Ahh.. ok, that's not one that I was considering. The two crossing my mind are trying to get a credit counselling service to bludgeon my interest rate down to something sane so that a much larger fraction of my monthly payments can actually go to principal rather than interest, and asking my credit card company to drop my credit limit every time I shave a thousand dollars off my balance (so that it would be easier to apply for lower-interest loans that I could subsequently move my balance to).

And to think that when my postdoc ran out a year and a half ago, I was free of institutional debt (though still had a balance at the bank of mom and dad). Graduating into a recession (apart from the detail that a postdoc doesn't end in a graduation) sucks. Clearly the universe is punishing me for snickering at the dotcom crash because I was going to grad school anyhow, and didn't have to worry about graduating into it.