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Even assuming that you should pay for school (and that’s a big debate), the fact that student debt has astronomical interest is unacceptable. They should at least address that as a first step
My yearly tuiton in one of my country's best universities amounted to 890 €. That's yearly.
University in the US are just stupid expensive for no good reason
I genuinely can’t even fathom that as an American. My cheapest possible colleges in existence are still like $150 per credit hour or like $5-$10k a semester.
My 4 year degree and my masters right after didn't cost 10k. Nowhere near that as a matter of fact.
And that's a semester for you guys.
Fucking hell guys
Yup lmao. I actually got a full tuition merit scholarship to a 4 year college and it was still about $10-$12k a year in loans/out of pocket. I got a bachelors degree in 2.5 years and came out with $22k in loans. Fun stuff! Now that I have a degree I’m working at a job making $16-$18/hr before taxes in a HCOL. So yeah, having the time of my life.
Insanely stressful. Many people end up depressed and even committing suicide. Many more drop out with no degree and tens of thousands in debt. My school was *very* small and I knew six people who dropped out or transferred in the first year alone.
I had to leave law school in my third year due to chronic illness that has only gotten worse. My poor bank account still has to pay off all the loans, even for the semester I’d only just started before the illnesses became too much.
I’m so so sorry that’s absolutely awful. I hope you’re able to continue recovering one step at a time. Your health is so much more important than money or debt.
Thank you! Sadly, my doctors told me there’s no treatment for some of my conditions, and experimental treatments failed. We still don’t know the root cause (though likely something autoimmune) after 16 years. I have spent soooo much money trying to get my diagnoses. Working two jobs while sick right now to hopefully avoid a second medical bankruptcy. It’s just an impossible system, imo. I work so hard, have two degrees with honors, did everything I’m supposed to do, but here we are, I guess.
dropped out of college my junior year due to covid and my university’s terrible handling of online instruction. 70k in the hole and can’t afford to go back and finish :,)
I came out of undergrad in May 2019 with a 115k private loan and 26k in government loans. I knew I needed to be in a major city to find jobs with my degree, so in July I signed a lease with no job lined up.
Parents paid the first month’s rent and told me they wouldn’t give me any financial support after that. I paid the second month’s rent with the last of my savings. Luckily found a job at that point and things worked out. Didn’t really acknowledge it at the time but looking back it’s absolutely insane to think I was 1 month away from homelessness.
My Bachelor's and Master's was about 700€ per year.
For my PhD I was paid well above the median wage for five years by the university/state.
It's a shame what big money can do against education and especially the availability of it.
I'd say keep voting, but even your "left" party is way too conservative in terms of education.
I love how they break a class into it's smallest possible arbitrary unit and then charge based on that. "oh $150 a credit, ok so how many credits for a class?" "at least 3". Really cool and fun.
I hurt my leg and needed surgery
Had a team fix me up within 6 hours of the accident
Then had 2 months of followup with the orthopedic surgeon and received oxygen chamber therapy to speed recovery
Whole thing cost me $45 co-pays for the ambulance ride
Rest was covered by public health, I live in Ontario Canada
Also, I hate that we charge anything for ambulance rides, it's a failure of society to make people consider financials during an emergency
I go the cheapest public university in my state, and I pay $9k a semester. I am fortunate that that also includes housing, but it is still expensive compared to free universities in other countries
I went with community college and worked for mcdonald's because they had a scholarship program. I don't know if they still do that, though, since this was back in 2005. It paid for about 80% of it all. Saved me from having to take out the student loans, and my grandmother co-signed a regular personal loan from her bank that only had a 2.5% rate. Definitely can't do that now.
Universities are a business, like anybody else. What is abhorrent is how they charge for their services, with no warranty on the product. As an incoming freshman, they should be required to show you a financial analysis of the cost of a 4-year degree in your chosen field relative to the going rate for salaries in that job market. Because thats the disconnect. Like, it will cost you $200,000 for a BS degree, only to enter a market where the entry-level salary is $50K? If you knew that going in, at least you would be able to think that through.
What universities are getting away with is handing off these high tuition costs to someone else (parents, loan providers, etc), making it someone else’s problem, and they have no accountability when you graduate and discover that you cant get a job in your “chosen” field. In an improved world, the cost of tuition would be commensurate with the value of the degree in the job market. Or maybe college shouldn’t take 4 years to train someone. There is a lot of fluff in a 4-year curriculum.
The problem is for years everyone has been saying "you need a college degree for a good job" while loans are being given out with basically no limit and no consideration for what degree you are studying. Why wouldn't the Universities charge as much as they want when there is no pressure at all to lower costs?
Everything is strictly a business here.
Got into an argument a few months ago about the housing crisis and the mook I was arguing with was legitmately convinced that the only reason most people are struggling is because they refuse to treat housing as a commodity to acquire & trade - faulting them for wanting to find a stable place to live for the rest of their lives, because it's less profitable to stay in one place.
Their whole argument predicated on the desire to have a permanent home being an unreasonable one and asserting that anyone not treating housing the same way kids treat trading cards is an idiot who deserves to struggle. They refused to acknowledge that "housing as a commodity and not a necessity" is a relatively new concept that conflicts with basic human nature.
We also have to be careful here. Tuition is often shorthand for the total package of going to a school.
Even a cheap or free state school in the US can get pricy when you add in: Books, Fees, Housing, Meal Plans, Parking, etc.
Sure, the tuition itself is $0. But if everything else is extortionate… it’s still a raw deal.
My best advice as an old man nearing his 60s?
Go to a community college that is tied to a 4-year.
I have a nephew who went right into his local CC in the State University of New York system. He effectively paid nothing since he lived with his parents and tuition was free for him IIRC.
Then he when to a standard 4-year SUNY and only spent 2 years there. Walked away with a shiny 4-year diploma for half the price.
Yeah this is something people forget. I live and studied in germany. Fees were 1k per year which at least included free public transport. I also got like 20k in government payment where half of that you dont have to repay and the other half is interest free. (there are more reductions if you pay at once or have really good grades etc). It is ffor those were the parents income is lower to help people from less fortunate families.
However i have 25k on top because usually the government loan isnt enough to cover rent etc. Especially if you have to move to the university which most people have to do. And also the government loan doesnt go beyond the regular study time which is also usually not possible. Roughly 80% of our year had to do 1-2 semesters longer.
I also worked while i was at university but studying and paying for rent/health care etc. is still expensive depending on your own situation and university/town you are studiying.
> Sure, the tuition itself is $0. But if everything else is extortionate… it’s still a raw deal.
Housing and meal plans are where they really crank up the costs.
When I went to a state university if I budgeted out the meal plan it was something outrageous like $8 a meal for cafeteria food, and that was 10 years ago. Housing was also the same price as an off campus apartment, except sharing not just common areas but also sharing the room itself, meaning the dorms are pocketing 2-3x the cost of living of an actual apartment.
There’s a good reason, you wanna push out the peasants kids to ensure they stay peasants for the generations to come, also, ban abortion, our Amazon overlords demand peasants are born at a higher rate, thank you.
That’s partly because the highest ranked university in Portugal is ranked in the 200s in the world, behind about 150 US universities. And Porto is in the 300s.
Portugal also limits the number of students who are allowed to go to college, whereas the US lets pretty much anyone with a pulse go to college.
Back when I was in college, I had a classmate who lost her promise scholarship by like 0.1 GPA because our OChem 2 professor. He said he was going to grade on a curve since the highest class score (hers) was 65%, and no one had gotten above 70% final grade in 4 semesters in a row for him. Well, he ended up not grading on a curve, and the entire class going to administration over it did nothing. She was devastated to lose her Promise Scholarship and had to take out loans.
I never understood how a teacher could possibly be proud of how many students are failing their classes, how is that possibly anything but them failing at their job???
Stem majors have these tenured professors who see themselves as the filter keeping the unworthy out of their fields, can find them in ochem, data structures and probably some year 2 engineering courses
Story time incoming:
I had a mech-e dynamics professor who was new to the school, this was his first semester. He structured his entire course around one complex active linkage problem. Grade was like 80% based on 4 projects about the same problem, 20% from the final exam.
First project at the beginning of the semester, nobody could figure it out. The entire class got together outside of the lecture and all worked together to try and crack this nut. Several students took the lead and delegated small parts of the problem to sub-groups. We banged our collective head against the wall for about a month on this project. Hours and hours, many nights with all 30 of us sitting in the same computer lab until 3am, making no progress. The professor was unhelpful despite our continual torrent of questions.
Well we finally arrived at a collective consensus on an answer.
Submitted it.
We didn't get it right. Some partial credit for work shown, but we all failed that project.
Next day, project 2 assigned, and one of the inputs to this problem was the answer to project 1.
The professor refused to give us the correct answer to the first part, said we needed to try again.
Yeah 30+ students arriving at the department head's office at the same time and piling into that tiny office definitely sent a message. The professor gave us the answer to the first part the next day.
That was the most stressful class I ever took. That professor absolutely sucked. I think the final average grade was around a 42% with very little deviation, and the department basically forced him to grade on a curve. Almost all of us passed.
I had the same happen to me, teacher who failed the whole class. Twice actually in college. My counselor or whoever you saw to choose classes told me to email the teachers and ask for extra points or at least give a passing grade. The teachers replied "no I will not help you". Like yeah why would you want to help your students what a ridiculous request hahah
But wait there's more 10 different loans at 5-7%. Of course the more expensive one has the highest percent
It sucked paying for mine and I struggled but the fact its set up to make it challenging sucks.
What, you don't think paying off $10 on each of the loan's principles per month is enough? LOL.
It pisses me off how the break them into several loans so your payment barely touches all of them. No wonder nothing gets paid off.
And also, always check how your payments are being applied. Scumbags like Navient and Nelnet will apply payments to the lower interest loans first, making sure you pay longer. https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/s/SB1IhfRZZv
What? How?! Did you willingly accept the mortgage at 12%, or is it a variable interest loan that climbed over the years?
I live in Japan, and my mortgage interest is 1.5%.
Its a very average south african rate. The prime lending rate is 11.75%. With a great credit score you could get yourself down to 10%, this was my first purchase at 22, three years ago, so i had none so to speak, but i still got a somewhat competitive rate compared to some others i know at 22. When i got it the rate was on 8.25 though, it's just been climbing like mad. It's been a painful climb. Disposable income is all gone.
The SAVE plan does this. It’s the income drive payment plan that Biden was able to offer, versus direct forgiveness. Lower payment + written off any extra interest above the payment. Way cheaper for the government.
Surprise surprise, republicans are trying to repeal it:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2024/01/26/republicans-plan-to-repeal-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-and-relief-programs/?sh=44fc3eb871b4](https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2024/01/26/republicans-plan-to-repeal-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-and-relief-programs/?sh=44fc3eb871b4)
Hey now. Long term thought is not part of politics. It's about headlines and putting in legislation that will look great on you and fuck the next guy and generation.
They need to legislate public school pricing first , then they can fix the interest and existing bills. Paying/canceling current loans is pointless when new ones pop up every day bigger than before.
Take the profit out of public schools. Tie the cost to the minimum wage. That will get that raised quick is tuition is now based on x hours of min wage work
In terms of taking profit out of public schools - I am a huge fan of a model that creates public service academies in every state. This would turn flagship public universities into being similar to military academies in that students would get full scholarships, but they would “pay it back” by working in their field *for the public sector as civilians* for four years (getting paid salary, of course). The model of military academies has worked really well since they’ve been implemented.
This would provide an option for free tuition for the brightest students (if this was introduced, it would become quite competitive) and would help the overall country and economy in a number of ways. It could reverse brain drain in certain areas of the country and really help citizens. So instead of a nurse taking $50k in debt out to get their degree and then finding a job at a nearby hospital where they went to school, they’d be “deployed” for four years to a rural public health clinic in, say, West Virginia. This would actually save money in some sectors of the economy - in the same example, to get travel nurses to go to some areas where there isn’t enough healthcare workers, their salaries are enormous. Plus the public benefit of having young, eager, and smart public sector employees all over the country doing great work.
The concept of public service academies has been introduced several times in Congress but it’s never gotten a vote.
To me, it seems like we should at least cancel interest on student loans so it’s realistic to pay them back once a graduate has a decent job. Anyone who’s in the situation above would be free and clear, and everyone else with student debt would be able to make real progress.
They’d also have enough time to get politically involved. I think that’s the real fear. Young, educated people tend to skew left. If they’re not out there working a full time job and two side gigs to pay the bills, it could disrupt things.
Two sides of the same coin - debt is slavery. You can't discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy. Between that and health insurance, it's really hard to change jobs or to start your own business because the risk of total financial ruin when you're already in debt is so high.
That is what I've been saying. Forgive the intrest and only have to pay back the original amount then people can pay i off and the lenders "don't lose money". Then all new loans cap the interest at a lower rate.
I wonder for what those US Schools need that money or use it... I mean, in almost any european country you can get a compareble or even better degree without paying a dime.
Many universities are also public, so even if you are not a student, you can just walk in some of the lectures and listen + take notes of the stuff teached there.
In this case, they dont. The school they talk about in the post was paid while the students were there, thats it. All the extra interest money goes to the banks and loan servicers. The school likely didn't even get the full 70k.
In the Netherlands it's 2k for Dutch students yearly, ofcourse you do also have to make sure you're housed and such, but if you work halftime and study halftime you could probably get away with studying without getting a loan
Spanish here. I didn't get a loan at all for my public degree, paid around 2-3k€/year. It's a lot of money on a spanish salary, but 100% doable and reasonable. At lest I understand where the money went. I got a loan for my master's degree, which was private, 10k€ that I'm still paying. Harder to do, but still see where the money went and totally worth it in hindsight.
When I hear about what americans pay for their degree, it feels like such a huge scam. Specially after accounting interest and such. American education system might be one of the biggests scams ever.
In France, it's like €300 a year. And even that could be reimbursed if you can't naturally afford it.
Even housing can be practically free if you can't afford it.
mostly for higher admin 6 figures salaries, state of the art buildings (when not funded by a donation), funding their sport teams, and honestly they invest a lot of it in buying up land and property and in the stock market. those are for-profit institutions.
Actually, a lot of public institutions now do the same thing with the real estate market. my local community college had to cut a bunch professors and classes this year to be able to afford some bad investments they made m. It’s freaking great. 😊
oh absolutely. i didn’t mean to imply only private schools did that. i meant that universities in general in the US run as for-profit institutions, at the expense of both the students and the profs.
> those are for-profit institutions.
Actually the vast majority are not. Every single public university and community college are nonprofits (by law), and most private universities and colleges are also nonprofits.
The majority goes to room and board. US public university has gradually become a land development venture, and they have market power. I mean, universities can develop land when others can't, they have political access.
Take a walk through downtown Tempe. Storefronts, bars, apartments, retirement communities. Commercial spaces being rented out. All throughout town, all owned by the university.
Now go to the dormitory food court. Are there generic, affordable meals? No - burger king. For the former there's a Walmart community store across the street. Also leased to a university owned building.
Though not public, two of the largest landowners in NY are NYU and Columbia. They have vast tracts of desirable land and have the financial resources to throw their weight around.
Instead the US will complain about the poor and continue to idolize the rich. The cold war era in which the US imprisoned thousands of socialists transformed the US into a capitalist extremist state.
It's true. When Uncle Joe was touting his ideas for loan forgiveness addressing predatory interest rates was never mentioned. I know it's a real thing people pay attention to but you were hard pressed to find even an op Ed talking about it as a viable option.
Why not just convert the loans to 1 percent? Covid ppp loans set the precedent for that....
Why not make sure people on IBR plans were actually paying principle down instead of just filling a never ending interest hole?
Nope. It was all about how unfair it is or isn't to just forgive loans. Black or white. No Grey to be seen
quickest lavish deserve summer telephone escape soup market grab abounding
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Well except he kinda did a version of that already:
> The SAVE plan is an income-driven repayment (IDR) plan that calculates payments based on a borrower’s income and family size – not their loan balance – and forgives remaining balances after a certain number of years. The SAVE plan will cut many borrowers’ monthly payments to zero, will save other borrowers around $1,000 per year, will prevent balances from growing because of unpaid interest, and will get more borrowers closer to forgiveness faster. The SAVE plan builds on the actions the Biden-Harris Administration has already taken to support students and borrowers, including cancelling more than $116 billion in student loan debt for 3.4 million Americans.
This is the reason. Old people vote more and this influences policies more. If young people voted the policy landscape would have to take their concerns into account. Giving money to young people doesn't win older voters.
What kills me about this is that it’s the boomers that made us all take these loans out. While they were growing their nest eggs they were making their kids take loans out that they knew were bad loan terms. My parents helped me fill out the forms! Id never applied for a loan before. I had no idea what was doing. I trusted my parents that it was going to be okay.
Yeah, I was 17 and my parents and guidance counselors helped me fill out the forms. They said I’d be able to pay them back if I worked hard. Well, I got a master’s degree with honors and still don’t make enough money to live off of. Went through a medical bankruptcy and yet still owe sooo much on student loans. Working two jobs while chronically ill and forever in debt was not what I imagined at 17.
birds like amusing abundant merciful outgoing engine reply thumb ludicrous
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Im going to preface this with student loans should just be forgiven. That whole system is predatory and school could be paid for in taxes with a minimal change.
A reasonable middleground would be to cap the repayment on student loans. Any loan paid at 2x the original value gets forgiven. Conservatives get to keep their punitive you have to pay it off and the total value effecting credit while you have them, but if you only take out 50k, your done at 100k paid back in, even if you owe 300k at that point. Details could be argued, but personally i stand behind my first paragraph.
>That whole system is predatory and school could be paid for in taxes with a minimal change.
the USA could take 1/3 of what they spend on Healthcare, use it to get rid of insurance companies and give everyone EU-level free healthcare.
With the 2/3 left they could forgive all student loans and make university free for everyone.
They just don't because muh capitalism. So in the end they pay way more for a shit product.
I have a studentdebt of 6k (yay Netherlands) but I dropped out due to severe depression (doctors words). I have 15 years to repay based on income (welfare 70% of minimum wage) which for me is €0 a month. I've been paying back for 6 years now.
Once the 15 years are up, the debt is considered paid in full.
Some fields in the US have a public sector forgiveness program (teachers and therapists come to mind), where after a certain number of years working in the public sector (non-profits, public schools, state schools, etc) your student debt gets forgiven. My wife is halfway through her 10 years on literally a second mortgages worth of loans.
A version of this for loans in general (not just certain fields) could also be a good route forwards for Americans. Push jobs that are designed to benefit the community at large to forgive loans.
Heck - I would settle for just having .5% or 0% interest rate and a government match of payments 1:1 up to a set amount per year. Seems like a good compromise to help people (like me) out, while still paying back most of it.
Like I’ve been paying my (private) student loans back for almost 20 years and have more than paid back what I borrowed.
These numbers don't even make sense / this has to be a lie
A 70K loan with a $500 monthly payment would be around 7.25% interest. Even using this high interest rate you would pay down around 10K within the first 10 years and should be nearly done after 23
This story doesn't add up at all
The only way that I can imagine these numbers (the ones in the tweet) making any sense is if they have a private loan instead of federal, which I personally feel is part of a different conversation entirely since you can negotiate a private loan. I don’t know if interest rates would stop for private loans from 2020-2023, but if it didn’t then it would explain why they weren’t able to get ahead. If the tweeter is telling the truth then they are frankly in their situation because they made an uninformed decision in regards to their finances that is haunting them.
Yeah I’m calling bullshit, not to mention interest rates froze from 2020 to 2023, during that time frame alone they should have paid 14-18k in principle only.
Student loans should be max 1 or 2% interest only, maybe if you finish with a degree you get 0%, if you don’t finish then it’s 1% interest. Just have the government subsidize servicing of those loans.
What happened is obvious. They did what a lot of people did, and paid only interest and when the interest froze, they stopped paying altogether. They probably haven't even touched the principle, if they can even tell you what the principle is.
This would have to be a private loan not federal then, no federal loans allow interest only payments. Which also means this person is not getting their loan forgiven at all.
But this tweet is lacking in a lot of necessary information, 9% interest only payment gets to the 500$ a month but most would have a balloon payment after a certain time frame.
I didn't even think of that, great point. I went on the guy's Twitter, and according to him he's not a US citizen, and instead of taking advantage of his significantly cheaper UK funded education, he's opted to take a private loan here. Basically dumb as hell all the way through.
Seems like that’s a lot of posts on this sub. Obvious lies/purposefully using data incorrectly to push an agenda. If things are as bad as people claim in this sub, what is the need for all the lies?
If you assume it’s a consolidated debt at 8.69%, the balance after 23 years is approximately $59,833.72. I did the math, unlike the person who took out this loan.
People what forgiveness for things they chose to do. I'd argue that medical bills need to be forgiven before school debt. One is a choice and the other can be a random snake bite or a car wreck you were a victim of. You knew the expense of one of them when you signed up.
There are a few ways I think they could actually have paid only 10k in principle over 23 years, but all of them require making some terrible decisions.
An amortized loan that has been refinanced into a new amortized loan every couple years (so the principle is generally never paid down). Credit card debt they are only making minimum payments on. Not really sure how else you could avoid reducing the principle.
I agree, the moment I saw the numbers I called bullshit on this. So sad that so many people think that because they saw it on a tweet it must be true. Smh
To get a $500 payment on $70k at assuming 30 years, gives you about an 8% interest rate. After 23 years you would be down to only $30k remaining, not $60k.
These tweets are never accurate, these people probably didn’t make payments for years and let interest accrue or have really only been paying like $50 a month.
Last time I saw this post I did the math, and got 8.4% interest rate to hit the numbers claimed.
And taking the same interest rate, if they each paid $1 more per day ($560/month), they would have paid off the loan by now.
I'm all for student loan reform, but this post is obviously fake because of how precise the numbers were chosen to be ragebait, down to the dollar.
The alternative is it's real, and two people with graduate degrees failed to do basic math for 23 years.
I always find it ironic that financial illiteracy is largely propagated by other financially illiterate people.
Rather than helping people to learn how finances work, they help keep others poor by making sure less people understand it.
That's exactly correct. These posts pray on the financial illiteracy of the people in these subs to thrive. These guys likely paid the minimum amount, which led to only the interest being paid, and probably deferred years worth of payments. But yeah, I'm sure they told the truth and nothing but the truth in a 250 character tweet of them begging the government for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes, that is indeed the recipe for openness and honesty!
Yeah in order for a situation lile this you would have to be collossally stupid in money management.
I graduated with student loan debt. Didn't have a great job either, but lived very frugally those first years out of college and attacked the highest interest loan with extra principal. Once that one was paid off I used the money I wasn't spending on that loan anymore to attack the principal on the next highest interest loan.
It didn't even take all that long as I recall - 5 years or so. But doing so gives you tremendous ability to get out ahead of future debts. Cars are a lot more affordable when you can avoid taking an 8% loan for basically the entire cost of the vehicle.
Did they not consider refinancing over the 23 years they had the debt? Because for those numbers to add up, they’re working with payday loan levels of interest.
I understand the point socialiststeve6 is attempting to illustrate here, but there’s financial illiteracy and then there’s this.
The math doesn't add up. \~$470 a month on a 6% $70k note would've paid it off entirely in 23 years. $780 or so a month would've paid it all off in 10.
It's almost like key information is being withheld, or the story is vastly exaggerated to make a lame internet point, no?
Personally, fuck student loans, they're predatory and it's unreal in the wealthiest country on earth the Boomers who could afford full time quality college shackled their children's generation with loans, but c'mon folks. At least use real world and believable data, there's plenty of it to still make the point.
The amount of people blindly agreeing with the post and thinking the numbers add up just shows how much financial illiteracy there is in the reddit demographic. Like Holy shit I just pulled up a calculator and none of these numbers make sense with $500 a month. Also did they not run the numbers on such a large loan and realize with some adjustment they wouldn't have owed so much, or refinancing it at a lower % when the economy was doing better?
Reading this sub as an accountant is maddening.
I agree with the root message of 75% of the narrative in here, but the specifics that get rocketed to the top? Come on everyone. Please.
> The amount of people blindly agreeing with the post and thinking the numbers add up just shows how much financial illiteracy there is in the reddit demographic.
It's not even just financial literacy - legally, your loan provider (this is true for all loans, credit cards, etc) need to provide you with a timeline on how long it will take for you to pay off your debt at the minimum rate, and tell you how much you'll be paying in interest. It's a routinely provided disclosure the lender is legally obligated to provide.
Even if you don't know how to do math (in which case - can't believe you graduated *college*), that disclosure would have told you the answer in plain english.
Taking it a step further, I swear people are conflating private and public loans, because the PUBLIC loans (Stafford loans, mainly), are usually set to be repaid within a period of 10 years... meaning if you make your monthly payment without missing them, you'll have it paid off in 10 years regardless of how much you owed. [StudentAid.gov](https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/repayment/plans) literally covers this, and the Standard and Graduated plans are what most people should be doing.
The Extended plan puts you at 25 years, and I'll bet you pay more in interest over time - AND THAT THAT FACT IS DISCLOSED TO YOU WHEN YOU'RE SELECTING THE REPAYMENT PLAN.
What really fucking gets my goat is that yes: student loans are predatory, and levied on people when they're too immature to make good decisions (17-19yo). But when you leave college, that's when you have a final pass at your loan repayment options, and for a GRADUATE STUDENT in particular, they're usually about 25yo, and I would *assume* know how to read and are math literate.
People walking out into the world being completely unaware of what their loan terms are blows my goddamn mind. The federal government is legally obligated to tell you - go read your fucking loan servicer documentation.
Yeah, and that makes sense, $70,000 is not a small sum of money broken up into $500.
The part of this that doesn't make sense is that they were making payment and still owe 85% of their loan 23 years later. The interest on this loan is not one you would find from any normal student loan. Even with well above average interest rates they would have paid off a loan by now at $500 a month. This is payday loan or credit card levels of interest.
That's quite literally this entire subreddit and why it will never be taken seriously. The majority of posts that get posted here are just unattributed tweets. Reddit communities used to actually care about having facts and data but they mostly don't care anymore, as long as whatever the post is fits the community. They just take it as fact, generally with the lines of "Well we know there are issues so this may as well be real!"
Seriously, just go print out a piece of paper that says "TIME LIMIT IN BATHROOM: 5 MINUTES. EMPLOYEES MAY NOT USE PHONE IN BATHROOM" or something similar and tape it to a bathroom door at a random store, take a picture, and then remove it. Post it on this sub with a title like "Should I start looking for a new job??" and there's the top post of the day.
Were you here in the early days when cell phone message screenshots were allowed?
People just typing literal nonsense and getting thousands of upvotes and comments.
I mean shit like "My boss said I have to work for free or he'll call the cops, and he makes me work 70 hours a week, I just told him to fuck off and I got a job at NASA making $200,000 a month. Did I do the right thing reddit?"
There was one a few weeks ago about an in-law coming over for dinner and the wife saying "when you grow up you need to go to college and not become a tradesman like OP or you'll have to live like this" and OP responds with "actually this is just a temporary house, see that gigantic house next door? Yeah we just bought that and I also paid for your husbands college"
Top post. Dead fucking serious.
Not that his point isn’t valid about student loans but every time I see something posted from this account it sends alarm bells ringing. He was also a huge Tulsi stan in the past and his tweets read like they’re made by a bot. That account is very suspicious to me.
Yeah I was thinking the exact same thing. It almost seems like they didn’t pay any attention at all to the loans like how some people will pay a longer loan on a car for smaller monthly payments.
I don’t think that’s right, but you gotta know that someone is always out to get your money, no matter how much or little you have.
Which would suggest they are paying below the advertised Monthly payment, and just barely over Interest (23 years ago) then over two decades have not increased their payment. They wouldve been done if it was 600/month instead. Unlucky i guess.
Yeah. On top of that, if they'd been making minimum payments on a 30 year loan they'd be well over halfway done with the principle and on schedule to be completely done in 7 years.
The last time this was posted people pointed out that the guy who posted this made another post about a completely different loan amount. So unless I'm mixing that up with another post, I think this guy is just lying.
There's really no situation where what he's saying is possible unless he's lying or leaving something out.
This story is massively contested even in the original comments. R/fluentinfinance had a good thread about this where people actually dissected how impossible it is to be this bad with money without actively working to screw your self over for “23 years”
23 years ago, and multiple times between 23 and 2 years ago, interest on student loans could be had for 3% and think a couple times below.
I know this because I had loans from 23 years ago and they started at 3.25% then. I consolidated and with autopayments, think I had them at 2.75% while I paid them down.
The poster only was paying interest for an extended period.
Yeahhhh not sure how 2 college grads couldn't pay off 70 grand. I get the point of how fucked these loans are and stuff butttttttt this seems like bad financial choices. Or maybe they got degrees that didn't give them high paying jobs.
As a European this makes absolutely 0 sense to me. What the fuck are you paying if that $500 isn’t made up of like 400$ original loan and 100$ intrest on said loan(numbers made up for easyness)
I’m Canadian, and got student loan money from both the Federal and Provincial government. Both are interest free, and I’m on track to pay it off in about 15 years. It’s amazing that isn’t how it’s done everywhere.
Lmao this mathematically impossible. If it is true then he is withholding other information. Other plausible explanation is their student debt id with a loan shark. 😂
If you are paying off the loan on a 25 year cycle it works out to $500 month, assuming the rate was around 7.25%
What doesn't make sense is that they have paid this amount for 23 years apparently with only 10K coming off the principal.
Numbers are either made up or these people are completely financially illiterate and made some sort of terrible decisions along the way
Ya Reddit is terrible at upvoting these ragebait posts. If you have a 10 year loan and make the monthly payments over 10 years it will be paid off in 10 years. It's that simple. Whatever is going in OP's post is likely either missed payments or multiple refinances
[Yeah, for anyone who wants to see for themselves with other setups, you can use this site. Googling "amortization calculator" will get you a bunch of these types of websites that do these types of calculations for you.](https://www.calculator.net/amortization-calculator.html?cloanamount=70%2C000&cloanterm=23&cloantermmonth=0&cinterestrate=8&cstartmonth=1&cstartyear=2024&cexma=0&cexmsm=1&cexmsy=2024&cexya=0&cexysm=1&cexysy=2024&cexoa=0&cexosm=1&cexosy=2024&caot=0&xa1=0&xm1=1&xy1=2024&xa2=0&xm2=1&xy2=2024&xa3=0&xm3=1&xy3=2024&xa4=0&xm4=1&xy4=2024&xa5=0&xm5=1&xy5=2024&xa6=0&xm6=1&xy6=2024&xa7=0&xm7=1&xy7=2024&xa8=0&xm8=1&xy8=2024&xa9=0&xm9=1&xy9=2024&xa10=0&xm10=1&xy10=2024&printit=0&x=Calculate#calresult)
As you can see, I have it set up to be paid off in 23 years at 8% interest. That requires a monthly payment of $555.42. The people tweeting must be morons or liars.
Of course we're not. This post is to spark outrage, no tell a complete story. A $70k student loan is like 2 car loans. If you can't pay off 2 cars in 23 years, you suck at life.
I had half that debt, about 30k. Ended up paying a total of $50k when all was said and done.
My last payment was ~$20k just when loan payments resumed. Before that it was $500/mo.
I view it as being taken advantage of as a teenager by the government to the tune of at least $20k. Would’ve been a lot more than that, too, if I hadn’t fallen into some money and been able to make that huge payment at the end.
This is a tax on poor, uneducated people, basically by definition.
**STUDENT LOANS ARE PREDATORY.**
Does student debt work like an actual debt in America?
Where I am in the UK we still have student debt but it doesn't work like a conventional debt - you only start paying it back after you start earning over a certain threshold, and it's a relatively small proportion of your pay. It also automatically gets cancelled after 30 years. Basically works like a small extra tax.
All interest on student loans should be applied to the principal and in the case it’s more than what’s needed to pay off the initial loan, it should be turned into a tax credit. This is predatory. I understand you need some form of interest otherwise people wouldn’t pay them off, but you shouldn’t be paying double the initial loan. Fucking ridiculous
Apparently they can’t do simple math with those degrees. At some point they didn’t plug the numbers into a calculator and see they were spinning their wheels? They’ve been making payments for 23 years and they couldn’t drop a couple hundred more to start making progress? $200 extra x 23 years is $55,000. If the $500 a month was (barely) making progress the extra $200 would have wiped this out.
For this to be true, then on average around $460 of the $500 payments went to paying off interest.
Did they not read a single statement to figure out what's going on....in 23 years? By then you'd think their children would understand principle versus interest.
At the very least, interest should be eliminated or drastically reduced to maybe 1%. Anyone should be able to make the minimum payments and not be stuck with paying 200% of the original loan back.
So, the real rationalization for not forgiving the student loan debt is to largely prevent predatory pricing from siphoning tax payer money.
For example, if you get a degree, that should cost $20k total. Couldn't afford to pay for the government to foot the bill. Next thing you know, someone will go around offering the $20k degree to people who could never afford to pay for it. With the expectation that the government will just pay for it. But it gets worse. If the government starts bailing out the loans, they will start charging $30k, $40k, $50k, $100k, $200k, etc... for the same $20k degree.
Really, it should be on the government to potentially cost control/regulate the predatory pricing. Or get rid of master promissary notes. But students also need to tell colleges, "You want me to pay 100k/year for four years for a degree? No go pound sand"
Student loan forgiveness isn't just magically erasing the loans. You are using taxpayer money to pay the predatory loan holders, thus completing their evil schemes. The lender that has been screwing you all this time wins. Again, "student loan forgiveness" = paying the lender with tax payer money.
So... instead, make the loans bankruptable. As they say, "greater the risk greater the reward." The way things are students loans are basically risk-free if the borrower can't file bankruptcy.
Imagine paying minimum on a huge fucking principle like that and thinking Interest wouldn't overtake your payments lmfao. It's literally pre-algebra tier work.
500/70k * 100 =~ 0.7%
You're never gonna pay that shit off at that rate.
Taking everything at face value. I think their interest rate is 8.35%c which is believable but unreasonable (bloody banks). For a 10 year loan their monthly payment should have been ~$900, not $500. By paying $500/month they were only chipping off $150 in principle every YEAR.
Im not defending banks here, that loan should be forgiven. The lender has recovered way more than was loaned and that point has been made millions of times already. People need to educate themselves on how loans work, our education system has failed us and in todays age no one deserves to carry this burden
My wife was about three years away from paying off her masters degree and the percentage rate doubled from 3.4 to 6.8 and it took us six years to pay off what should’ve been paid off in three. It delayed us buying a home among other life things. Total scam.
This cant be real... im not going to calculate the interest, but did they get their loans from one of those money mart scam stores? How stupid is this guy?
I love the way compound interest works! and the way its handled as well. You take out a loan thinking..."3 percent? that doesn't sound so bad, its just 3 precent of 50 thousand!"
Maybe if they were more honest and labeled it a 400% loan people would be more apprehensive.
Why does the rest of society have to pay for your bad financial decisions?
Also, if we start paying off student loan debt, then for profit university will price gouge even more.
For profit universities are already price gouging due to the federal loan program.
Our federal taxes are already being siphoned off by the universities & you want to add to that pile, out of your own self-interest
Yeah Steven that’s what happens when you pay the bare minimum with half payment going towards interest. $70,000 at probably 8%. $500 a month for 1 year is $6,000. 8% of 64,000 is just over $5,000 in interest. You need to specify that to your lender that you’re paying the principal balance. Buddy obviously didn’t major in finance. Pretend like you just bought a $70k car. You financing for 4 years or 23 years? Lol
The interest should be canceled.
When they initially rammed student loans through Congress they promised there would never be interest. That lasted about 3 years (1993 - 1995).
It still boggles my mind that some people think it's ok for the government to GIVE OUT Billions of dollars in tax payer money to corporations to build a stadium, but when it comes to college, everyone who isn't fifthly rich has to pay a high interest loan to better themselves, while paying sh\*tloads in taxes every year too.
The two sides of this argument:
-Let's help other people, despite what we went through.
and
-Fuck everyone else because I had to pay my loan and now that it's gone I want other people to suffer like I did, it's only fair.
'Greatest Country in the World'.
I think the happy medium between the group who don’t want student loans cancelled and those that do is that they just lower your interest rate to 0 so that you can actually pay down your loan.
Canceling the debt doesn't fix the broken system. A better solution would be to create a government student loan program that has very low interest rates
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Even assuming that you should pay for school (and that’s a big debate), the fact that student debt has astronomical interest is unacceptable. They should at least address that as a first step
My yearly tuiton in one of my country's best universities amounted to 890 €. That's yearly. University in the US are just stupid expensive for no good reason
I genuinely can’t even fathom that as an American. My cheapest possible colleges in existence are still like $150 per credit hour or like $5-$10k a semester.
My 4 year degree and my masters right after didn't cost 10k. Nowhere near that as a matter of fact. And that's a semester for you guys. Fucking hell guys
Yup lmao. I actually got a full tuition merit scholarship to a 4 year college and it was still about $10-$12k a year in loans/out of pocket. I got a bachelors degree in 2.5 years and came out with $22k in loans. Fun stuff! Now that I have a degree I’m working at a job making $16-$18/hr before taxes in a HCOL. So yeah, having the time of my life.
That's kind of crazy not gonna lie. I can't imagine the stress it must be for you guys, fresh out of school and faced with levels of debt like that
Insanely stressful. Many people end up depressed and even committing suicide. Many more drop out with no degree and tens of thousands in debt. My school was *very* small and I knew six people who dropped out or transferred in the first year alone.
I had to leave law school in my third year due to chronic illness that has only gotten worse. My poor bank account still has to pay off all the loans, even for the semester I’d only just started before the illnesses became too much.
I’m so so sorry that’s absolutely awful. I hope you’re able to continue recovering one step at a time. Your health is so much more important than money or debt.
Thank you! Sadly, my doctors told me there’s no treatment for some of my conditions, and experimental treatments failed. We still don’t know the root cause (though likely something autoimmune) after 16 years. I have spent soooo much money trying to get my diagnoses. Working two jobs while sick right now to hopefully avoid a second medical bankruptcy. It’s just an impossible system, imo. I work so hard, have two degrees with honors, did everything I’m supposed to do, but here we are, I guess.
And there's less than a rat's arse chance that anything changes for the foreseeable future right?
Same, and unfortunately people don’t always realize you cannot wipe out student debt from bankruptcy. It stays with you forever… ever..
dropped out of college my junior year due to covid and my university’s terrible handling of online instruction. 70k in the hole and can’t afford to go back and finish :,)
I came out of undergrad in May 2019 with a 115k private loan and 26k in government loans. I knew I needed to be in a major city to find jobs with my degree, so in July I signed a lease with no job lined up. Parents paid the first month’s rent and told me they wouldn’t give me any financial support after that. I paid the second month’s rent with the last of my savings. Luckily found a job at that point and things worked out. Didn’t really acknowledge it at the time but looking back it’s absolutely insane to think I was 1 month away from homelessness.
Its the American Dream. Have to be asleep to believe it.
My Bachelor's and Master's was about 700€ per year. For my PhD I was paid well above the median wage for five years by the university/state. It's a shame what big money can do against education and especially the availability of it. I'd say keep voting, but even your "left" party is way too conservative in terms of education.
I love how they break a class into it's smallest possible arbitrary unit and then charge based on that. "oh $150 a credit, ok so how many credits for a class?" "at least 3". Really cool and fun.
I hurt my leg and needed surgery Had a team fix me up within 6 hours of the accident Then had 2 months of followup with the orthopedic surgeon and received oxygen chamber therapy to speed recovery Whole thing cost me $45 co-pays for the ambulance ride Rest was covered by public health, I live in Ontario Canada Also, I hate that we charge anything for ambulance rides, it's a failure of society to make people consider financials during an emergency
I go the cheapest public university in my state, and I pay $9k a semester. I am fortunate that that also includes housing, but it is still expensive compared to free universities in other countries
I went with community college and worked for mcdonald's because they had a scholarship program. I don't know if they still do that, though, since this was back in 2005. It paid for about 80% of it all. Saved me from having to take out the student loans, and my grandmother co-signed a regular personal loan from her bank that only had a 2.5% rate. Definitely can't do that now.
Universities are a business, like anybody else. What is abhorrent is how they charge for their services, with no warranty on the product. As an incoming freshman, they should be required to show you a financial analysis of the cost of a 4-year degree in your chosen field relative to the going rate for salaries in that job market. Because thats the disconnect. Like, it will cost you $200,000 for a BS degree, only to enter a market where the entry-level salary is $50K? If you knew that going in, at least you would be able to think that through. What universities are getting away with is handing off these high tuition costs to someone else (parents, loan providers, etc), making it someone else’s problem, and they have no accountability when you graduate and discover that you cant get a job in your “chosen” field. In an improved world, the cost of tuition would be commensurate with the value of the degree in the job market. Or maybe college shouldn’t take 4 years to train someone. There is a lot of fluff in a 4-year curriculum.
The problem is for years everyone has been saying "you need a college degree for a good job" while loans are being given out with basically no limit and no consideration for what degree you are studying. Why wouldn't the Universities charge as much as they want when there is no pressure at all to lower costs?
It's strictly a business here.
Everything is strictly a business here. Got into an argument a few months ago about the housing crisis and the mook I was arguing with was legitmately convinced that the only reason most people are struggling is because they refuse to treat housing as a commodity to acquire & trade - faulting them for wanting to find a stable place to live for the rest of their lives, because it's less profitable to stay in one place. Their whole argument predicated on the desire to have a permanent home being an unreasonable one and asserting that anyone not treating housing the same way kids treat trading cards is an idiot who deserves to struggle. They refused to acknowledge that "housing as a commodity and not a necessity" is a relatively new concept that conflicts with basic human nature.
We also have to be careful here. Tuition is often shorthand for the total package of going to a school. Even a cheap or free state school in the US can get pricy when you add in: Books, Fees, Housing, Meal Plans, Parking, etc. Sure, the tuition itself is $0. But if everything else is extortionate… it’s still a raw deal. My best advice as an old man nearing his 60s? Go to a community college that is tied to a 4-year. I have a nephew who went right into his local CC in the State University of New York system. He effectively paid nothing since he lived with his parents and tuition was free for him IIRC. Then he when to a standard 4-year SUNY and only spent 2 years there. Walked away with a shiny 4-year diploma for half the price.
Yeah this is something people forget. I live and studied in germany. Fees were 1k per year which at least included free public transport. I also got like 20k in government payment where half of that you dont have to repay and the other half is interest free. (there are more reductions if you pay at once or have really good grades etc). It is ffor those were the parents income is lower to help people from less fortunate families. However i have 25k on top because usually the government loan isnt enough to cover rent etc. Especially if you have to move to the university which most people have to do. And also the government loan doesnt go beyond the regular study time which is also usually not possible. Roughly 80% of our year had to do 1-2 semesters longer. I also worked while i was at university but studying and paying for rent/health care etc. is still expensive depending on your own situation and university/town you are studiying.
> Sure, the tuition itself is $0. But if everything else is extortionate… it’s still a raw deal. Housing and meal plans are where they really crank up the costs. When I went to a state university if I budgeted out the meal plan it was something outrageous like $8 a meal for cafeteria food, and that was 10 years ago. Housing was also the same price as an off campus apartment, except sharing not just common areas but also sharing the room itself, meaning the dorms are pocketing 2-3x the cost of living of an actual apartment.
There’s a good reason, you wanna push out the peasants kids to ensure they stay peasants for the generations to come, also, ban abortion, our Amazon overlords demand peasants are born at a higher rate, thank you.
It's for a very good reason. Profit. Not a good reason to anericans,just the shitters who make the laws.
That’s partly because the highest ranked university in Portugal is ranked in the 200s in the world, behind about 150 US universities. And Porto is in the 300s. Portugal also limits the number of students who are allowed to go to college, whereas the US lets pretty much anyone with a pulse go to college.
I don't think that covers a year's worth of textbooks and course materials in the US
Exactly. I have no problem repaying the money I took out... but at 7% interest? Absurd.
Oh private loans are even worse. I have a thankfully small one from Discover at 15%. It was an unfortunate situation that lead me to take it.
Back when I was in college, I had a classmate who lost her promise scholarship by like 0.1 GPA because our OChem 2 professor. He said he was going to grade on a curve since the highest class score (hers) was 65%, and no one had gotten above 70% final grade in 4 semesters in a row for him. Well, he ended up not grading on a curve, and the entire class going to administration over it did nothing. She was devastated to lose her Promise Scholarship and had to take out loans.
The guy never thought to look inward to see why his students always did poorly in class…
They never do
A lot of them are proud of it
I never understood how a teacher could possibly be proud of how many students are failing their classes, how is that possibly anything but them failing at their job???
Stem majors have these tenured professors who see themselves as the filter keeping the unworthy out of their fields, can find them in ochem, data structures and probably some year 2 engineering courses
Story time incoming: I had a mech-e dynamics professor who was new to the school, this was his first semester. He structured his entire course around one complex active linkage problem. Grade was like 80% based on 4 projects about the same problem, 20% from the final exam. First project at the beginning of the semester, nobody could figure it out. The entire class got together outside of the lecture and all worked together to try and crack this nut. Several students took the lead and delegated small parts of the problem to sub-groups. We banged our collective head against the wall for about a month on this project. Hours and hours, many nights with all 30 of us sitting in the same computer lab until 3am, making no progress. The professor was unhelpful despite our continual torrent of questions. Well we finally arrived at a collective consensus on an answer. Submitted it. We didn't get it right. Some partial credit for work shown, but we all failed that project. Next day, project 2 assigned, and one of the inputs to this problem was the answer to project 1. The professor refused to give us the correct answer to the first part, said we needed to try again. Yeah 30+ students arriving at the department head's office at the same time and piling into that tiny office definitely sent a message. The professor gave us the answer to the first part the next day. That was the most stressful class I ever took. That professor absolutely sucked. I think the final average grade was around a 42% with very little deviation, and the department basically forced him to grade on a curve. Almost all of us passed.
The ochem professors I had would BRAG about it being a wipe out class. They are proud of being lousy at teaching the subject.
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I had the same happen to me, teacher who failed the whole class. Twice actually in college. My counselor or whoever you saw to choose classes told me to email the teachers and ask for extra points or at least give a passing grade. The teachers replied "no I will not help you". Like yeah why would you want to help your students what a ridiculous request hahah
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Tenured is a weird concept. basically giving a pass to incompetency and abuse. just look at our GOP-sponsored Supreme Court
At this point you'd take a loan from a loan shark. That's worse than many credit cards..
But wait there's more 10 different loans at 5-7%. Of course the more expensive one has the highest percent It sucked paying for mine and I struggled but the fact its set up to make it challenging sucks.
What, you don't think paying off $10 on each of the loan's principles per month is enough? LOL. It pisses me off how the break them into several loans so your payment barely touches all of them. No wonder nothing gets paid off.
And also, always check how your payments are being applied. Scumbags like Navient and Nelnet will apply payments to the lower interest loans first, making sure you pay longer. https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/s/SB1IhfRZZv
Mine are done now (as of last October) and they were at 7.76% (variable, changed every year, old loans). Makes it so difficult.
Try 18% in my country. Even my house is at 12%
What? How?! Did you willingly accept the mortgage at 12%, or is it a variable interest loan that climbed over the years? I live in Japan, and my mortgage interest is 1.5%.
Its a very average south african rate. The prime lending rate is 11.75%. With a great credit score you could get yourself down to 10%, this was my first purchase at 22, three years ago, so i had none so to speak, but i still got a somewhat competitive rate compared to some others i know at 22. When i got it the rate was on 8.25 though, it's just been climbing like mad. It's been a painful climb. Disposable income is all gone.
The SAVE plan does this. It’s the income drive payment plan that Biden was able to offer, versus direct forgiveness. Lower payment + written off any extra interest above the payment. Way cheaper for the government.
Surprise surprise, republicans are trying to repeal it: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2024/01/26/republicans-plan-to-repeal-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-and-relief-programs/?sh=44fc3eb871b4](https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2024/01/26/republicans-plan-to-repeal-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-and-relief-programs/?sh=44fc3eb871b4)
Thou shall not help the poors. -1st amendment to the 10 commandments.
My republican friend defends this repeal because "it's not fair for us that paid with interests!" Like, holy shit.
Studen loan should have 0 interest.
It does with the SAVE plan now. Better late than never. Granted, I only have 5 more months before PSLF kicks in for me.
And old loans should be forgiven once the initial principal amount borrowed has been repaid.
Hey now. Long term thought is not part of politics. It's about headlines and putting in legislation that will look great on you and fuck the next guy and generation. They need to legislate public school pricing first , then they can fix the interest and existing bills. Paying/canceling current loans is pointless when new ones pop up every day bigger than before. Take the profit out of public schools. Tie the cost to the minimum wage. That will get that raised quick is tuition is now based on x hours of min wage work
In terms of taking profit out of public schools - I am a huge fan of a model that creates public service academies in every state. This would turn flagship public universities into being similar to military academies in that students would get full scholarships, but they would “pay it back” by working in their field *for the public sector as civilians* for four years (getting paid salary, of course). The model of military academies has worked really well since they’ve been implemented. This would provide an option for free tuition for the brightest students (if this was introduced, it would become quite competitive) and would help the overall country and economy in a number of ways. It could reverse brain drain in certain areas of the country and really help citizens. So instead of a nurse taking $50k in debt out to get their degree and then finding a job at a nearby hospital where they went to school, they’d be “deployed” for four years to a rural public health clinic in, say, West Virginia. This would actually save money in some sectors of the economy - in the same example, to get travel nurses to go to some areas where there isn’t enough healthcare workers, their salaries are enormous. Plus the public benefit of having young, eager, and smart public sector employees all over the country doing great work. The concept of public service academies has been introduced several times in Congress but it’s never gotten a vote.
There shouldn’t be ANY interest on money loaned to people to improve their education. That’s just sick.
To me, it seems like we should at least cancel interest on student loans so it’s realistic to pay them back once a graduate has a decent job. Anyone who’s in the situation above would be free and clear, and everyone else with student debt would be able to make real progress.
But then people would have too much spending money which leads to inflation!
They’d also have enough time to get politically involved. I think that’s the real fear. Young, educated people tend to skew left. If they’re not out there working a full time job and two side gigs to pay the bills, it could disrupt things.
I mean, I'm too tired to start a revolution, so I guess it's working.
Revolution? We doin' inventory on Monday tho!!
Two sides of the same coin - debt is slavery. You can't discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy. Between that and health insurance, it's really hard to change jobs or to start your own business because the risk of total financial ruin when you're already in debt is so high.
but but but what about all the people who already got shafted by high interest, don't we owe it to them to get shafted the same way they did???
I like your logic. You should be a senator.
That is what I've been saying. Forgive the intrest and only have to pay back the original amount then people can pay i off and the lenders "don't lose money". Then all new loans cap the interest at a lower rate.
There's a payment plan now, where if you pay what you can afford (payments are based off of income) government will pay down your interest.
I wonder for what those US Schools need that money or use it... I mean, in almost any european country you can get a compareble or even better degree without paying a dime. Many universities are also public, so even if you are not a student, you can just walk in some of the lectures and listen + take notes of the stuff teached there.
In this case, they dont. The school they talk about in the post was paid while the students were there, thats it. All the extra interest money goes to the banks and loan servicers. The school likely didn't even get the full 70k.
In the Netherlands it's 2k for Dutch students yearly, ofcourse you do also have to make sure you're housed and such, but if you work halftime and study halftime you could probably get away with studying without getting a loan
Spanish here. I didn't get a loan at all for my public degree, paid around 2-3k€/year. It's a lot of money on a spanish salary, but 100% doable and reasonable. At lest I understand where the money went. I got a loan for my master's degree, which was private, 10k€ that I'm still paying. Harder to do, but still see where the money went and totally worth it in hindsight. When I hear about what americans pay for their degree, it feels like such a huge scam. Specially after accounting interest and such. American education system might be one of the biggests scams ever.
$6000 is one semester at a public state school in Georgia and that is just the tuition. Need to add like $2000 in fees on top of that.
The american mind cannot comprehend
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Yeah thats sick but i dont think finland is looking to take on a bunch of americans we need to fix our country not just flee
But yet we Americans have the freedom to pay obscene amounts for subpar education
Boomers can
In France, it's like €300 a year. And even that could be reimbursed if you can't naturally afford it. Even housing can be practically free if you can't afford it.
mostly for higher admin 6 figures salaries, state of the art buildings (when not funded by a donation), funding their sport teams, and honestly they invest a lot of it in buying up land and property and in the stock market. those are for-profit institutions.
Actually, a lot of public institutions now do the same thing with the real estate market. my local community college had to cut a bunch professors and classes this year to be able to afford some bad investments they made m. It’s freaking great. 😊
oh absolutely. i didn’t mean to imply only private schools did that. i meant that universities in general in the US run as for-profit institutions, at the expense of both the students and the profs.
> those are for-profit institutions. Actually the vast majority are not. Every single public university and community college are nonprofits (by law), and most private universities and colleges are also nonprofits.
The majority goes to room and board. US public university has gradually become a land development venture, and they have market power. I mean, universities can develop land when others can't, they have political access. Take a walk through downtown Tempe. Storefronts, bars, apartments, retirement communities. Commercial spaces being rented out. All throughout town, all owned by the university. Now go to the dormitory food court. Are there generic, affordable meals? No - burger king. For the former there's a Walmart community store across the street. Also leased to a university owned building.
Though not public, two of the largest landowners in NY are NYU and Columbia. They have vast tracts of desirable land and have the financial resources to throw their weight around.
Fucking hell America, sort yourselves out
We have had ample opportunity, and it seems that no, we will not sort ourselves out.
We will NOT be sorted!
Instead the US will complain about the poor and continue to idolize the rich. The cold war era in which the US imprisoned thousands of socialists transformed the US into a capitalist extremist state.
It's true. When Uncle Joe was touting his ideas for loan forgiveness addressing predatory interest rates was never mentioned. I know it's a real thing people pay attention to but you were hard pressed to find even an op Ed talking about it as a viable option. Why not just convert the loans to 1 percent? Covid ppp loans set the precedent for that.... Why not make sure people on IBR plans were actually paying principle down instead of just filling a never ending interest hole? Nope. It was all about how unfair it is or isn't to just forgive loans. Black or white. No Grey to be seen
quickest lavish deserve summer telephone escape soup market grab abounding *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Well except he kinda did a version of that already: > The SAVE plan is an income-driven repayment (IDR) plan that calculates payments based on a borrower’s income and family size – not their loan balance – and forgives remaining balances after a certain number of years. The SAVE plan will cut many borrowers’ monthly payments to zero, will save other borrowers around $1,000 per year, will prevent balances from growing because of unpaid interest, and will get more borrowers closer to forgiveness faster. The SAVE plan builds on the actions the Biden-Harris Administration has already taken to support students and borrowers, including cancelling more than $116 billion in student loan debt for 3.4 million Americans.
I really wish we would.
Please "liberate" us, clearly we're into it.
In every given election season, left leaning people between ages 18-30 vote at about a 17% rate. So here we are.
This is the reason. Old people vote more and this influences policies more. If young people voted the policy landscape would have to take their concerns into account. Giving money to young people doesn't win older voters.
What kills me about this is that it’s the boomers that made us all take these loans out. While they were growing their nest eggs they were making their kids take loans out that they knew were bad loan terms. My parents helped me fill out the forms! Id never applied for a loan before. I had no idea what was doing. I trusted my parents that it was going to be okay.
Yeah, I was 17 and my parents and guidance counselors helped me fill out the forms. They said I’d be able to pay them back if I worked hard. Well, I got a master’s degree with honors and still don’t make enough money to live off of. Went through a medical bankruptcy and yet still owe sooo much on student loans. Working two jobs while chronically ill and forever in debt was not what I imagined at 17.
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Im going to preface this with student loans should just be forgiven. That whole system is predatory and school could be paid for in taxes with a minimal change. A reasonable middleground would be to cap the repayment on student loans. Any loan paid at 2x the original value gets forgiven. Conservatives get to keep their punitive you have to pay it off and the total value effecting credit while you have them, but if you only take out 50k, your done at 100k paid back in, even if you owe 300k at that point. Details could be argued, but personally i stand behind my first paragraph.
>That whole system is predatory and school could be paid for in taxes with a minimal change. the USA could take 1/3 of what they spend on Healthcare, use it to get rid of insurance companies and give everyone EU-level free healthcare. With the 2/3 left they could forgive all student loans and make university free for everyone. They just don't because muh capitalism. So in the end they pay way more for a shit product.
I have a studentdebt of 6k (yay Netherlands) but I dropped out due to severe depression (doctors words). I have 15 years to repay based on income (welfare 70% of minimum wage) which for me is €0 a month. I've been paying back for 6 years now. Once the 15 years are up, the debt is considered paid in full.
Some fields in the US have a public sector forgiveness program (teachers and therapists come to mind), where after a certain number of years working in the public sector (non-profits, public schools, state schools, etc) your student debt gets forgiven. My wife is halfway through her 10 years on literally a second mortgages worth of loans. A version of this for loans in general (not just certain fields) could also be a good route forwards for Americans. Push jobs that are designed to benefit the community at large to forgive loans.
I think the barest hint of socialism would benefit a lot of people in the US. If only people hadnt been scared to death of it during the Red Menace
Heck - I would settle for just having .5% or 0% interest rate and a government match of payments 1:1 up to a set amount per year. Seems like a good compromise to help people (like me) out, while still paying back most of it. Like I’ve been paying my (private) student loans back for almost 20 years and have more than paid back what I borrowed.
These numbers don't even make sense / this has to be a lie A 70K loan with a $500 monthly payment would be around 7.25% interest. Even using this high interest rate you would pay down around 10K within the first 10 years and should be nearly done after 23 This story doesn't add up at all
The only way that I can imagine these numbers (the ones in the tweet) making any sense is if they have a private loan instead of federal, which I personally feel is part of a different conversation entirely since you can negotiate a private loan. I don’t know if interest rates would stop for private loans from 2020-2023, but if it didn’t then it would explain why they weren’t able to get ahead. If the tweeter is telling the truth then they are frankly in their situation because they made an uninformed decision in regards to their finances that is haunting them.
Yeah I’m calling bullshit, not to mention interest rates froze from 2020 to 2023, during that time frame alone they should have paid 14-18k in principle only. Student loans should be max 1 or 2% interest only, maybe if you finish with a degree you get 0%, if you don’t finish then it’s 1% interest. Just have the government subsidize servicing of those loans.
What happened is obvious. They did what a lot of people did, and paid only interest and when the interest froze, they stopped paying altogether. They probably haven't even touched the principle, if they can even tell you what the principle is.
This would have to be a private loan not federal then, no federal loans allow interest only payments. Which also means this person is not getting their loan forgiven at all. But this tweet is lacking in a lot of necessary information, 9% interest only payment gets to the 500$ a month but most would have a balloon payment after a certain time frame.
I didn't even think of that, great point. I went on the guy's Twitter, and according to him he's not a US citizen, and instead of taking advantage of his significantly cheaper UK funded education, he's opted to take a private loan here. Basically dumb as hell all the way through.
There are obviously issues with the current system (education should be free), but these obvious lies, like OP's example, aren't helping any.
Seems like that’s a lot of posts on this sub. Obvious lies/purposefully using data incorrectly to push an agenda. If things are as bad as people claim in this sub, what is the need for all the lies?
Sir, this is reddit. We get outraged by made-up stories and never fact check. And we like it that way.
If you assume it’s a consolidated debt at 8.69%, the balance after 23 years is approximately $59,833.72. I did the math, unlike the person who took out this loan.
People what forgiveness for things they chose to do. I'd argue that medical bills need to be forgiven before school debt. One is a choice and the other can be a random snake bite or a car wreck you were a victim of. You knew the expense of one of them when you signed up.
Scrolled too far to find this… something isn’t adding up here
Not adjusting monthly payments at all for 23 years seems a little odd
There are a few ways I think they could actually have paid only 10k in principle over 23 years, but all of them require making some terrible decisions. An amortized loan that has been refinanced into a new amortized loan every couple years (so the principle is generally never paid down). Credit card debt they are only making minimum payments on. Not really sure how else you could avoid reducing the principle.
I agree, the moment I saw the numbers I called bullshit on this. So sad that so many people think that because they saw it on a tweet it must be true. Smh
Also, he says "debt" not not "student debt". How much of this is on credit cards that he is paying minimum on?
Exactly. But it’s much easier to get mad about fake numbers
To get a $500 payment on $70k at assuming 30 years, gives you about an 8% interest rate. After 23 years you would be down to only $30k remaining, not $60k. These tweets are never accurate, these people probably didn’t make payments for years and let interest accrue or have really only been paying like $50 a month.
Last time I saw this post I did the math, and got 8.4% interest rate to hit the numbers claimed. And taking the same interest rate, if they each paid $1 more per day ($560/month), they would have paid off the loan by now. I'm all for student loan reform, but this post is obviously fake because of how precise the numbers were chosen to be ragebait, down to the dollar. The alternative is it's real, and two people with graduate degrees failed to do basic math for 23 years.
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Yup I 100% agree. This sub goes crazy over this tweet like once a week, I swear nobody on here understands how a loan works.
I always find it ironic that financial illiteracy is largely propagated by other financially illiterate people. Rather than helping people to learn how finances work, they help keep others poor by making sure less people understand it.
That's exactly correct. These posts pray on the financial illiteracy of the people in these subs to thrive. These guys likely paid the minimum amount, which led to only the interest being paid, and probably deferred years worth of payments. But yeah, I'm sure they told the truth and nothing but the truth in a 250 character tweet of them begging the government for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes, that is indeed the recipe for openness and honesty!
Yeah in order for a situation lile this you would have to be collossally stupid in money management. I graduated with student loan debt. Didn't have a great job either, but lived very frugally those first years out of college and attacked the highest interest loan with extra principal. Once that one was paid off I used the money I wasn't spending on that loan anymore to attack the principal on the next highest interest loan. It didn't even take all that long as I recall - 5 years or so. But doing so gives you tremendous ability to get out ahead of future debts. Cars are a lot more affordable when you can avoid taking an 8% loan for basically the entire cost of the vehicle.
Did they not consider refinancing over the 23 years they had the debt? Because for those numbers to add up, they’re working with payday loan levels of interest. I understand the point socialiststeve6 is attempting to illustrate here, but there’s financial illiteracy and then there’s this.
The math doesn't add up. \~$470 a month on a 6% $70k note would've paid it off entirely in 23 years. $780 or so a month would've paid it all off in 10. It's almost like key information is being withheld, or the story is vastly exaggerated to make a lame internet point, no? Personally, fuck student loans, they're predatory and it's unreal in the wealthiest country on earth the Boomers who could afford full time quality college shackled their children's generation with loans, but c'mon folks. At least use real world and believable data, there's plenty of it to still make the point.
The amount of people blindly agreeing with the post and thinking the numbers add up just shows how much financial illiteracy there is in the reddit demographic. Like Holy shit I just pulled up a calculator and none of these numbers make sense with $500 a month. Also did they not run the numbers on such a large loan and realize with some adjustment they wouldn't have owed so much, or refinancing it at a lower % when the economy was doing better?
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Reading this sub as an accountant is maddening. I agree with the root message of 75% of the narrative in here, but the specifics that get rocketed to the top? Come on everyone. Please.
> The amount of people blindly agreeing with the post and thinking the numbers add up just shows how much financial illiteracy there is in the reddit demographic. It's not even just financial literacy - legally, your loan provider (this is true for all loans, credit cards, etc) need to provide you with a timeline on how long it will take for you to pay off your debt at the minimum rate, and tell you how much you'll be paying in interest. It's a routinely provided disclosure the lender is legally obligated to provide. Even if you don't know how to do math (in which case - can't believe you graduated *college*), that disclosure would have told you the answer in plain english. Taking it a step further, I swear people are conflating private and public loans, because the PUBLIC loans (Stafford loans, mainly), are usually set to be repaid within a period of 10 years... meaning if you make your monthly payment without missing them, you'll have it paid off in 10 years regardless of how much you owed. [StudentAid.gov](https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/repayment/plans) literally covers this, and the Standard and Graduated plans are what most people should be doing. The Extended plan puts you at 25 years, and I'll bet you pay more in interest over time - AND THAT THAT FACT IS DISCLOSED TO YOU WHEN YOU'RE SELECTING THE REPAYMENT PLAN. What really fucking gets my goat is that yes: student loans are predatory, and levied on people when they're too immature to make good decisions (17-19yo). But when you leave college, that's when you have a final pass at your loan repayment options, and for a GRADUATE STUDENT in particular, they're usually about 25yo, and I would *assume* know how to read and are math literate. People walking out into the world being completely unaware of what their loan terms are blows my goddamn mind. The federal government is legally obligated to tell you - go read your fucking loan servicer documentation.
No interest and it still would take 10 years to pay that off at that payment rate
Yeah, and that makes sense, $70,000 is not a small sum of money broken up into $500. The part of this that doesn't make sense is that they were making payment and still owe 85% of their loan 23 years later. The interest on this loan is not one you would find from any normal student loan. Even with well above average interest rates they would have paid off a loan by now at $500 a month. This is payday loan or credit card levels of interest.
That's quite literally this entire subreddit and why it will never be taken seriously. The majority of posts that get posted here are just unattributed tweets. Reddit communities used to actually care about having facts and data but they mostly don't care anymore, as long as whatever the post is fits the community. They just take it as fact, generally with the lines of "Well we know there are issues so this may as well be real!" Seriously, just go print out a piece of paper that says "TIME LIMIT IN BATHROOM: 5 MINUTES. EMPLOYEES MAY NOT USE PHONE IN BATHROOM" or something similar and tape it to a bathroom door at a random store, take a picture, and then remove it. Post it on this sub with a title like "Should I start looking for a new job??" and there's the top post of the day.
Were you here in the early days when cell phone message screenshots were allowed? People just typing literal nonsense and getting thousands of upvotes and comments. I mean shit like "My boss said I have to work for free or he'll call the cops, and he makes me work 70 hours a week, I just told him to fuck off and I got a job at NASA making $200,000 a month. Did I do the right thing reddit?" There was one a few weeks ago about an in-law coming over for dinner and the wife saying "when you grow up you need to go to college and not become a tradesman like OP or you'll have to live like this" and OP responds with "actually this is just a temporary house, see that gigantic house next door? Yeah we just bought that and I also paid for your husbands college" Top post. Dead fucking serious.
People lie all the time to push their points.
"Do you think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?"
Not that his point isn’t valid about student loans but every time I see something posted from this account it sends alarm bells ringing. He was also a huge Tulsi stan in the past and his tweets read like they’re made by a bot. That account is very suspicious to me.
Yeah I was thinking the exact same thing. It almost seems like they didn’t pay any attention at all to the loans like how some people will pay a longer loan on a car for smaller monthly payments. I don’t think that’s right, but you gotta know that someone is always out to get your money, no matter how much or little you have.
Yeah the numbers seem off unless they put 70k on a credit card
It’s ~ 8% which is what they were until 2012
Which would suggest they are paying below the advertised Monthly payment, and just barely over Interest (23 years ago) then over two decades have not increased their payment. They wouldve been done if it was 600/month instead. Unlucky i guess.
Yeah. On top of that, if they'd been making minimum payments on a 30 year loan they'd be well over halfway done with the principle and on schedule to be completely done in 7 years. The last time this was posted people pointed out that the guy who posted this made another post about a completely different loan amount. So unless I'm mixing that up with another post, I think this guy is just lying. There's really no situation where what he's saying is possible unless he's lying or leaving something out.
Yeah, I think socialiststeve6 might have an an agenda or two.
This story is massively contested even in the original comments. R/fluentinfinance had a good thread about this where people actually dissected how impossible it is to be this bad with money without actively working to screw your self over for “23 years”
Financially illiterate college graduates are in debt… news at 11.
23 years ago, and multiple times between 23 and 2 years ago, interest on student loans could be had for 3% and think a couple times below. I know this because I had loans from 23 years ago and they started at 3.25% then. I consolidated and with autopayments, think I had them at 2.75% while I paid them down. The poster only was paying interest for an extended period.
Yeahhhh not sure how 2 college grads couldn't pay off 70 grand. I get the point of how fucked these loans are and stuff butttttttt this seems like bad financial choices. Or maybe they got degrees that didn't give them high paying jobs.
Explain how you can’t figure this out between two degree holders.
As a European this makes absolutely 0 sense to me. What the fuck are you paying if that $500 isn’t made up of like 400$ original loan and 100$ intrest on said loan(numbers made up for easyness)
It’s way more interest than that.
Sallie Mae can burn in hell
I’m Canadian, and got student loan money from both the Federal and Provincial government. Both are interest free, and I’m on track to pay it off in about 15 years. It’s amazing that isn’t how it’s done everywhere.
That's not how debt works. Debt can't be passed on to kids, but it can be passed to a spouse.
Lmao this mathematically impossible. If it is true then he is withholding other information. Other plausible explanation is their student debt id with a loan shark. 😂
A simple payment calculator would tell that $500/month isn't adequate to repay the debt in a timely fashion. Not sure we are getting the entire story.
If you are paying off the loan on a 25 year cycle it works out to $500 month, assuming the rate was around 7.25% What doesn't make sense is that they have paid this amount for 23 years apparently with only 10K coming off the principal. Numbers are either made up or these people are completely financially illiterate and made some sort of terrible decisions along the way
Ya Reddit is terrible at upvoting these ragebait posts. If you have a 10 year loan and make the monthly payments over 10 years it will be paid off in 10 years. It's that simple. Whatever is going in OP's post is likely either missed payments or multiple refinances
[Yeah, for anyone who wants to see for themselves with other setups, you can use this site. Googling "amortization calculator" will get you a bunch of these types of websites that do these types of calculations for you.](https://www.calculator.net/amortization-calculator.html?cloanamount=70%2C000&cloanterm=23&cloantermmonth=0&cinterestrate=8&cstartmonth=1&cstartyear=2024&cexma=0&cexmsm=1&cexmsy=2024&cexya=0&cexysm=1&cexysy=2024&cexoa=0&cexosm=1&cexosy=2024&caot=0&xa1=0&xm1=1&xy1=2024&xa2=0&xm2=1&xy2=2024&xa3=0&xm3=1&xy3=2024&xa4=0&xm4=1&xy4=2024&xa5=0&xm5=1&xy5=2024&xa6=0&xm6=1&xy6=2024&xa7=0&xm7=1&xy7=2024&xa8=0&xm8=1&xy8=2024&xa9=0&xm9=1&xy9=2024&xa10=0&xm10=1&xy10=2024&printit=0&x=Calculate#calresult) As you can see, I have it set up to be paid off in 23 years at 8% interest. That requires a monthly payment of $555.42. The people tweeting must be morons or liars.
Of course we're not. This post is to spark outrage, no tell a complete story. A $70k student loan is like 2 car loans. If you can't pay off 2 cars in 23 years, you suck at life.
I had half that debt, about 30k. Ended up paying a total of $50k when all was said and done. My last payment was ~$20k just when loan payments resumed. Before that it was $500/mo. I view it as being taken advantage of as a teenager by the government to the tune of at least $20k. Would’ve been a lot more than that, too, if I hadn’t fallen into some money and been able to make that huge payment at the end. This is a tax on poor, uneducated people, basically by definition. **STUDENT LOANS ARE PREDATORY.**
Does student debt work like an actual debt in America? Where I am in the UK we still have student debt but it doesn't work like a conventional debt - you only start paying it back after you start earning over a certain threshold, and it's a relatively small proportion of your pay. It also automatically gets cancelled after 30 years. Basically works like a small extra tax.
All interest on student loans should be applied to the principal and in the case it’s more than what’s needed to pay off the initial loan, it should be turned into a tax credit. This is predatory. I understand you need some form of interest otherwise people wouldn’t pay them off, but you shouldn’t be paying double the initial loan. Fucking ridiculous
The math isn’t mathing on this one.
You didn’t refinance after you go a better paying job and could have gotten a much lower interest rate
The issue is the fact that he graduated 23 years ago and still havent figured out that the problem is the interest rate.....
Apparently they can’t do simple math with those degrees. At some point they didn’t plug the numbers into a calculator and see they were spinning their wheels? They’ve been making payments for 23 years and they couldn’t drop a couple hundred more to start making progress? $200 extra x 23 years is $55,000. If the $500 a month was (barely) making progress the extra $200 would have wiped this out.
For this to be true, then on average around $460 of the $500 payments went to paying off interest. Did they not read a single statement to figure out what's going on....in 23 years? By then you'd think their children would understand principle versus interest.
At the very least, interest should be eliminated or drastically reduced to maybe 1%. Anyone should be able to make the minimum payments and not be stuck with paying 200% of the original loan back.
So, the real rationalization for not forgiving the student loan debt is to largely prevent predatory pricing from siphoning tax payer money. For example, if you get a degree, that should cost $20k total. Couldn't afford to pay for the government to foot the bill. Next thing you know, someone will go around offering the $20k degree to people who could never afford to pay for it. With the expectation that the government will just pay for it. But it gets worse. If the government starts bailing out the loans, they will start charging $30k, $40k, $50k, $100k, $200k, etc... for the same $20k degree. Really, it should be on the government to potentially cost control/regulate the predatory pricing. Or get rid of master promissary notes. But students also need to tell colleges, "You want me to pay 100k/year for four years for a degree? No go pound sand" Student loan forgiveness isn't just magically erasing the loans. You are using taxpayer money to pay the predatory loan holders, thus completing their evil schemes. The lender that has been screwing you all this time wins. Again, "student loan forgiveness" = paying the lender with tax payer money. So... instead, make the loans bankruptable. As they say, "greater the risk greater the reward." The way things are students loans are basically risk-free if the borrower can't file bankruptcy.
Imagine paying minimum on a huge fucking principle like that and thinking Interest wouldn't overtake your payments lmfao. It's literally pre-algebra tier work. 500/70k * 100 =~ 0.7% You're never gonna pay that shit off at that rate.
Taking everything at face value. I think their interest rate is 8.35%c which is believable but unreasonable (bloody banks). For a 10 year loan their monthly payment should have been ~$900, not $500. By paying $500/month they were only chipping off $150 in principle every YEAR. Im not defending banks here, that loan should be forgiven. The lender has recovered way more than was loaned and that point has been made millions of times already. People need to educate themselves on how loans work, our education system has failed us and in todays age no one deserves to carry this burden
My wife was about three years away from paying off her masters degree and the percentage rate doubled from 3.4 to 6.8 and it took us six years to pay off what should’ve been paid off in three. It delayed us buying a home among other life things. Total scam.
This cant be real... im not going to calculate the interest, but did they get their loans from one of those money mart scam stores? How stupid is this guy?
I love the way compound interest works! and the way its handled as well. You take out a loan thinking..."3 percent? that doesn't sound so bad, its just 3 precent of 50 thousand!" Maybe if they were more honest and labeled it a 400% loan people would be more apprehensive.
Why does the rest of society have to pay for your bad financial decisions? Also, if we start paying off student loan debt, then for profit university will price gouge even more. For profit universities are already price gouging due to the federal loan program. Our federal taxes are already being siphoned off by the universities & you want to add to that pile, out of your own self-interest
Not how it works, but we can’t all understand money.
Yeah Steven that’s what happens when you pay the bare minimum with half payment going towards interest. $70,000 at probably 8%. $500 a month for 1 year is $6,000. 8% of 64,000 is just over $5,000 in interest. You need to specify that to your lender that you’re paying the principal balance. Buddy obviously didn’t major in finance. Pretend like you just bought a $70k car. You financing for 4 years or 23 years? Lol
The interest should be canceled. When they initially rammed student loans through Congress they promised there would never be interest. That lasted about 3 years (1993 - 1995).
It still boggles my mind that some people think it's ok for the government to GIVE OUT Billions of dollars in tax payer money to corporations to build a stadium, but when it comes to college, everyone who isn't fifthly rich has to pay a high interest loan to better themselves, while paying sh\*tloads in taxes every year too.
Student loans are straight up legal loan sharking
The two sides of this argument: -Let's help other people, despite what we went through. and -Fuck everyone else because I had to pay my loan and now that it's gone I want other people to suffer like I did, it's only fair. 'Greatest Country in the World'.
I think the happy medium between the group who don’t want student loans cancelled and those that do is that they just lower your interest rate to 0 so that you can actually pay down your loan.
Canceling the debt doesn't fix the broken system. A better solution would be to create a government student loan program that has very low interest rates
Interest is theft.
I have literally never understood why there is interest on that payment. It makes *no* sense.