Should I Invest My Emergency Reserve?

Should you be investing your emergency reserve, even if it’s a conservative investment? It’s a very common question, and the answers vary widely. A lot of people say yes. You can hear my two cents on the subject as I discuss it with Andrew from Atlanta.

Next up was student loan debt, another very common topic on the show. This time it’s Linda in the Bay Area who is struggling to find her way as she deal with a significant amount of debt in a very expensive place to live.

The struggle to pay for college is one of the defining features of middle-class life in America today. At kitchen tables all across the country, parents agonize over whether to burden their children with loans or to sacrifice their own financial security by taking out a second mortgage or draining their retirement savings. 

Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, takes readers into the homes of middle-class families throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life.

Caitlin Zaloom gained the confidence of numerous parents and their college-age children, who talked candidly with her about stressful and intensely personal financial matters that are usually kept private. 

Throughout the book, Zaloom describes the profound moral conflicts for parents as they try to honor what they see as their highest parental duty, providing their children with opportunity, and shows how parents and students alike are forced to take on enormous debts and gamble on an investment that might not pay off. 

What emerges is a troubling portrait of an American middle class fettered by the “student finance complex,” the bewildering labyrinth of government-sponsored institutions, profit-seeking firms, and university offices that collect information on household earnings and assets, assess family needs, and decide who is eligible for aid and who is not.

Indebted breaks through the culture of silence surrounding the student debt crisis, revealing the unspoken costs of sending our kids to college.

Have a money question? Email me here.

"Jill on Money" theme music is by Joel Goodman, www.joelgoodman.com.