Would You Rather Have Gifts or a Student Loan Payment?

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash.

Today in “there’s still time to return the gifts you bought,” we go to the Washington Post:

The Student Loan Report, a website that covers student loan news, asked 1,000 borrowers: “If you had the choice this year, would you rather receive a gift this holiday season or an equally valued payment toward your student loans?”

Nearly 70 percent of survey respondents would indeed prefer the generosity of a loan payment made on his or her behalf.

When you go to the source, you get… well, I can’t decide how speculative this quote is, but it’s worth sharing:

A result like this just goes to show just how serious the student loan debt crisis in the U.S. has become. In a time when you are left in the dust if you are not up-to-speed on all the latest tech gadgets and products, student loan borrowers would still prefer a contribution towards their educational debt.

They’d rather fall behind on the latest tech!

But seriously. I know that some people are against using the holiday season as a way to exchange cash or gift cards, but they’re often the presents we need most—more than stuff, and even more than experiences.

On the other hand, sometimes giving people stuff (or experiences) is the only way to ensure they’ll have that stuff. The poll notes that 58.5 percent of people surveyed plan to put any money they receive towards their student debt, which means they probably won’t use it to buy new clothes or a new laptop or anything else they might need. Sometimes getting that thing you really want but feel too cash-strapped to buy for yourself can be just as good, if not better, than getting money.

So I’ll turn the question over to you: if you have student loans, would you prefer gifts or cash to put towards your loans?

This piece is part of The Billfold’s Holidays and Money series.

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