Hey guys- I haven’t introduced myself yet. I will be 30 next month and I have $43,000 in federal student loan debt. I graduated in 2011 with 62,000 and have diligently scrimped and saved in a debtors prison to faithfully pay down what I have. Like so many of you, I was 18, naive and gullible when I signed my life away for a college education that every trusted adult in my life told me that I “needed”.
The last few days, I have been on pins and needles praying that the stimulus bill would include some of the Democrats’ debt forgiveness proposals. Normally, I am bipartisan and even lean conservative. But indebting so many young people in this way is just wrong. Yet… Instead of a true reprieve, Congress has stopped payments and interest for 6 months, but all that does is postpone the problem. At this point, I swear to God that when this is all over, they will never see another dime of my money. I don’t care what that means. I won’t rejoin an economy that has kept me in this prison since I was a child.
A second economy may have to pop up where people only deal in cash and under the table jobs so that the feds don’t garnish this debt they think they are owed (similar to what already happens in many big cities where there are large undocumented populations without proper work visas, etc).
They will pry this money from my cold and dead hands. Even after this is over. That’s the only way they get it.
I’m in Activist Mode now. I want to be free! I want all of us that were sold under this bus as teenagers to be free! Can someone point me in the right direction? I feel sort of lost on what to do and who to ask. Let’s share this forum. Get the word out. Write your senators. Especially the Republicans. They need to truly see what a lost cause trying to collect this debt will be. Let’s get this thing big. Let’s find out who else is in this boat and make our voices so big that they can’t ignore us. Come September, we won’t pay. We won’t ever pay. They are trying to tap a dry well. Student Debt forgiveness and jubilee is the only way forward.