The interest rates in the 90s was nothing less than vigorish (but i feel that all interest is vigorish) and what you describe is similar to how my 35,000 loaned ballooned to the impossible amount it is now. I’ve just read that the unpaid balance at the end of IBR gets taxed as regular income. How the hell do they expect a woman of 85, in poverty, to pay that kind of tax??
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Old Timers! Never seen so much hogwash! How did all y’ all get through college in the first place? Banking works just about exactly the same as it always has and compounding interest is one of the most favored tools of the banking industry since way, way back. All wide eyed and bawling? Didn’t realize you were pawning your future and stealing from your retirement fund by taking out student loans in 1980? Did the math and thought to yourselves, it’ll work out as long as I can get on Medical? Can’t believe how much good intentions really cost back then, huh? Probably still have those $100 textbooks in your library at home thinking you could give them to your grandkids when they are ready to go to college? It was the graduate students at their work study jobs in the financial aid office that set the undergraduates straight at my school. Career academics who never planned on leaving the ivory tower showing us the ropes. Sign here. Everybody knew the scam, the scammers and the scammed, stop pretending. Student loan terms were not a secret to anyone then anymore than they are right now as students are lining up around blocks to get into universities that still haven’t said SORRY. 1985, remember FARM AID? Watched the country families crawl through the 80’s as our food system went corporate and the shit kickers got shamed into learning how to sell dad down the river in business school. Cute. Our urban ghettos were full of brilliant minds in 1990, ripe for the picking, the reicuters were everywhere, selling cheap futures, remember? Go anywhere near a university and you will see it’s no different, just more expensive, bigger loans. Slick info sessions packed with potential students listening intently as the school representatives spin it just like they did back then. So you want to write a novel? Fact is, can’t afford to turn the money down now anymore than you could have then. It’s still the most important investment I’ve made despite the loans. It’s worth fighting for isn’t it? Those loans were the one and only chance I had to get off the farm and I would have signed anything just so I could read instead of shovel. Go to any academic setting and you will see it’s the same as it’s always been for working class kids. Remember how the Pell was just enough to get you in the door but it was the loans that kept in in books and food. Those calculations were suspicious weren’t they? That’s why it’s important for the members of this UNION to get UNITED and refuse one dime of “forgiveness” until there is a thorough accounting of what these policy makers and politicians have done with OUR department of education. Do they really think they are getting away with this? Hold on, hold steady, put your pens away, these people haven’t even said they were sorry for 35 years of SYSTEMIC abuse of our citizens, you and me! Already, rolling over because you can’t remember what it was like to walk around with a credit score that couldn’t get you an apartment to live in!!! DEFAULT is the worst! 30 years of punishment not good enough for you? $20K doesn’t even scratch the surface! And they are selling the same system to your neighbor kids and you’re saying THANKS FOR CARING?!! It’s $10K on $150K. That’s an INSULT not a favor! Not one person on here screaming and kicking? Here comes the debt collectors, here comes the bankers, the servicers and the financial aid officers, the DOE and Biden to celebrate and we congratulate ourselves for being on time to their meeting? They have done a wonderful job making it so that some of us win a little so the rest lose it all. Don’t need a college degree to figure it out!
Hi—thank you for inviting us to share our story.
I’m 60 and starting in a 5-yr PhD program in Depth Psychology. I am a Leadership Development consultant not working right now, but I plan to work again in the next few years. I am still paying off over $26,000 in loans from the completion of my B.A. degree over 10 years go, and will have new debt in the coming years that could amount to over $100,000.
It makes me feel defeated to know I will likely have to dig in to most of my modest retirement funds to pay my tuition and loan payments. But I am committed to this degree program because I want to make a contribution to a transformation in how we psychologically approach the issue of climate change, and how we might mitigate our unconsciousness of the archetypal nature of earth systems.
I think this is crucial work for our times and I agree with Debt Collective that (even graduate level) education should be free and we (at any age) should not have to sink into poverty just to fulfill a lifelong dream of higher education. I am calling for complete debt forgiveness! You can print that!
Thank you.
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I’m a 69 year old retired teacher. Very little relief for public service. I think I owe roughly $45,000. I’m in default. Any advice?
I spent 32 years teaching in inner city schools. People in public service should not have to pay for a college education so that they can do public service. That would be unheard of in any other country so stop talking about banking systems. Who cares?
Keep up the good fight. Do not jeopardy your retirement.
Your story sounds like mine. I’m not even working in the field I went to school for, didn’t graduate. It seemed as Navient pushed for the deferment and or hardship. I’m on income sensitive and my payment is 0. If I wasn’t they want like 2 grand a month. I’m on SS retired. [quote=“martian, post:44, topic:5289, full:true”]
61 here, with income-based repayment since 2009 for undergrad & grad school loans from 1985-1997. 45k in student loans is currently 442k, locked in at 8% [!] interest when consolidated in 1998. Is whatever remains unpaid to be forgiven in 2030-something? Won’t the loan have more than doubled by then? What if any relief is in sight for the eventual tax bill on six or seven figure loan forgiveness?
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53 owe 90K original loan was around 40K in 1994
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
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.
- “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.