This is Motley Fool Answers. I'm Alison Southwick, and I'm joined, as always, by Diana Yocum and Robert Brokamp,

personal finance experts here at the Motley Fool. Motleyful CFO, Olin Douglas, is also back today with

advice on how to negotiate a raise. But before that, we're going to talk about the morality of

defaulting on your student loans and a financial life planning website to check out. All that and

some gloating by Dayana and myself in this week's episode of Motley Fool Answers.

So here's something fun we read this week.

What's fun about this is that whenever we start talking about this op-ed in the New York Times that ran this last week, Robert just shakes his head sadly and looks like he wants to just like, I don't know, not punch something, but definitely get a little

ground someone, send someone to the room. Partially. So the op-ed was why I defaulted on my student

loans by Lee Siegel. And it got a lot of people really upset. Slate even said that the New York

Times needs to apologize publicly for

publishing this op-ed. And in it, Lee Siegel talks about how after pursuing not one, not two, but

three degrees from Ivy League universities, the author chose to default on his student loans,

and he recommended that others do the same yeah so here's here's my issue so

part of it is personal right it sounds I don't know if he's trying to elicit sympathy

when he writes this but here's what my wife and mr. Siegel have in common

two master's degrees from Columbia had to take out student loans, became writers. The difference is,

my wife paid off her student loans. He had to work part-time. She worked full-time. So his sob story

just doesn't resonate with me at all. Yeah. He had to work part-time through college. Right. Well, see, that's the thing. When

you read the article, things are a little fuzzy and then there have been follow-up stories about it.

In a follow-up story, he said that actually his, for Columbia, he went on a scholarship.

So how much money did he have to borrow? And then it was sort of implied that maybe it was his living

expenses that he had to borrow right right well and the thing here part of the argument in the

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