lifestyle, one that I can barely keep up with month-to-month.

One of my big expenses is the apartment, which is currently rented for $725. I live alone as some years ago I finally got to the point where I really resented having a roommate. My sister still has a roommate and this one place where she saves a lot of money, but the lack of privacy is too high a price, in my opinion.

Computer items are another big expense. I bought a PowerBook last December, $3000 for the computer, extra RAM, and a wireless modem with one year subscription. Since then I've spent another $1000+ on software to slowly weed myself away from having to use my work-provided NT workstation. ADSL access is another $80 a month. My computer expenses are not budgeted, as they're in general big once or twice a year expenses.

My car is the third big expense. I spent $3000 to get it fixed after a small accident. Another $500 for 30000 mile checkup, which is about yearly with my driving. Plus insurance, gas, bridge tolls, etc. The $3000 was not necessary, but I believe (at least for car insurance) that insurance is for those times when you've done something so bad that there's no way you could ever pay for it. Therefore if I can sort of afford it I'll pay for it myself.

Games, dining, and other entertainment comes out to about $250 a month. Varying widely. When I eat out I like to go to relatively expensive places with my friends. And I love paying for dinner, and other things for my friends. That's one of those weird honor things where we try to pay for the group meal or activity.

Anyway, if I'm relatively inactive in a month I can come out $300-$400 ahead, which I can then use to pay off some of my debts. Many times though there'll be some expense -- I'll go out shopping or something -- and so I'll not have much left over to pay the debts.

The big problem is the big $1000+ expenses. I don't budget for that. I do try to keep a $1000 reserve in my checking account just for these cases. But once I decided to buy the PowerBook I spent a lot and sort of tried not to think about it.

But now I've gotten into a fairly good routine. I'm using my bonus money (from my company) to slowly pay off the debts in $500-$750 chunks. This way I'm not using up all the bonus at once and I'm making steady payments. I don't spend it all on repayments and then run into trouble when I need some extra money.

With luck, discipline, and maybe a promotion, I may be able to pay off my interest accruing debts by the end of next year (or maybe midway through 2000 is possible). Then, I still have $9000 to repay my parents for the car and a couple of other things (and that's all money that I've had to borrow after graduating).