Mitt Romney recently advised students that they should borrow money from their parents so they could get an education or start a business. That’s not bad advice if your parents have the money to loan you. But he said this while Congress was debating whether to keep interest rates low on student loans. In context, he’s saying “don’t borrow money from a bank or the government, borrow it from your parents.” You see, that way you don’t have to worry about the going interest rate unless your parents are going to charge you interest at the going rate. I guess Mitt Romney assumes that parents will just fork over their money with no interest attached. Maybe some families operate that way, but not all. What’s interesting about this is that Romney paid for his college with what appears to have been a gift from his parents. Ann Romney tells it:
They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income. It was tiny. And I didn’t have money to carpet the floor. But you can get remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors. It looked awful, but it was carpeting.
We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time. The stock came from Mitt’s father. When he took over American Motors, the stock was worth nothing. But he invested Mitt’s birthday money year to year—it wasn’t much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself. Five years later, stock that had been $6 a share was $96 and Mitt cashed it so we could live and pay for education.
Now, George Romney was a wise man and a kind father. And he set his son up nicely so he could focus on his studies. It paid off very nicely, as Romney graduated at the top of his class at BYU. Maybe every father should set aside birthday money for their children and invest it in the hope that it will pay off 16 times over. That sounds like a plan!
It also sounds tone deaf.
What do you think?
