Wishing Fairy

From the Baltimore Sun, we have Buying home not best step to reducing college debt.

Charles wants to buy a house, but says $60,000 in student loans is holding him back.

The 37-year-old earns $39,000 a year working for the federal government and pays $420 a month for his Baltimore apartment. He has $6,000 in a savings account that could help with closing costs.

He says he wants a house because renting doesn't allow him to build up equity. But he's haunted by the student loans.

"To me, the one negative outweighs the positive. I keep seeing that $60,000 problem each time I look in the mirror. I still think buying the house is the right thing to do," he writes in an e-mail. "I just don't know what to do."

Charles is banking on selling his house for a tidy profit in five years or so. But there's no guarantee that housing prices will rise in the future. Prices have flattened here in recent months, and they can remain that way or even go down.

He was hoping that if he bought a house and sold it later, he could apply $20,000 or $30,000 from the proceeds to his student loans. A big payment like that might lead the lender to forgive the remaining balance, he says.

$60K in debt, trying to take on more debt in the "hope" that that appreciation would pay off the other debt.

And why would a big payment make the lender "forgive the remaining balance"?

Any lender would milk the last penny out of his cold dead hands!

Logic need not apply in this bizarro world!