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Hi, and welcome to The Longview. I'm Christine Ben's Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning at Morningstar.

And I'm Jeff Patak, Chief Ratings Officer for Morning Star Research Services.

Our guest on the podcast today is Anne Garcia.

Anne is a certified financial planner. She's also the author of the book How to Pay for College.

She's the managing partner of independent progressive advisors,

a fee-only registered investment advisor in Portland, Oregon. And she's also the author of the

College Financial Lady Blog. She received her BA from the University of California at Berkeley.

Anne, welcome to the Longview. Thank you for having me. Well, thanks for being here. You know, we want to talk about your book, How to Pay for College. In the book, you relate an experience from your advice practice. You were working with an attorney. She wanted to change to a less stressful career path, but she couldn't because she owed massive amounts of student debt.

Can you discuss how that was one of the events that sparked your interest in wanting to focus

on helping people make smarter decisions about paying for college and other types of higher education? Sure. And I would say she was an

extreme example of people that I was talking with. But, you know, at the time that I had the

conversation with her, and this was a woman who had gone to law school, she had taken out student

loans for her undergraduate years, taken out student loans for her grad school years.

She had federal loans.

She had private loans.

And she had even borrowed money from her family and was really not happy as an attorney and wanted to make a career change.

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