albacore

Just wanted to add that I did get professional help from the excellent doctors at Mass General Hospital during my time in business school, and it is mostly to their credit that I made it through those tough times at all.

I actually do know how to program (I have an MS and BS in Computer Science as well)

Our expenses (car, phone, food, fuel, medicine, toiletries, etc.) are $1600 a month without the loan and credit payments (living with the folks). My student loan payment (most of it from b-school) is $1200 and the credit cards are $300 a month. Her student loan (also most of it from grad school) is $1000 a month. Note that we could do income based repayment where the loan payments are lower (it's 15% of your income above the poverty level, which I think is around $11,000 dollars). The balance is forgiven after 25 years of payments.

Her income is virtually non-existent right now.

We don't mind deferring a home purchase for the next few years (though we would like to move to Boston in a few years [which has a high cost of living]) and we can't have children for medical reasons.

As for finance jobs or other high-income jobs I have been under the impression that these are hard to come by if you're not near the top of the MBA class (my GPA 3.44/4.0), haven't done an internship, and don't get hired shortly after you graduate. Let me know if I'm wrong about this though.

Getting through my MBA was the toughest thing I have ever done in my life, particularly due to my psychiatric illness at the time. During this time I sought high and low for a practical, easy to understand, non-wishy-wahsy, and logical self-help book that would at the very least give me some guidance on how to deal with the stress I was under. I hated almost everything I found. I felt so trapped, I started looking at US Army POW survival manuals for clues on dealing with stress and fear.

Since then I've been hoping to write something or develop a website that would help another person going through a tough time (of any sorts) get through it successfully. Not sure how I would monetize it, but it would be cool if I could come up with a way to bring some sense to the self-help market.

Since I don't have training in counseling or psychology I even thought about going for the one year Master of Positive Psychology program at UPenn, but of course dropped the idea as it would add to my debt.

Anyway, that's the only idea I have had and only topic I really have passion for at the moment.

Maybe if I did some exploratory research on different things I could come up with some more areas I'd be interested in.

But I need to move fast as I'm terrified of defaulting on my bills when the year is out.