Last summer a relative told me that the only way to “protect” our border would be to allow the Border Patrol to shoot to kill. This eventually resulted in my writing an essay called “Who would Jesus strafe?”

Initially, though, it resulted in disbelief and sorrow. I cried as I drove away because his heart was so hard and so bitter.

I needed to do something to cleanse myself of that kind of hatred. And that’s when I came up with my evil plan:

Americans are now deeper in college-loan debt than they are in credit-card debt. We owe some $829.785 billion for those sheepskins, compared to the $826.5 billion in consumer debt.

But you don’t have to go broke to go to college. You probably don’t even have to borrow money.

This post isn’t only about those dear old golden-rule days. But with all the school-related stuff jamming the blogosphere, it’s only logical that I included a few links to the classroom.

10 tips to help you save $1,000 by Christmas at Yahoo! Finance

How to get what you want on customer service calls at Wise Bread

15 ways to save on back-to-school shopping at FatWallet

Maybe you read the article about the doctor with $555,000 of student loan debt. In addition to that horrific sum (which started out as $250k in 2003) were a few other scary numbers:

• A laid-off factory worker whose $300 unemployment check is garnished down to $180 because of the PLUS student loan she took out for her son.
• A woman who after 14 years of deferment and forbearance (and bankruptcy) saw her Sallie Mae loan leap from $28,000 to more than $90,000. Her monthly payment was once $230; now it’s $816.
• An estimated $730 billion of outstanding federal and private student-loan debt exists, and just 40% is being repaid. The rest is in default, deferment or forbearance.

Gargantuan loans taken out with no clear idea of how they’ll be repaid. Sound familiar?

Actually, there’s a crucial difference between subprime mortgages and student loans: You can’t return your diploma to the school and walk away from college debt. In fact, such debt can’t even be discharged in a bankruptcy. Student loans stay with you until you pay them back.

Two years ago I wanted a laptop. I thought my life would easier if I could write during my 50-minute bus rides to the University of Washington.

But then I examined the potential purchase the way I examined all others:

• Can I really justify the expense vs. the payoff?
• If I got it, would my life be significantly improved?
• If I didn’t, would my life by substantially diminished?

No, no and no. Buying the laptop would have meant dipping into my nascent emergency fund. It also would have meant one more thing to carry – and a backpack jammed with textbooks and my daily brown-bag lunch already had me feeling that I was toting my house on my back.

In other words, it would have amounted to a very expensive shoulder ache.