If there’s one area where I feel comfortable leading a woman, it’s education, career and finances. I wasn’t born in the USA, so it was quite a struggle to know how to navigate education, career and finances. But I did it, and I learned how to do it. And I like to share what I learned with Christian women, so that they don’t end up with a useless degree and a bunch of student loan debt.

Here’s a story about a woman I didn’t advise, reported by the far-left Business Insider:

Maria had a goal to teach at a university full-time. Today, she “absolutely” regrets pursuing that goal.

While Maria’s undergraduate education, which she completed in 2001, was funded through scholarships and Pell grants, she knew more advanced degrees would give her a leg up in university teaching — especially as a woman in the industry. So she pursued a master’s degree and a PhD, the latter of which took seven years to complete.

[…]Now, at 48 years old, Maria’s student-loan balance is $430,000…

[…]As a full-time human resources representative and part-time adjunct professor in Michigan, Maria now makes a five-figure salary while supporting her 15-year-old daughter on her own, with very minimal child support from the father.

[…]Of her total student-debt load, more than $70,000 is interest that accumulated while her student-loan payments were on hold, during which she cashed out her 401k and lived on unemployment benefits.

[…]Maria even filed for bankruptcy in 2018

I don’t recommend doing a degree in non-STEM fields, they don’t pay. I don’t recommend spending 7 years with no income for a PhD. But notice how society gives her free money to subsdize these poor decisions. She got free scholarships, Pell grants, child support, unemployment benefits. The article doesn’t mention if she got alimony, too. And she filed for bankruptcy… screwing her creditors out of what she owed them. Who knows what other social programs and tax benefits she got? While other women do STEM degrees, work in the private sector, marry and stay married, she’s been doing life on easy mode, passing off the costs of her poor decisions to the people around her. I don’t want women to make decisions that impose costs on their neighbors.

And now, she wants to get a bailout from taxpayers:

The Education Department recently announced reforms to PSLF, which included going back over denied applications and payments to the program. So there’s a chance that Maria may earn a quicker route to loan forgiveness. But with her current financial outlook, she’s not confident she can complete the program and wants President Joe Biden to do more to help millions of borrowers with debt burdens.

The article notes that teachers and other public sector “workers” can default on their loans and pass the costs along to taxpayers:

Maria does not work enough hours to qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which forgives student debt for public servants, like teachers, after ten years of qualifying payments.

Just understand that if society pays women to make poor decisions with their education, careers and finances, then more women will do it. That raises the costs on the men that pay taxes for this, reducing their ability to get married and conceive children. If men are paying for this woman’s mistakes, they can’t pay for their own marriage and parenting plans.

Consider this other article from the far-left Business Insider:

There are over 4 times as many scholarships restricted to females as there are restricted to males.

This is despite the fact that about 60% of college students are women. Why are we focusing on subsidizing the group that’s already doing well?

By the way, the author of the first Business Insider article, is a recent journalism graduate (expensive university) living in expensive Washington, D.C.. She advocates for bailouts through her journalism. She probably has massive student loan debt, too. It seems like choosing easy non-STEM majors, going into debt, then hoping for a bailout from socialism is quite common.

According to far-left Yahoo News, women hold two thirds of the $1.4 trillion outstanding student loan debt:

Women hold nearly two-thirds of the outstanding student debt in the U.S., according to the American Association of University Women. And, they have a harder time paying off their debt compared to men. Prior to the student loan forbearance period, 70% of men made at least their required minimum monthly loan payments, while only half (54%) of women said the same, a recent survey by D.A. Davidson found.

Young women today don’t like to have to “settle” for a lower cost college in a city with a lower cost of living. Like the Business Insider reporter, they want the Sex in the City lifestyle. So they go live in an expensive city, and run up debt doing useless degrees at an expensive university. And sometimes overseas! As you can see from the chart below, women avoid hard STEM degrees. But those programs are hard for a reason – they pay more money.

My thoughts

What I wanted to do here is report to you what happens when I try to coach young women about their decisions in education, career and finances. And keep in mind, I’m doing this from a position of starting out in a foreign country, earning a BS and MS in computer science, graduating debt-free and working 22 years full-time. I had a $1.3 million net worth by age 45 (including the new construction home I bought for cash). So I have achievements here.

I run into the student loan debt problem while dating Christian women for marriage. Christian women seem to be even less likely to do hard degrees than women on average. You see a lot of art, music, English, journalism, etc. degrees there. I show them that student loans are a risk factor for divorce, and they also set back the plan to stop paying rent and start having children. I also show them which majors pay the most.

Here’s what I usually get in response:

• Women think that they will be an exception to all studies and reports showing that the likely consequences of their actions.
• One woman dismissed the need to clean up her finances  because God decided what degrees I would have, and how much I would earn, so I had no authority to advise her from my experience.
• Other women say that I am only doing what makes me happy, and they must do that too. (Note: I cried in second year calculus after failing the first test).
• I advised a 29-year-old woman with $25K of student loan debt and was working as a waitress to take a job I found her as an IT project manager. She said “No! Being a waitress is the easiest job I’ve ever had!”
• A 30-year-old woman with $23K in student loan debt wanted to do a Masters degree in Europe. I told her to pay off her loans first. She got two useless Masters degrees in Europe, and never worked again.
• I’m told that there is no rush to get out of debt to afford children, because women can have children in their 40s.
• I’m told that it will be fine for the children if she has to work to pay off her debts, because daycare and public schools work better for children than stay-at-home moms and homeschooling.
• I’m told that the $30 trillion national debt and bailouts for student loans, etc. are no big deal because the government can just print more money.
• I’m told that I can fix her financial problems by working harder and longer. One of my friends actually married a woman with $200K in student loan debt in order to get his green card, so some men take this deal.
• I’m told that too much planning feels bad, and I need to be more spontaneous and adventurous. One woman literally said “I don’t want to make decisions based on fear”.
• A famous Christian apologist woman (not WIA) told me that I can’t judge a woman who has student loans because if God forgives a woman, then a man can’t exclude her from marriage.

I’m not going to run a marriage that way. I have goals.

Men can’t afford BOTH bailouts AND marriage

So, my point is that we have a real problem with figuring out how to get women to make better decisions about education, career and finance. I want to help them. I really do. Because we are $30 trillion in debt now, and we simply don’t have enough money to keep bailing out people for student loans. And the problem will only get worse, as the younger generation of losers keeps making poor decisions and demanding that someone else pay for their mistakes.

Men don’t marry women who are bad with money. Money is one of the biggest causes of divorce, and divorce is a financial disaster for men because of anti-male divorce courts.

The number of men who can afford marriage and children is declining because they have to bail out all these reckless, irresponsible young women through their taxes. We need to fix this problem.

I’ve been warning people about Canada on this blog for some time. Canada is interesting, because they have secular left leaders similar to our own Democrat party. But unlike America, there is no “brake” on the power of this political party, because the population is far more secular than in the United States. What does the secular left do when their power is unchecked?

Here’s the story from The Federalist:

Canadian pastor has “exiled” his family to Kenya after his government invoked emergency war measures to punish citizens who attended a protest where he prayed and sang the national anthem.

Harold Ristau, a decorated veteran and seminary professor, participated in the “trucker convoy” against lockdowns last February, when The Federalist interviewed him last. He is now party to a lawsuit arguing the government’s response to Covid that included treating dissent as terrorism violated Canadians’ fundamental rights.

What was interesting was what the secular left fascists felt comfortable doing to him:

For peaceably assembling to petition his government for one day last year, Ristau says, he was threatened with the removal of his security clearance and government confiscation of his retirement nest egg, kids’ college funds, and other life savings. Ristau says he’s also experienced serious damage to his reputation, career, and friendships after the government used anti-terrorism measures against peaceful protesters.

Did you get that? The secular left wants to punish people who disagree with them like this: “the removal of his security clearance and government confiscation of his retirement nest egg, kids’ college funds, and other life savings”. If you disagree with things like abortion, global warming, masking, closing schools, and mandating untested vaccines, then you should be persecuted as a terrorist. This is why you should never – and I mean never – set foot in Canada. They have gone so far to the left that they are now a fascist country. If you disagree with their secular left dogma, they will come after you and persecute you in ways not seen since the Soviet Union. And Canadians just keep voting for unqualified, incompetent secular leftists, who blame all their failures on their enemies. Just like Hitler, Stalin and Mao did. They don’t allow anyone to challenge their rule.

The persecution wasn’t limited to the father, either. It went on down to the wife and the children:

Besides dealing with overbearing health restrictions, their children were mocked at school for their family’s religious and political views, Elise Ristau told The Federalist. After enduring more than two years of severe social and government repression, the Ristaus moved outside Nairobi with their five children last August.

“I don’t know that I can go back and be a Christian in Canada. So that’s why we’re here in Kenya,” Harold Ristau said. There, the former chaplain with a Ph.D. in philosophy trains Kenyan pastors at the Lutheran School of Theology.

I was particularly interested in the government’s “freezing” of bank accounts… essentially trying to starve their slaves into submission if they disagreed with the government’s propaganda.

Government use of “debanking” to punish dissent is growing in the West. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government used it on essentially every convoy participant authorities could identify, said Moore.

“As soon as they knew your name if you were on the ground [protesting] in Ottawa, they froze your bank account,” Moore told The Federalist. “…The federal government met with the banks, they gave the [protesters’] names to the banks, and the banks were then pushed to freeze the bank accounts of anyone with that name in their banks. It was a fascist collaboration.”

[…]Leftist activists also filed a class-action lawsuit against every Canadian who donated to the convoy. It seeks $300 million in damages.

The closing of bank accounts is routine in the United Kingdom as well. If you are too conservative, then they just close your bank accounts. You have to be forced to comply with what the state believes. And religious liberty is no defense. Not in a secular left fascist country.

None of these methods were used against secular left criminals and terrorists, who were actually violent and dangerous.

Canadian lockdowns kept gyms, restaurants, and liquor stores open but closed churches. Leftist protesters were allowed to yell and sing without masks, and the prime minister kneeled to them, all while provinces banned Christians from singing and chanting in church for years.

[…]Rev. Johannes Nieminen wasn’t allowed to cross provincial borders to perform his pastoral duties, while other Canadians could do so for work, he told The Federalist. After he was denied border entry several times, he said, police finally let him through — but told him he wasn’t allowed to meet with parishioners or hold church services.

Christians were especially singled out for punishment, and many of the “don’t judge” Christians approved of the government for doing it:

Police regularly showed up at churches on Sunday mornings and fined pastors whose parking lots had too many cars, he said. ARPA Canada and JCCF litigated a number of those cases and were often able to get pastors’ fines negotiated down to charitable donations.

[…]So far, “none of the [legal] challenges to worship restrictions on church services have succeeded” in Canada, said John Sikkema, a lawyer at the nonprofit firm ARPA Canada.

“Culturally, people find going to the gym very important and less so going to church,” Sikkema noted. “Especially when some churches don’t seem to care and don’t think it’s necessary.”

I thought this summary of the state of religious liberty in Canada was very interesting:

In Canada, Christians are often required to lie or betray their faith to access government grants and licensing credentials, and avoid punishment in many professions, Sikkema said. Many Canadian doctors, lawyers, and teachers, for example, are required to endorse abortion and LGBT sexual acts. Canadian doctors and many other health care workers must help patients obtain an abortion or doctor-assisted suicide.

In 2018, Canada’s Supreme Court banned a Christian law school from opening over Christian sexual standards. The Canadian military is also working to eject chaplains over Christian sexual ethics. Just about every Canadian business sports a government-provided pride flag, Nieminen said. Churches that object to transgender mutilation of children have faced naked protesters as families arrive to worship, Sikkema said.

“Canadians are very aware that we don’t have freedom of religion, we don’t have freedom of speech, we don’t have the right to assemble if that’s in disagreement with the regime,” Nieminen said. “Pastors and teachers cannot speak about the morality of human sexuality. That is a reality Canadians live in, and I think that’s partly why they’re afraid to speak out.”

It’s very important for Christians in America to not capitulate to the “don’t judge” emotional culture. We can’t afford to capitulate to the secular left, and allow them to force their views on us. And on our children. Learn from Canada, and don’t make their mistakes.