It’s that time of year again: back to school time. And while students are anxious to walk through their school halls, check off their back to school lists, and make sure they have plenty of friends in every class, graduates may be struggling to pay off their debt.

Unfortunately, student loan debt is at an all-time high and continues to rise. The average student loan debt for 2017 graduates was $39,400 amounting to $1.48 trillion in total student loan debt. This exceeds the amount of credit card debt in the United States by $694 billion.

In the summer of 2016, we surveyed around 1,000 young professionals for The Impact of Student Loan Benefits, a white paper outlining the effect of student loan debt on employee recruitment. We found over 60% of respondents reported that student loan debt is one of the top two financial concerns in their lives. While student loans are clearly a stressor for millennials, there’s a way to prevent them from causing students so much anxiety.

The need to plan a funeral can take you by surprise, leaving you very little time to make arrangements when someone you care about passes away. Having some understanding of what goes into planning for a funeral can only help, especially since funerals tend to happen so soon after someone passes. Your loved one deserves to be honored with dignity when they pass, and in turn, you and your family deserve the opportunity to say a proper goodbye. Ultimately, you want a funeral to be meaningful, and knowing how to facilitate that is key.

Finding the money to pay for a funeral is a high priority. Funeral costs determine the kind of funeral you can have—where you can have the funeral, how many mourners can come pay their respects, and the type of burial or cremation ceremony you can have. However, money is usually the last thing on your mind when a loved one passes away. That’s why it’s a good idea to know how to cover funeral costs, so that you’re not left financially scrambling while grieving. In this article, we’ll look at a breakdown of funeral costs, and outline the ways you can pay for a funeral.

By Alison Norris, CFP, SoFi

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By Tony Morosini, VP of Banking

There’s no question deposit accounts are having a moment. In a rising rate environment, banks earn an increasing yield on the deposits they hold, and these additional proceeds can often go directly to earnings. To gather more deposits, banks fight to get consumers to switch banks, but it’s a tough sell because changing banks is painful.

While lots of institutions are offering deals to entice people to move their accounts, they haven’t invested in making the consumer experience as good as it should be. People have been using and managing money online at scale for 20 years, and we’ve now gotten to a place where people are not just comfortable with handling money online, but they expect it. The traditional financial institutions have improved on some marks, like improving their mobile experiences (or at least creating one at all), but there’s still a lot of space to tackle.