My local paper today had a front page story about all the homes being foreclosed on and such here lately. One guy bought a house a few years ago for over $300,000 and now it’s worth $120,000. Sticking with that sorry deal doesn’t make you noble, it makes you a sucker! You don’t agree?
So he should stiff them first? Okay, you lend me $20 for dinner. I go buy a crappy dinner. Then I tell you “I’m not gonna pay you back because the food was awful”. Are you okay with that?
So go ahead and sue the school for the tuition you paid. Don’t stiff the lender.
Sucks for him, but that’s the risk you take when you borrow money. You win some, you lose some. I don’t care if your house is worth nothing now - you made a bet, and you’re a spineless coward if you refuse to pay up because it’s inconvenient.
Yeah, I don’t think I’m aiming for “noble” here, just “honest”.
Slightly different from defaulting on a mortgage - in that case the bank will get your house which is what your contract states. In the case of a student loan - assuming you accepted the money and got your education I don’t see how you could default on the loan legally or morally.
Thanks for pointing that out. Yes I realize the lender and the school are not the same entity and that to be fair the lender should get back their money. (My point of view is that the lender would be far more capable of getting the money back from the school than I would be.) Guess they missed the part that I actually paid back everything ahead of schedule.(I was a chump but I still paid it back and I’m not the suing kind.)
Actually to be totally open in a way I actually got at least some of that money back. At one point after I graduated I did need some medical attention and I didn’t have medical insurance at the time. Guess who’s hospital I ended up going to? 
There is such a thing as honor and integrity. Anyone who defaults on a loan like that shows neither.
I’d love to go back to college, but I can’t afford to take on any new debt that I can’t be 100% reassured of paying back. No one should, and that includes student loans.
I’d like to think I have the personal integrity to pay 'em back.
But sometimes I also think that if I’m going down, I might as well take the fuckers with me.
No, I would not. I signed what amounts to a contract with the government, and they did right by me so I have a responsibility to do right by them.
All I have is my word. Without that, what am I?
This is my thought too - if you default on a mortgage or, say, a car loan or something, you then lose the item in question. Short of coming over and hitting you in the head with a rock or something, they bank cannot remove your education.
This is how I feel, exactly. Who cares what GM or Chrysler or whoever do? I find the idea of running away from your debts morally repugnant, and even though I know other people do it I don’t think I could feel okay about it. I would hope I would have the integrity to see the thing through if I were in the situation of paying off a student loan.
I do sympathize to some extent with people who feel that they didn’t get anything from their education, but I’m not sure it changes the situation. FWIW, the person in the OP is in grad school now, so he must have gotten something out of the undergrad. I have to ask, notsoheavyd3, assuming it was a 4-year undergrad why didn’t you transfer to another school after a year or two if you felt the education was so poor?
*And he is British, nicole1912, for some reason I was being deliberately vague - I don’t know why, he’s not even in my lab group. Anyway, thanks for the insight into British student loans.
I am in that position right now. Paying back university loans from Canada and I live in the US. I wouldn’t want to screw up my credit and it seems wrong to stiff them. One is done one more to go!
I think I remember reading that defaulting on a student loan is the one blemish on a credit report that can stay on there for as long as you live. Anyone in the credit biz know if this is true?
It’s easy for me to say I wouldn’t because I didn’t have student loans, but I’ve worked with doctors who think they shouldn’t have to pay them back. It’s odd to hear their reasons why
We owe money on two things- my vehicle (about $4k) and my wife’s student loans (some ungodly amount of money which I’m starting to think we’ll never finish paying off). Her original degree, and for which she borrowed the money, is in Microbiology- and she’s completely given up on ever finding a good, well-paying job in that field. She’s since gone back to college to get her degree in accounting- and we paid for that out of our paychecks.
Damn, I wish we could just erase that debt. It’s not doing her, or us, any good at all. I kind of like the sense of moral superiority we get by paying it every month… but I’d like to have that money, too, ya know? Oh well.
The house is collateral for the loan, which was a contract. Defaulting on the loan has consequences, as does breaking any contract. In this case, the consequences are forfeiture of the house.
I don’t know of any usage of the term “bet” that includes the holding of collateral.
Probably she meant that you bet the house would retain its value over the period of the loan.
I’ve heard weird excuses from doctors too. One (who is a friend of a friend) told us that he shouldn’t have to pay his huge loans back because he works harder than everyone he knows, so he deserves a break. Of course the same guy favours a flat income tax and thinks all government spending on education should be cut, so I’m thinking he’s just a selfish bastard.
Seriously? I could just not pay them and there would be no consequences? Yes, in a heartbeat. It is an overwhelming debt burden at this point - and that’s with consolidation.
In reality, I know I borrowed the money with the promise to pay it back, and so every month I make that payment.
Actually I wonder that sometimes myself. I agree with you though, looking back at it the most sensible decision would have been to just cut my losses and go elsewhere. Still at some level I think I thought that I was basically throwing away a year or 2 of work I had already done.(Of course assuming any place else would take me.) What I mean is if I transfered the new school would probably wouldn’t accept a good portion of the coursework so I would be extending my time in school for probably another year, maybe two.(Sort of a sunk cost fallacy) At that point I just wanted to do as little time and get out. Plus on top of that I think at some level I thought “what would be the difference?” Basically since I was a naive kid I didn’t realize other schools would be significantly different so as far as I knew there was no point it transfering since the new school would be the same as the old. (If anything I would have figured “better school” means they’re better at teaching. Of course I found out that wasn’t true since I actually went to that state school years later. Hey what do you know, they actually cared about my education and miracles of miracles I actually did well. Interesting factoid, Newtonian mechanics makes alot of sense if they make it a point to make sure you know calc first.)
However the one thing that probably really made this that much of a train wreck was that as far as I’m concerned they drove me literally crazy.(And no, I don’t mean “figuratively”) In a nutshell all the nonsense, all the games, and just the pointless of it all as far as I’m concerned triggered a bout of clinical depression that lasted for years. So to paraphrase a saying you really can’t expect rational decisions from irrational people. Admittedly I was never formally diagnosed so obviously there will be some question if I really was mentally ill at the time. (Actually what really ticks me off about this time is I actually went to the help center for testing. The guy who did the testing was a phd in psycology. The guy never even suggested mental illness as a possible problem even though now that I look back on it I did have alot of symptoms of being seriously mentally ill and suffering a major depressive episode. Unfortunately given the stigma of mental illness I never went for testing or treatment which probably would have helped.)
Yes, I’m a bit bitter about it. (Although I do get alot of laughs when they send me mailings begging for money. I guess it’s the whole thing that they’re supposed to be so smart and they can’t figure out I’d never give them anything. Either that or the fact I actually donated money to the state school.)
Funny, but we just had a meeting yesterday about colecting payments to set-off against debt. Supremes issued a decision last week concerning attorney fees under the EAJA. Ratliff.
Suffice it to say that if you owe a debt to the fed gov’t, you’d better be pretty comfortable that you don’t intend to receive anything from the fed gov’t in the future - including but not limited to Social Security, tax refunds, etc.
I’d do it in a second if I could. People walk away from mortgages, buy thousands of dollars in consumer goods (and keep them!) while writing off the loans in bankruptcy, we give out zillions of dollars in corporate welfare and piss away money on foreign adventurism, but I’m $500 poorer every month for a substandard state school education that’ll still take me another decade to pay off. Fuck it!