Did any read some of the bigger headlines today in the news about personal finances and loans?  If not, I'm here to tell you about it...and heads up to all of you student out there, graduate, undergraduate, postgraduate...this is all about student loans.  Student loans are one of those mysteries that everyone has to deal with but has no idea about until a long time after you get them.  When students are applying to school, lenders make it seem like getting a student loan is the easiest and most pain-free process that you could possibly go through.  They fail to tell you about all the hoops that you have to jump through with financial aid offices, university bursars, loan counseling, signing promissory notes, and the kicker...paying them back sooner rather than later.  I suppose that if you are anything like I was when I was going to school, you probably don't know and/or care much about loans because all you want to do is get away from home and start a new life at college.  I wanted so little to do with my university student loans that I made sure that my mother took care of just about all of the technicalities, right down to communicating back and forth from New York to Florida when financial aid office needed to be called for one thing or another.  It may sound immature, but it's the truth, and I know for a fact that I am not in the minority on this point.  One of the biggest problems that a lot of kids face for school loans is the money that their own parents make.  When you first start out in college or at a university, most students don't have much credit if any at all, and when you apply for your loans, all the lenders want to know is how much your parents make each year so that they can co-sign for you.  What the lenders and the federal government fail to understand is that a lot of students going off to college don't have parents who want to participate in their education or college experience.  Be that as it may, students often end up getting the short end of the stick if they have parents who make a decent amount of money but who have no interest in helping to fund their child's education.  This leaves them uneligible for a lot of loan funding and other sources of aid, while it still leaves them with an enormous college tuition bill...not to mention needing money for everything else.  Heaven forbid that these students should go out of state!  I was in somewhat of a similar boat as what I've described, however not quite as bad.  My parents had a decent amount of income, but since I was going out of state and I was the first person in my family to go to college, we went about the situation all wrong.  My parents thought student loans were great and opted to have me take out more in loans rather than providing me with anything out of pocket to go to school, even though the mystery "estimated family income" number was pretty high in my case.  What I didn't have covered in scholarships, I got loans for, and I even worked for three years while in undergrad.  End of story, I am sitting on a good amount of student loans from undergrad, but now that I'm in graduate school, I haven't paid for a thing.  You just never really know how things are going to work out.  I surely know plenty of people in my own department in the graduate program who are still paying for their own education via loans.  I have always said that if you have to pay for your graduate education wherever you are, you are surely at the wrong school.  You should be good enough that they want to pay for you to be there.  If you aren't the right material for one program, you should definitely look for another one.  It gets worse when kids who are very smart but simply can't afford the extras of living in a big city for school have to take out extra loans to go out top of tuition.  I know several people who come out of medical or law school with nearly one hundred thousand dollars in loans to pay off...all in ten years.  I'm very thankful that my situation isn't quite that bad...but I'm sure that I won't be a happy camper when I have to start paying things back full force in another few years.  Hopefully I'll have a great job where I can afford to live comfortably while still paying big payments on my loans.