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Her money is supported by Fidelity Investments. Together we're here to empower, educate, and encourage women to start talking about money. Discover more at Fidelity.com slash its time. Her money comes to you through PRX. Hey everybody, welcome to Her Money, it's

Shensky, and if you're a regular Her Money listener,

and I hope everybody is, then you know that one of my favorite

parts of the show is answering your questions which is why I'm so excited to do a

special episode devoted just to your questions.

We're calling it the mail bag episode.

And since we receive so many of those questions,

we figured we would try to tackle a few different topics one by one. So we're going to start with

student debt, then we'll answer questions on credit cards and finally we'll

take your retirement questions. Kelly Holkren is in the studio with me.

Hey Kelly.

Hi, Jay, I'm so excited for this episode.

Yeah, I'm excited to do this too.

And it's great that we're starting with student debt because what we know about this year's grads is that they walked off campus

with an average of $37,000 in student debt. That's over 1.3 trillion in total according to Market Watch's National Student Loan

debt clock which you can go to and depressingly see the number climb about

two thousand seven hundred dollars pressingly see the number climb about $2,700 every single second.

That just makes my stomach hurt.

It's astonishing.

But let's start with some good news for future student loan borrowers and parents, interest rates are going down.

So for any federal student loans issued after July 1st of 2016, they'll be roughly a half

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