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I have a student debt of over 40,000 euro. Because I have a job I pay 250 euros per month on it. My partner has a similar debt, but because she does not have a job she doesn't make any payments. Does it suck, yeah. Does it make us poor or hurt us in any significant way? No. It's a joke, because student debt is a sign of wealth, not of poverty. My government invested almost 50,000 euro into giving me plenty of time and space to study. I was able to live as a student for 7 years, usually working less than 12 hours per week to supplement the loan. I leveraged that loan into getting an education is super valuable, if I wanted to I could take a job double my current salary and live very comfortably in Amsterdam. Different story for my partner perhaps, but if she never makes income, after a certain amount of time her loan will be forgiven even without her ever making payments. I don't know how home ownership is correlated to poverty. It's tied to wealth, sure, and it's a very bad thing that it's so low. But the average renting person in The Netherlands lives very comfortably, so not owning a home is not a strong indicator for poverty. Homelessness, that's the indicator you're looking for. But you are right, it seems I am living in a bubble, because there's a severe problem with homelessness in The Netherlands right now. https://nltimes.nl/2020/02/17/homelessness-netherlands-doubl... According to wikipedia there's more registered homeless people in The Netherlands than there are in the states, I don't know how to make sense of that because the scenes I saw in SF, Portland and SLC were unlike anything I've seen in any wealthy European country. It made me think of Hungary and Romania. |
You wouldn't last long living on the streets of Fargo North Dakota.