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The story
A post arguing that “you should just work and save up before taking out a student loan or a mortgage” set off a wave of pushback on 5ch’s News VIP board. Some argued it’s “inefficient,” pointing to the hidden cost of delaying school or a home purchase and to the logic of inflation and leverage, while others countered that “taking on debt is a personal choice” or that “borrowing for something you don’t need is just dumb.” The thread eventually spiraled into a fight over what “cost-performance” even means when it comes to buying a car.
What people said
Just graduate high school, work, save up 5 million yen, then go to college.
Same with a mortgage.
Save up 20 million yen and buy a used place instead.
Burning your precious years from 18 to 22 working a low-wage high-school-grad job instead of going the new-grad route is clearly not worth it.
And if you don't have the money, just get into a public university or take out a low-income grant-type scholarship.
Though sure, there's no upside to using a life-wrecking, exploitative loan just to attend a private school.
In that case interest gets added to your savings too, so it piles up faster.
I genuinely don't get why you'd go into debt to buy something now.
Why are you trying to force your idea of "normal" onto everyone else?
Nobody asked for your personal standard of normal.
So why go into debt instead of saving up first?
Can't you just be patient?
Why would I owe you an explanation for that?
Ever heard the phrase "mind your own business"?
Being able to save up in the first place is partly just having rich parents.
Then just save up the money first and go to college after.
Sounds like you just can't justify your own debt.
There's nothing to "justify" — it's already legitimate as is.
Taking out a loan is a personal choice, isn't it?
I agree going into debt is dumb in general,
but I can't agree with that take.
Going to college is exactly the kind of thing you should borrow to do sooner rather than later.
Is there really any point taking out a student loan to go to a voice-actor trade school?
Even if you borrow, you still have to pay it back, so it's the same thing in the end.
If we're talking about going to med school or a national university,
sure, I think it's fine to take out a loan because your family's broke.
But borrowing money just to get into a trade school or some run-of-the-mill private university? That's just dumb.
> "sure, I think it's fine to take out a loan"
Nobody needs your permission to take out a student loan.
Who do you think you are?
> "borrowing money to get into a trade school or private university is just dumb"
Do you have some kind of disease where you die if you don't get people to nod along and agree with your "right?" at the end of every opinion?
I'd say it's exactly people going to private universities or trade schools who should borrow.
Ending up there after repeating a year of exam prep (a "ronin") is no laughing matter.
"I was working instead" doesn't fly in the real world.
"As long as it drives" isn't cost-effectiveness, that's just low cost, plain and simple!
More and more idiots calling cheap junk "cospa" without even understanding what the word means.
Does a 5-million-yen car have 5 times or more the performance of a 1-million-yen car?
That's what cost-performance actually means.
Why does "performance" have to be the only thing that counts as the "pa" in cospa?
There are plenty of other kinds of value in a car besides raw performance — equipment, features, convenience, quietness, and so on.
As someone who's all for small government, that's how I see it too.
Business works the same way.
Well, I think what Re: #1 is really getting at is that borrowing to buy something you don't need is just dumb — and I agree with that much.
Whether you need it or not has nothing to do with it.
Whether it's business or government,
I think you should save up money and keep things small.
but it'd be hilarious if you had the power to see how much debt they're carrying lol.
Then you'd know who can actually flex and who can't.
What's so fun about that?
That's information that's completely useless to your own life.
Porsche, Benz, Lexus —
I bet they're all financed idiots up to their necks in debt.
Rent an apartment and save up your money.
Rent isn't free though.
If you're just going to waste money on rent, wouldn't it be better to save up and build the house from the start?
Why take on debt at all?
Why not just save up, buy a used house in your old age, renovate it, and live there?
This person clearly doesn't understand inflation or leverage at all.
And conversely, why would you have to buy a used house and renovate it in the first place?
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Mortgages and student loans work by borrowing a lump sum upfront and paying it back out of future income — a fundamentally different premise from saving up the full amount before spending. The “inflation” argument raised in the thread points to the idea that inflation erodes the real value of savings while the amount you borrow stays fixed in nominal terms, meaning that when asset prices and wages are rising, borrowing and acting early tends to work in your favor. “Leverage” is an extension of this same logic — moving more money than you actually have on hand in order to avoid missing out on opportunities. At the same time, given how loan defaults on student debt and mortgage foreclosures have become recognized social problems, there’s also a strongly held view that the risk of borrowing simply “because you can” shouldn’t be brushed aside. Throughout the thread, posters never quite agreed on where to draw the line around necessity or the prestige of one’s school, and the argument ultimately morphed into a fight over the very definition of “cost-performance” — laying bare just how differently people’s baseline assumptions about money can be.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News VIP) thread “People who go into debt don’t make sense to me — just save up money first and then buy it, right?“
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