What Would You Do to Pay Off Your Student Loans?

A new survey from personal finance app Pillar found that student loan borrowers would do some outlandish things to get their loan debts paid off, including changing their name to Baby Yoda and chugging rotten milk.

The survey polled 1,180 student loan borrowers from across the United States. The average borrower surveyed was $44,000 in debt from their student loans, and 95 percent of the responders were women around 32 years old.

Some of the poll’s quirkier findings were that 63 percent of those surveyed would vote for Kanye West to get their debts paid off, 58 percent would change their name to Baby Yoda, 51 percent would lick peanut butter off of Donald Trump’s toes and 44 percent would chug a gallon of rotten milk.

People were also willing to completely give up small luxuries for debt forgiveness — 67 percent would give up social media and 64 percent would give up alcohol.

Some individuals even went far enough to suggest tattooing brand names on their body for monetary sponsorship and wearing a wedding dress everywhere for a week. One responder even said, “I would do literally anything short of harming a living thing.”

While these findings are interesting, they coincide with current events. Student loan debt is currently the second largest type of consumer debt with $45 million people in the U.S. owing over $1.7 trillion in student loans. As we approach the 2020 election, student loan debt forgiveness has become one of the most debated topics of this election cycle with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., making the cause central to their campaigns.

The Pillar app hops onto this issue, helping people to save and manage money to pay off their student loans. The app looks over users’ income, spending habit and personal loans to determine a budget plan that will help them efficiently pay off their debt. The app’s founder, Michael Bloch, started the company after seeing his wife struggle with student loan debt.

“My wife graduated from law school with over $300,000 in student loan debt,” Bloch said. “We really struggled to figure out how we were going to pay all that back. As I started doing research and looking into the space, I realized that this is something that millions of other Americans struggle with as well. I couldn’t find any good tools that were helping people with this, so I decided to drop out of business school to do something about it.”