I took a look at mine and saw I'm accruing $117 of interest per month. Absolute vultures, I swear.
I'm waiting for a hilarious wave of defaults to sweep the nation. It should have been obvious that was gonna happen. I'm hoping it'll have a similar effect to a general strike.
I hope you are wrong but it does feel like adding student loans back into the equation is going to put a significant financial burden on a demographic that is already struggling to accumulate wealth.
How do you even default on a student loan without becoming a dependent? I was under the impression they could take it directly out of your paycheck and it couldn't be dismissed as part of bankruptcy.
Trying to save up to do a group buy on a building with some folks so that we have more reliable / permanent community to fend off the coming capitalist apocalypse, and we can't possibly secure a loan for that if we don't all find a way to somehow pay off our student loans too. It's awful. I make a decent amount of money and it's still just totally unreasonable to expect anyone but the most affluent to be able to save for anything, let alone something like a building even if you're sharing that cost burden, while also paying rent, and student loans, and buying food, and paying your ridiculous health insurance premiums and also still paying for your medical needs, and utilites, and literally all the random other bullshit capitalists make you pay for.
Maybe in a similar boat, like I went to a university and used it to "start a career" and even though I'm making "a living" I still feel like I'm paycheck to paycheck and now these fucking cretins are coming out of the grave to take even more.
It would be great if going to a university and then working for years led to anything like owning my own home or not being like "shit this is bad" when I look at my grocery bill.
edit: nobody, university-educated or otherwise, should be barred from owning their own home, or be stressed out by a grocery bill. My personal path means nil in the calculus of who deserves to be happy and safe. I only say the above in response to the advertisement for the university path which I was constantly subjected to as a child, which was that by going to a university and then getting a job, I would be shielded from the meatgrinder of the supposedly lesser non-university-educated life path. Along with like, my entire family basically threatening to shun me if I did not go, and thus being agents for a loan agency.
Mostly we just buy a building and live in it. Instead of renting 4 different flats in different buildings we can buy our own building and live in that. Rent doesn't change but it goes to our mortgage rather than a landlords mortgage. The math works out well but it's a lot of work even for 6 people to save up for.
I'll pay them back when they give me a job that can pay them back. I went out and got their little stemlord degrees but oops turns out master degrees aren't worthy of drinking the shit out of a gas station toilet. So that's to say I'm just going to wait out the next capitalist crisis where hopefully either they get paused again or I die.
Yeah, I think I can get rid of them in about 5 years. I left them at 20,000 hoping the Supreme Court would give us something. I was going to use my loan payments toward buying a new car. It was kinda crushing when the Supreme Court made their decision.
To be clear while the Supreme Court shouldn’t have done that Biden should’ve anticipated that and just done it the right way the first time instead of specifically designing it in a way that the Supreme Court could stop.
And after doing it the right way and immediately, he should’ve had all the records destroyed so if they tried to restore the debt they didn’t even know who owed what.
I was super fortunate that my parents were fine with me living with them post college. I was able to pay back all ~$45k after working a few years, basically just dumping my entire paycheck into loans.
I didn't get loans, only some grants. It was a gut instinct thing where I was wary of being neck deep in debt and using one credit card to pay for another credit card like the chuds in my biological family.
It took me a few extra years to finish college because I was working a full time job (and a part time job for part of that), but I escaped 's student debt hell circus almost by accident that way.
grandpa died so me and sibling got my dads share of his inheritance
all you need is a white guy born in the 1930s who worked the same desk job for his whole life. so easy! i think it was like $10k i paid off, after having made payments for a while. and that was after my mom paid for some of my college with my dads inheritance/insurance money.
take a guess what paid for my house downpayment too? you guessed it! although funnily enough my grandpa also paid for my parents first house.
all student loans should have 0% interest, but then how would the stonk lines go up?
and yea, i often ponder how much of my current life and security was paid for with generational wealth and death. people talk about life changing amounts of money, mine was like $40k at most. It doesnt take much.
yes. i'm about half a year out from hitting 120 qualifying payments / finishing my 10 years of public service to get the last $25k wiped. i originally borrowed about $32k. i have paid "back" something like $24k. that's right. borrowed $32k, paid $24k, still owe more than half. the juice on federally subsidized loans is harsh. that's with the 2.5+ year COVID pause on payments and interest. even LIB liz warren said it was embarrassing that the program literally makes money off of student borrowers. and i borrowed significantly less than the average in my cohort, because i won some really big and highly competitive national scholarships. i basically got an entire year free from tuition. i went to a state school and paid at the in-state rate.
i remember i was in cuba some years ago talking to this younger cuban national who had gone to art school there, and we were talking about how education and assistance programs compare. i mentioned that school was extremely expensive in the US, even at the publicly-supported state institutions. dollar amounts aren't really a good comparison because the economies are so distinct, but i mentioned that i was working on getting them forgiven by doing public service. he said the cuban system worked like that too, his eyes lighting up. i got the impression he really wanted to believe the US wasn't a dystopian shithole, as he had family there and wanted to visit them and maybe even live for a while to broaden his horizons.
i asked how many years of service the cuban government wanted, and it was something like 2. i said in the US, it's 10. and we had to make payments the entire time. and if we didn't complete the 10 years, nothing was removed. no partial forgiveness. he struggled to internalize that, but agreed it was too great of a burden.
Mine are FFEL, so they never qualified for anything. Program was bad enough for Obama to end it, but not bad enough to give us any relief.
I don't really care though. Brandon said he was doing something about student loans so if anyone calls I'll tell them to go bug him about it.
unless you're fleeing abroad, it seems like the yearly cost (5-10pct of (AGI - ~35000) is worth the incredible psychic strain of knowing your principle is increasing and you can never buy property.
I live in Australia and was fortunate the majority of my HECS debt (smaller than US) was covered by some programs for working in an area of need that got cancelled a few years in (the ladder being pulled away from me by neoliberalism for the last couple of rungs)
I have enough to pay them off in full without having to make material sacrifices so I think I might just do it and never have to worry about it again. it's not like they're ever gonna get forgiven tbh
Forgive me if this is obvious, but just to write it down for anyone browsing this thread: If you have a fixed-rate loan at a low interest rate (~3%), even if you have enough cash on hand to repay the loan in full, it may be a better move financially to make the minimum payments on the loan and invest the rest of the money in a financial instrument that can net a higher rate of return.
For example, say you have $100 in savings and a $100 loan at 3% interest. Ally savings accounts are at something above 4% right now, so if you put that $100 in an Ally account and can afford to make the minimum payments without withdrawing that $100, you're making $4/month on savings interest while only paying $3/month in loan interest. If you pay the loan off over 10 months, you profit $10.
There are relatively safe ways to net 5+% on your money, like CDs or bonds. Or you could gamble your money in the stock market or an index fund, but obviously that's riskier.
I have $33k of loans I think and enough liquid assets lying around to pay them off. Later this month (or whenever the due date is idk) I will check what interest rate the loans are at, if (a) market rates are better than I'm paying on the loan (b) if that difference is actually enough money to be worth the trouble of keeping around a student loan forever. Like if it was a hundred bucks' "pay" for ten years of managing $33k student loan + $33k slightly better investments I'd give up $100 to not have to keep messing with it. If it is a few thousand I'd probably do it. One-year CDs pay like 5.5% APY right now, I'm sure the stock market is nuts. Haven't looked at my finances in a bit.
Also I fucking hate these guys and don't want to give them any money