Helps if you have dual citizenship.
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Reminds me of this article:
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$300K in students loan debt here and living in one of the most expensive areas in the US. It sucks but going abroad never seemed like a viable option for me. Friends, family and elderly parents keep me here. Plus my wife has no student debt and makes 33% more than me with no degree (I’ve got 3). I sympathize with everyone struggling with any amount of student debt and fault no one for taking whatever (relatively non-criminal) steps they have to take to get out from under it. We
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I recall some friends gloating about jumping toll gates for years because they were so disorganized it never got enforced.
One day the state hired someone to enforce it all. At 30 bucks per fine, it was a bad month for those two guys. Between the two probably $5000, and we were only 24.
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Somehow, I tend to doubt that’s completely accurate.
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This sounds like a horrible plan–what happens when they get old and have no reasonable access to medical care?
And addressing an earlier comment–there’s a very good reason you can’t get rid of student loans in bankruptcy. If it were permitted you would see a large number of strategic bankruptcies. When you graduate in general your only asset is your degree, something that can’t be taken. 10 years of tough credit in exchange for wiping out all that debt? An awful lot of people would jump at that. (Especially when the credit bureaus figured out that strategic bankruptcies didn’t translate into not paying one’s bills otherwise and greatly reduced how much such a bankruptcy counts towards your credit rating.)
What they should do is cap student loan payments at some % of income above the poverty line.
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Any constraint in money will have to be met by equal cuts in spending. Less money coming in = less money to pay for vice-provosts and climbing gyms.
I have long maintained that any discussion about college and it’s role and how it’s paid for is farting in the wind if we don’t acknowledge and address that we are in the current situation largely because universities have had an unlimited money spigot mainlined into America’s veins and until people are willing to say no nothing can change.
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No, they’ve already left the US at that point.
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My point was more that predatory lenders use it as one of their big “we’ve got you by the short hairs forever” cudgels.
A cap like the one you suggest would help remedy that problem. So would loosening the rules so that full or partial discharge without meeting the varying standard of “undue hardship” would be possible starting no less than 15 years after the loan was first taken out.
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As @Melizmatic said, I seriously doubt that. Even if you aren’t playing on the easiest setting, I doubt you’re playing on superhard.
Depends on what else you aren’t needing. If you have a place to live and someone to help pay the rent or mortgage, you’re ahead of someone who doesn’t. If you own a car that doesn’t burn through a litre of oil a week, or needs a new engine, you’re ahead of someone who doesn’t. If you don’t need a specialised diet or expensive medications…
Incidentally, it’s easier to get a job when you have a home to go to where the electricity works so you can have regular hot showers. It’s easier to keep a job when you don’t have brain fog on account of not eating for the past few days because you don’t have any food. It’s easier to get and keep a job when you have reliable transportation.
When you’ve got that stacked against you (or more), $20,000 might as well be $200,000 or $2,000,000. It’s all the same: crushing debt you can’t get out from under as the interest and penalties push it higher. And given that post-secondary education is a gatekeeping device for jobs that pay more than minimum wage and provide enough hours to get benefits (like health care), more and more people are finding it necessary to take on that debt.
And just because $20,000 isn’t as big a number as $200,000 doesn’t mean it’s acceptable, especially since we’re making it mandatory. Just because some people pay $2,000 for shoes doesn’t mean a $200 pair is cheap.
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“Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt they can’t afford the time to think. Tuition Fee increases are a disciplinary technique, and by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the disciplinarian culture. This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.”
― Noam Chomsky
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While this is something of an issue the real reason the state universities and the like have gotten much more expensive is the government isn’t contributing as much funding as before. We are more seeing a shift from government funding to tuition than we are really seeing runaway costs.
And student loans aren’t being paid to the university anyway, changing the repayment rules has zero effect on the universities.
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If we put a cap on how much of your income can be demanded for payment there’s no need for hardship rules.
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The British solution is that any unpaid student loan debt is written off (no bankruptcy required) 25 years after you graduate, or 30 years if you take the option to stop making payments for 5 years.
Payments are also income-dependent (fixed percentage of your income above a certain amount on a per-paycheque basis, adjusted for cost of living if you live outside the UK).
Of course, this is possible because the loans are from the government, which will find itself in a big hole financially in a few years when increased tuition fees mean that much more debt is written off. There are also “career development loans” from banks which are mostly used to finance graduate degrees- these are treated the same as any other bank loan, including in case of bankruptcy.
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I wouldn’t take US citizenship if they were giving it away.
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It’s not just student loan debt. A friend of mine is dual US/UK citizen, but grew up and lived most of her life in the US.
Your tax system makes her miserable. She hasn’t been back to the states for five years and yet every year she has to spend a grand on a tax return because she has savings / 401k, investment bonds etc. The last time she did one the IRS decided her accountant fucked up and threw penalties at her that totalled more than $20k.
She’s looking to renounce, because being American just ain’t worth the time or money.
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Did you just say it makes her miserable to pay a tax of 1000 out of her 401000 $ a year?
I am getting something wrong, right?
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A “401k” is a US tax-defered investment vehicle. You/your employer drop some (capped) fraction of your income into it income tax-free, and you’re taxed on withdrawal at retirement age, without paying taxes on the growth until you are taxed on the withdrawal amounts. The goal, of course, is to pay in when your tax rate is high, and withdraw when your tax rate is low after getting significant untaxed gains.
This mechanism allows the rich (who can afford significant savings) to realize higher gains to support them in retirment.
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Thanks, the sentence makes more sense now.
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It may seem possible, but the system is constructed such that foreign credentials don’t count (or at least aren’t equal). I know a surgeon from Russia who is currently driving a taxi in New York City.
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