Since this is GQ, the factual answer is:
So you start a conversation seeking opinions, input, ideas concerning your situation, but can’t be arsed to respond to people’s questions, ideas or input, just ignoring the greater number altogether?
What’s the point of anyone responding to any of your posts, ever?
You need to get better at several skills, it seems.
Wishing you Good Luck, (I think you’ll need it!)
Suck it up, live like a student for a few more years, drive an old car and don’t buy any toys, and pay the loan off early.
It’s a relatively small sacrifice to get an albatross off your neck. The alternative is no retirement plan, because you’ll be in the red. Can’t buy a house either, and that’s a huge long-term financial benefit.
It doesn’t matter whether the school hosed you, given that you have no legal recourse. They already have their money; it’s your creditors you’ll be shafting (probably the federal govt.)
Ok, just for you, I scrolled up and made sure there wasn’t something I missed.
a. A couple of people were badgering me, wanting me to reveal details of what the school did to me. I know where that goes - they just want to call me a liar/say an educational institution would never deliberately shaft someone, it must have been my fault. So no point in talking about it.
b. A couple of people didn’t realize I did ultimately finish a degree, and the median salary for people with my degree is a little over 100k, and I may make that myself quite a bit sooner than I thought because of the venture I’m in.
c. A couple of people were right about my assumptions about how fast the debt would grow. Actually, if I pay 15% of every dollar between 16k and 100k of income, plus pay taxes first on that money, (so it ends up taking about 25% of my total income), I would repay what I owe in about 15 years.
I did this calculation assuming that I started making 50k a year and eventually moved up to about 80k over time. Not making 100k a year out of school and eventually move up to 150k or possibly a share of a 7 figure deal. Sometimes things work out unexpectedly.
So maybe I would be able to pay it off. It still makes sense for me to use the deferment for the first few years - if I actually am able to pull 100k/150k/a share of millions in the next few years, there’s no telling when there might be a dry spell in the business. (I am not guaranteed a salary, but I end up making about 3 to 5 k a week for the projects I’ve done in the last few months. Currently I’m jammed with work for the foreseeable future and do 12 hour days. hence my 6 figure annual estimate if this keeps up) I will need as much money in the bank as possible. So my basic plan still makes sense in the short term - defer for a few years to save up enough to buffer the volatility of a consulting business.
No, it doesn’t. You can borrow dischargeable funds at lower rates from private lenders if you really need money in the future.
Let’s be clear – you have raised this issue in several posts on this board. But it’s in that teasing way in which you’re happy to tell everyone how badly the college screwed you, but how DARE we ask what happened.
Pro tip: if you don’t want people to ask what happened, don’t bring up vague references to things you don’t want to talk about.
Huh. Your point is taken, but again, you are not taking into account that you *can * avoid paying the full balance on student loans, you just have to be more creative to do it.
- You can do income based repayment, where after 10/25 years the remaining debt is forgiven. The trick is to only earn IBR credit during years when you are not making much money, not years when you are making 100k+
- You could probably put your money into accounts that the Federal government doesn’t have the legal power to seize. (some foreign banks may not agree to respect seizure orders)
- You could probably put your money into assets that are protected, such as houses in homestead states
4. You could probably leave the country, with your money in overseas accounts, and just not pay at all
5. You can stall the whole process with the in-school deferment, which may in fact cost 4-5k a year in tuition and fees but that is cheaper than the loan payments by a factor of 3 or 4.
I’m willing to at least consider alternatives, as this ever ticking pile of debt is naturally not something I want to have eating my seed corn at this early vulnerable phase.
I’m trying to give my moral position. I know that “collectively” the voices on this board may feel that as a taxpayer, they want the government to get their money back, and they want to shut down any discussion on practical ways to avoid the government being able to collect. (by using the governments own rules, or putting assets into banks controlled by other governments, or leaving to another government, or just relying on the fact that a big number in a computer doesn’t mean anything on the ground if you have no assets to seize)
So I’m saying “yeah, I signed up for the debt. Don’t lecture me on responsibility - it’s not my fault the tuition was inflated to 40-50k+, it was the only school I had available for this purpose, and had I graduated, I would have been able to repay”.
And I’m simply saying that the entity I am plotting to screw over - if I can - is indirectly responsible for what happened to me as that entity policies this nation and is supposed to prevent fraud like what happened, and really should have come up with a better scheme for education financing that doesn’t create this spiralling pool of inflating tuition rates.
Once more for emphasis: if you don’t want people to ask what happened, don’t bring up vague references to things you don’t want to talk about.
If I said "down with the Fed! If they, like a sensible Western democracy, made all the basic state schools free to anyone who shows sufficient “ability” to be worth educating (and the higher end schools, the equivalent to Harvard/Oxford, also free to anyone at the upper end), it would work out a lot better.
Or not free, per say. It would be work study. Degrees would be something like 6 months in the workforce, 6 months in school or something. Going to work is the student’s “skin in the game” - sort of like a downpayment on a house, it gives the student incentive not to quit school. Maybe 30-50% of the money earned during that 6 months of working would be held in trust and the student only receives if he/she finishes.
Anyways, the current system is crazy. Crazy stupid. And I never received even a tiny fraction of the money I was charged in terms of things spent to educate me personally - lots of the money paid for big fancy buildings, research, and so on.
Anyways, fine. “down with the Fed!” We live in a society where you have to go to school or you can’t make a living and you are at the mercy of predatory institutions your whole life. (if you don’t make enough money, you can’t buy health insurance or quality food, which means you get sick and fat, which lowers your earning potential further, which forces you to take payday and high interest loans, which lowers your earning potential further still, and so on in a perpetual cycle of barely scraping by)
So choosing not to take those loans was not a choice at all. I did my best, but I didn’t finish.
From one of his previous threads. He references his friend.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=16646593&postcount=14
Yeah, that about sums it up. I just didn’t want to see a wall of “don’t get falsely accused of crimes”, “you shouldn’t have listened to your attorney and should have told the school”, “no state school just kicks people out arbitrarily like that, you must have done something worse”, “just go to another medical school, they’ll let you in despite your transcript saying you got thrown out”.
Don’t defer the debt, pay it off. Otherwise you get screwed by compound interest. Money in the future is not guaranteed, but your debt is, if you don’t pay it off. Resist the urge to kick the can down the road, and tighten the belt for a few years. Meanwhile, work your ass off. Good for you that you are, and that you’re on what you think is a rewarding path. I hope that works out as planned. Meanwhile, don’t bet everything on it the way you bet on that degree.
I’m not engaging on the substance of your dispute. I’m trying to give you common-sense advice: if someone doesn’t want to tell people about their cat, they shouldn’t tell people they had to go shopping for kitty litter yesterday. If you don’t want to talk about your university’s perceived injustices upon you, you don’t have to introduce the fact you feel slighted by them in order to ask a question about student loans.
Does this not make sense to you?
Your dodges all pretty much rely on a static world that ISN’T growing more connected by the second! There may currently be places and ways to hide but as the world grows more connected these things will rapidly disappear, I’m guessing. Things are changing rapidly, hoping you’ve at least considered that.
You never answered how much you’d be willing, as a percent of your income, to pay toward your debt, why is that? Surely there’s some amount you’d be comfortable with.
It’s difficult for anyone to take harmful legal action against you if you ARE making small, regular payments, never missed a one! Plead medical bills, sick Auntie, whatever. The judge sees someone trying to pay, pays regularly, never misses. I know someone who worked this quite well for many years, eventually settling the debt for pennies on the dollar.
Good Luck !
If you are expecting to be earning 100k then the bolded section above is flat out wrong and your whole justification for trying to skip out on paying your loan back is invalid.
So you were prepared for the possibility that you’d only be earning 50k. Why not pretend that you DO only earn 50k and put everything over and above that into your loan.
If you manage 100k then 50k less taxes can go straight on to your loan, call it 30k after tax (I don’t know what your total tax rate would be, I’m guessing 40% but maybe that is on the high side.)
If you put $2500 a month onto a 150k loan with an interest rate of 5% you’d be all paid up in six years. Then you can enjoy the benefits of your salary without worrying about a stupid loan hanging over your head.
Seriously, if you think you can’t pay a $150k loan, how do you imagine you will ever afford a house?
Habeed,
Any chance you’d be willing to show your work on why you think you wouldn’t be able to pay back the loan?
Maybe there’s an error or something in the maths that would make your situation less dire than you think?
I would be able to pay it back if I were actually consistently making 100k. Which I may be - again, I work as a contractor, but right now business is really good and there’s years of work available.
Can we assume, by your complete avoidance of my question, and the above response, that, in fact, you’re not interested in paying ANY portion of your current income toward your debt repayment?
If the case is that you’re so righteously angry you don’t want to repay a red cent, then you should own that, so people in your thread will stop making untrue assumptions about your ability to repay, and offering suggestions about how you can.
It’s somewhat disengenuis to pretend otherwise, if such is the case, in fact.
Oh. Yes, you can say that. I don’t owe a red cent. Maybe I owe it legally, but I don’t owe it morally, given I know where the debt came from and I know I didn’t deserve what was done to me. So I’m going to find a way to avoid paying it at all if possible.
With that said, there’s no point in just refusing to pay out of principle - the government will just take it out of my bank account if the money is there, and charge me several times as much as a penalty. I have to have a plan that does not let the government collect from me, and if that means paying a little bit, then I’ll pay it.