<prompt> Human: I graduated college a year ago and was told I owe my parents 42k no interest for them helping me with college. I currently have 51k in formal student loans. How do I go about this?After I graduated, I discovered my mother had been itemizing any assistance they gave me over the years while I was in college. Im 26, live at home, and pay 900 a month in student loans, but 32k of that 51k will be paid off in 5 years. The rest will be paid off in 10.Im not sure how to handle the extra burden of 42k. I am wondering if it would make more sense to put the money into a fund, such as a mutual fund or 401k, and pay them off once I get enough or simply just pay them each month for X amount of years. To complicate this, my mom is 61 and my dad is 67, so Im not sure if my dad will even be alive in 10 years since he smokes. Here are my financial break downs:Savings: 8,500Own a paid-off truck with 180k milesMonthly income after taxes: 3,662Monthly budget for spending: 2,105 Does not include rent or utilities as I live at home for nowBudget categories:1. Student loans: 9152. Food and Dining: 3003. Gas Fuel: 2254. Braces: 200 for 16 months starting in Jan5. Auto maintenance: 1006. Clothing: 1007. Gym: 91 Includes 32 for YMCA and 59 for rock climbing gym8. Recurring expenses46 Storage unit 30 phone bill 11 Netflix: 879. Auto insurance: 5210. Personal Care haircuts, hygiene products: 35 I was hoping to move out in the spring, as Ive been living here for a year now. Apartments are not cheap here, and Ill likely be paying 700-800 rent utilities, so a total around 1000 for rent and utilities is possible.TL-DR: I have 51k in student loans, and I found out I owe my parents 42k for college expenses. Are there any smart ways to go about this? Should I just pay them monthly and forget about it or try to invest the money then pay them? Any other comments or advice are appreciated too.Thanks!Assistant: Wow...yeah, youre under no obligation to pay the 42k, that sounds like straight up bullshit. They cant just spring that on you once you graduate. If they wanted to be paid back, they should have told you that when you started college so you could choose to accept or not accept their help.Are they maybe having financial problems?Human: They dont appear to be having financial issues. They usually paid out of cash flows when they helped me out, so savings wasnt affected. The only exception is they took out a loan during my final two years to help me out. That loan was roughly half that amount. To be honest, I wasnt thrilled when I found out that the total was 42k, as that put me over 100k in student loans at the time. Assistant: Did your parents tell you they were taking a loan out to help you? This all seems super shady on your parents behalf to not tell you this, or to tell you ahead of time that any time they helped you that you needed to pay them back. My parents can be a lot to handle but they never did this to me. Not trying to dis your parents but are you upset at them for this? I would be. Id rather owe a bank this money than my parents. If they have a loan for about 20K I can understand why they are wanting you to pay them, to basically pay off this loan too. However, it sucks because it sounds like you had no idea you were going to have to pay them too on top of the bank.Have they been cool with letting you just pay the bank and skip paying them for now? As others have said, you have no legal obligation to pay them but I know you are in a shitty predicament if you want to have a good relationship with your parents, but what they did isnt exactly good in my opinion.Your only saving grace may be if they are going to be lax about you paying them back until you pay off most of your other debt. If they are truly wanting you to do both at the same time, and you are going to do that, you are probably going to have to consolidate or do something with your bank loans to pay them off slower, but youre going to rack up more interest.Human: My dad told me he was taking the loan out because he didnt want to touch his savings. I didnt expect them to treat the arrangement like an open tab in that anytime they assisted me, it got added to the total. They have been pretty lax about it. In the past year Ive only had two conversations with my mom on the matter. First time was right after graduation, and the second time was back in August.Im currently paying most my loans at twice the pace to save on interest. In about another 4 years, my monthly payment for student loans will drop to 206.Assistant: Im not sure why you didnt just take the loan out yourself if you knew your parents were taking out a loan but whatever. I would say, you are paying down your bank loans pretty fast and at a high monthly rate 900. You seem to have some money left over between what your monthly take home is vs. your bills. I would just at least start paying your parents 100-300 a month just to show you are serious about paying them back, or tell them you are going to save this in a fund and give them a larger amount every 6 months or something - I guess whatever you both are okay with doing. However, with your current living arrangement it seems you have an extra 1500 per month you dont have going towards any bills unless I missed something. You could stick it out with where you are living in mean time to pay this debt down even faster - whether that is put most of that 1500 towards the bank loans which is what I would do or give it to your parents.Human: I ultimately got denied for financial aid my last 4 semesters, and even though I got approved for outside loans, my school denied them. I went more into detail in a comment further down, but basically I wasnt progressing fast enough through my program.I currently have 1500 left over according to the budget, but this amount will considerably shrink when I eventually try to move out. I want to make sure I dont put myself in a situation where I dont have enough left over for savings. According to this thread so far, it seems I should focus on getting an emergency fund going and paying down my bank loans faster while also paying some each month to my parents.  <response>: In this case, you would not have been able to graduate without their help and you were seeking additional loans anyway, so I think you should treat the tuition portion as if you had indeed been given a normal loan from someone else.If I was in your position, I would accept responsibility for the portion of their tab that is directly your tuition; but I would have a serious conversation with them about all the other line items as being items that werent discussed with you, and arent right to spring them on you. If nothing else, push those items down the road for after the tuition loan part of the equation is taken care of. 