Yes. I’m 68 and have loans from private lenders that has ballooned to 98k from 40k. I am 2mos behind on payments of over 650 per month! I have paid what I could for a total of 350.00 thus far, but not enough. I am not eligible for any deferrals or anything! What am I going to do? Living on Social Security! They have reported me to the credit bureaus and my FICO SCORE dropped almost 100pts!
I am a Scandinavian immigrant and can also move back. But I am discovering that the US still requires you to file taxes, even if you are never coming back, and can garnish your SS. This country does not treat its poor and its elderly very well.
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Indeed. But by filing taxes on SS and paying not more than 5% of discretionary funds, the payment will probably be $0 anyway.
I’m just about to turn 44 with debt from multiple grad degrees that have become a source of despair. On August 24th, when other people were high-fiving themselves, I had a good cry. Actually I had five or six good cries because it seemed like Biden was sending a clear message: the only way I could ever be free of debt— debt I took on to better myself during the recession, following orders like a good soldier of capitalism— would be to commit suicide or at least die early enough that my spouse could maybe still have time to save for retirement.
As a teacher and teacher-educator, I represent the educated proletariat that Ronald Reagan (and apparently most of the neoliberal establishment) sees as such a threat. When I look at Biden’s plan, it’s not just that it doesn’t do anywhere near enough good, it’s that it also would enact great harm by forcing millions back into peonage and further entrenching a formal, federally-backed system of educational apartheid:
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$10k/$20k is meaningless the 8 million people who are currently on IDR (unless it wipes out their deb)t because their balances are computed based on income not outstanding principal. They are on IDR precisely because they have demonstrated that they cannot afford repayment yet they are entirely excluded as a class from Biden’s plan.
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It does little to rehabilitate high-balance defaulted loans (simply saying loans are no longer in default does not repair the underlying social and economic factors that caused default). At best, if the defaulted loan is for undergraduate debt, Biden’s new overly-complex IDR plan will lower monthly payments and won’t let the balance grow (but if they have low or $0 monthly payments that don’t cover the interest, they still won’t pay it down and will have to wait at least another decade for forgiveness).
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It forces 10s of millions back into repayment. With the repeated invocations of “one-time student loan debt relief,” using HEROES act authority instead of HEA, it was obvious that Biden had caved to SoFi’s lobbying push with only minor tweaks to make it look more generous. Especially galling is the evidence-free assertion that the new PSLF rules and Biden’s new IDR plan obviate the need for future targeted debt relief much less debt abolition.
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It establishes a a new borrowing threshold, explicitly based on the cost of attending two years of community college. If you borrow less than $12,000 you can have your debt forgiven in 10 years. If you borrow more, you’re stuck at 20 years. If you borrow for grad school, they’ll keep you indentured for 25 years— and all of these timelines assume that you don’t fall into default, switch repayment plans, or a myriad of other reasons servicers invent to force repayment to be extended, sometimes indefinitely.
The new borrowing threshold is most dangerous part of the plan. On the surface it looks like the White House sees this as a way to achieve free community college on the back end instead of funding it up front through Congressional action. However, it also formalizes the idea that people from less-wealthy backgrounds and un- and underrepresented groups should limit the scope of their ambitions. Stated another way: only the already wealthy should bother with advanced degrees.
We already do too much of this.
For example, Pell Grants exclude disabled students (or students who have disabled family members) who, because of the cost of insurance and medical care, may have incomes above the cutoff but still cannot afford college . And then, to kick them while they’re down, they only get half the relief. The division of subsidized and unsubsidized loans for grad students also works this way, inexplicably charging the highest interest on those with the greatest demonstrable need. Banks do that to reflect the risk of loaning to less well-off people, but it should not be federal policy to charge the poorest among us more than the wealthiest. It is deeply regressive to both punish someone on the back end for having had too much ambition while poor and to responsibilize them on the front end by saying, essentially, “just don’t bother.”
Sorry for the lengthy reply, but my word I’m exhausted by the toxic positivity coming from the clap-harder-or-we’ll-get-fascism crowd.
TL;DR: We need debt abolition not poorly targeted, partial, one-time relief.
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I am 54 and owe 100k. I am partially disabled with 9 autoimmune conditions and can’t afford to go through the approval process for social security because I can’t afford to go without pay for the lengthy process.
I applied for Borrowers Defense because over half of it was due to a predatory college. I was denied and asked for an appeal.
My daughter graduates next year and she plans to go to college, but the best I can do is help with community college. I fear I will never be able to retire because of student loans. It keeps me up at night and I have developed ulcers.
Hey there, my name is Ryan. I’m a student debtor and a nurse with > $100,000 in federal & private student loans. I greatly appreciate you sharing this - even though I just graduated college a few years ago, I’m very interested in hearing from the growing number of older student debtors as this is the largest-growing cohort of debtors. If you’re interested in sharing more of your story, I’m compiling some testimony from older student debtors for an article I’m writing for my Medium.com page https://medium.com/@nurseryanrn. Feel free to email me at ryanmoran011@gmail.com if you’d like to share your story, how student debt has affected your life, what you’d like to see going forward in terms of action from the federal government, etc. Everything’s anonymous unless you specify otherwise.
This goes for anyone reading this post who’d like to share their story as well!
Wishing you all the best,
Ryan
ryanmoran011
Hey there, my name is Ryan. I’m a student debtor and a nurse with > $100,000 in federal & private student loans. I greatly appreciate you sharing this - even though I just graduated college a few years ago, I’m very interested in hearing from the growing number of older student debtors as this is the largest-growing cohort of debtors. If you’re interested in sharing more of your story, I’m compiling some testimony from older student debtors for an article I’m writing for my Medium.com page https://medium.com/@nurseryanrn. Feel free to email me at ryanmoran011@gmail.com if you’d like to share your story, how student debt has affected your life, what you’d like to see going forward in terms of action from the federal government, etc. Everything’s anonymous unless you specify otherwise.
This goes for anyone reading this post who’d like to share their story as well!
Wishing you all the best,
Ryan
Hey there, my name is Ryan. I’m a student debtor and a nurse with > $100,000 in federal & private student loans. I greatly appreciate you sharing this - even though I just graduated college a few years ago, I’m very interested in hearing from the growing number of older student debtors as this is the largest-growing cohort of debtors. If you’re interested in sharing more of your story, I’m compiling some testimony from older student debtors for an article I’m writing for my Medium.com page https://medium.com/@nurseryanrn. Feel free to email me at ryanmoran011@gmail.com if you’d like to share your story, how student debt has affected your life, what you’d like to see going forward in terms of action from the federal government, etc. Everything’s anonymous unless you specify otherwise.
This goes for anyone reading this post who’d like to share their story as well!
Wishing you all the best,
Ryan
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50, and I owe 60K in Federal student loans. I went to school late at University of Phoenix. I got my degree in 2012. I didn’t have a choice; I had to work to live, and at that time, degree programs for working adults were limited. Tutions were increasing faster than I could save. So I took on student loans. I dream of a better life and access to jobs I didn’t have access to. Now the jobs that are there don’t want to hire someone with a degree because if I get an offer to one of these mythical green jobs, I went to school for , I’ll leave. Which is pretty much true.
I was told all kinds of things that my earnings with this degree would be a salary I would still be happy to take. So I applied for the borrower’s defense this last summer. Still no word. My guess is they want to stall till they can kill that.
Going to college was the single worst financial mistake I’ve made.
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- “permanently disabled” (…) borrowers of ANY age are eligible for FULL CANCELLATION of federal loans!!! It’s clear that not enough people are aware of that!!!
- seeing this thread as a “level 1 cripple” (from infections milder than Rona) makes me wonder what we could do uniting ELDERS with ILLDERS/younger disabled folks … even if you think saddling young abled folx w debt is moral, that argument crumbles looking at our lives!!! Hugs/solidarity!
Hi, I’m Dave from Dallas. I’m 64 and semi-retired. My student loan debt is for my youngest son, I hold the ParentsPlus loan to the tune of about $70K. Due to the pandemic, I got laid off in January, 2021 and can no longer make my payments. I tried to get an into an Income-Driven Repayment program, until I realized that everybody gets denied and it’s useless to pursue. The whole process is pathetic and politically-motivated. So here I am…
I dream of the day when the payments are re-instated and nobody in the US elects to make a payment of any kind. Wonder how they’d react to that…
Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?
I would be very happy to share my story with the media. $64,000+ debt, just was released from medical BK this past July(took five years to pay off). I am 69, my husband is 84 (multiple mecial issues plus the early stages of dementia). I worked as a nurse for 40+ years. Living in a mobile home with quite a bit of anxiety at present. Unfortunately we elders are at the mercy of a system designed to trap learners in an endless cycle of debt with no straightforward way out.
Hi @Braxton, I’m 51 years old and I have $55, 000+ in student loans as well. Where do we stand now? Are there any considerations for people like us, yet, or are we still on the back burner? What else can we do to be heard?
Hi @scrivenl77 and all others who have posted in this thread!
I wanted to thank you for sharing your stories here and urge you to join our 50 Over 50 Debt Strike! A group of now hundreds of Debt Strikers who are over the age of 50 w/ student debt. We had our last call last week and should have another call come the new year. If you want to try to get your story heard as a Student Debtor over 50, consider joining our Writing Workshop Monday December 12th.
You can find any of our events here!
Hi Jerry, I am a 57 year-old woman and I understand the feeling of guilt you are going through because of decisions made under a desire to conquer the world, especially coming from a disadvantage, family, culture… I pushed my two sons to attend college and now one of them has a debt of almost $200.00. We must keep fighting this corrupt system.
I am an older borrower and I would like to expose the federal TANF or welfare agency as a predatory agency for lenders both private and government lenders. I would like to know how many people needed welfare help due to a crisis but were told they had to go to work or go to school. If I had the career skills and family support when my husband left us I would have gone to work but I had just given birth to our second child when he discovered fatherhood was not for him.
When I told the welfare worker I didn’t want to go into debt, his response was that after I got our of school I would have a job and make enough money to pay for the loans. He neglected to tell my young mother self that I would have enough money to pay for the loans but nothing else. Going to school did not improve my children’s lives but made us poorer than before.
Somehow we need to expose this predatory agent aka the welfare department. How much money has the welfare department made for the banks, financial institutions and educational institutions??
Thanks for listening.
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Hey @lil.brown.owl have you had your student loans for over 40 years? If so, we have a reporter who wants to get in touch with you.
Hey @nvstgatr1 have you had your student loans for over 40 years? If so we have a reporter who would like to talk with you.
Hi @ssuz545 we have a reporter who is looking to talk to people who have had student loans for over 40 years. It sounds like you might have yours for 38 years, which is maybe close enough if you are willing to share your story.
Hi @maestraloca have you had your student loans for over 40 years? If so we have a reporter who would like to talk with you if you are willing to share your story.