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Final Fantasy Online Forums  >  Community Discussion  >  General Discussion

School Loan forgiveness.





0
 09.16.2011 11:28pm


Zet
Registered Member



<span style="font-size: 11px; color: #959595;"><a href="/forums/profile/5">Crono</a> said:</span>

Bankruptcy is a weird beast. Sometimes they take your house, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they take all your cars with loans on them, sometimes you are allowed to refinance. Sometimes they take your house and you still have to pay some of it back a few years, sometime it's a clean slate. I'm no expert on the field but my family has gone through three of them (once every 8 years almost like clockwork) and I've seen a different case each time. And yes, they are absolutely horrible with money. Poor by no means but then run up tens of thousands of credit card debt, second mortgages, and financing for more than the houses worth.

Anyways, my point is that school loans may fall into that "Sometimes forgiven" category but I honestly have no idea. Google ahoy!

https://bankruptcy.lawyers.com/consumer-bankruptcy/Student-Loans-In-Bankruptcy.html

So yeah, it stays unless you have "undue hardship".
Just an FYI for "undue hardship", that clause is nearly impossible to get(like the article said). I used to work for a bankruptcy lawyer and asked him about this. He gave me this example:
<p class="plain2">Imagine that you got into a car accident and needed both legs amputated. A double amputation would not be bad enough if you could still work without your legs in a field of study that you had used the loan to pursue. A chemical engineer, for example, could still work from a wheel chair<span class="aswer">.</span>
<p class="plain2"><span class="aswer">So in essence the "undue hardship" may as well not even exist.</span>




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0
 09.17.2011 5:13am


Monetary Dragon
Just keep swimming

I&rsquo;m generally against student loan forgiveness.

My take:

1) Go to a school you can afford to go to, not one you can&rsquo;t. I went to a school that cost $8K/yr, not one that cost $40K/yr. Where I got my undergraduate degree is irrelevant outside &lsquo;pride&rsquo; issues, since I&rsquo;m getting a PhD. As a graduate student looking back, I can&rsquo;t imagine how going to one of those &lsquo;good&rsquo; expensive schools could possibly have been beneficial, because undergraduates are not capable of taking advantage of the special intellectual opportunities there anyway. The undergraduates at Harvard have no idea how screwed they&rsquo;re getting.

2) Don&rsquo;t spend extra time in school, beyond what&rsquo;s necessary to finish your degree. If you want, you can finish most degrees in three years. Chem/biochem and the like might require 3.5 years. Know before you sign up. If you don&rsquo;t know why you&rsquo;re there (if you somehow don&rsquo;t know what degree you want, or can&rsquo;t figure out how to enroll for the classes you need to take to earn it), then don&rsquo;t go to college.

3) Work while you&rsquo;re in school if you can, and definitely work whenever you&rsquo;re not. If you somehow can&rsquo;t work over summers, take as many general education classes at a community college (as cheaply as possible) at this time as your primary institution will give you credit for, to minimize the number of years you&rsquo;re paying for in the first place.

Don&rsquo;t go to college because it&rsquo;s just what you do after high school. Only go to college if you have a degree you&rsquo;re trying to earn, and then earn it as quickly as possible.

It turns out that, as a graduate student, my student loans are (for now) deferred, and looking back I would probably have worked less and put more of the cost into student loans, since it&rsquo;s effectively 0% debt, the value of that money is much less to me now than it was when I was an undergrad, and I can let inflation eat away at it&rsquo;s value over time anyway. But, I don&rsquo;t regret how I did things.

All of this said, I&rsquo;d have no opposition to student loans being deferred for 5 years or so, as economic stimulus. That has nearly all the positives which would go along with loan forgiveness, only without the cost of the loans falling on everyone else who didn&rsquo;t take them out.




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0
 09.17.2011 5:58am


Free Spirit
Zetta Member



As a personal aside, yes I am bitter. I am what my life experience has made me. In my life(real life, not online life), every single person I have ever known who has been on welfare has been a lazy good-for-nothing scumbag that takes unbelievable advantage of the system and makes no attempt whatsoever to rise above the situation they're in. Every last one. These people have made me absolutely loath the welfare system. This is where I'm coming from. Does that mean that everyone else on welfare are trash? No. Just every single person I've personally known, and in my field, I know a lot. When someone who is higher up than you in the company, and who actually makes MORE money than you is on welfare, you tend to be a bit jaded on the whole idea. Welfare, and the general idea of "money for the needy" is a great idea in principle, but I see far too many people abusing the hell out of it for me to have a positive opinion of it, as it works now.




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0
 09.17.2011 8:12am


Arckanghel
Pirate.



The bottom line is that if you walk into the argument assuming that everyone using the system is apiece of shit, there's no point in having it. It's sad you feel you that way. Go use Google and learn some things. Like the average length of time people are on welfare.




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0
 09.17.2011 2:44pm


Free Spirit
Zetta Member



I'm sure there are plenty of people who do need welfare and get it. I'm also sure there are plenty of people who do need welfare and don't get it. And I'm absolutely sure there are plenty of people who don't need welfare, and get it anyways.

And I'm sure the average numbers for welfare is something like a few months or something reasonably like that( I googled it and it seems it's actually something like six years). My reality, however, is that the people I see on welfare have been on welfare for as long as I've known them, 10+ years, and show no signs of ever getting off it, or of ever wanting to. Besides, my problem isn't so much how long a person is on welfare, but how much effort they put into getting off it, and how much they actually needed it to begin with. When that effort is not only zero, but less than zero(they actually make an effort to stay on welfare for as long as possible), I get pissed.

And you're right. There's no point in arguing with me, or me arguing with you about this subject. As long as I'm surrounded by the type of people that take advantage of the system for their own selfish ends, I'm not going to change my mind one inch on the topic.




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0
 09.17.2011 4:25pm


Crisium
N/A



It seems more fair to just have interest rate forgiveness.




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0
 09.17.2011 9:26pm
Thread Creator

Id82
Fuck Shit Stack.



I can agree with that Crisium. Interest rates are ridiculous. Especially when I'm done with a project and I have to have my loan differed for a few months until I get my next gig interest rates increase my loans again its bullshit.




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0
 09.17.2011 10:25pm


Teek
Angelboy

<span style="font-size: 11px; color: #959595;"><a href="/forums/profile/100">Darth Howie</a> said:</span>

Some of you people seem to be living in some kind of time warp where hard work pays off 100% of the time like some kind of inerrant mathematical equation. That's not the way the world works. Some people worked their asses off to earn professional degrees like Law, Education and Medicine only to find that the industry they worked so hard to break into is not creating jobs. So what do you do? You take whatever job you can while continuing to knock on the door of the field you tried to enter. Except no amount of high grades or glowing recommendations will make jobs appear out of the ether. So you go to work in sales, in retail, in whatever is available, even though you are making virtually no money compared to your supposed earning potential. Now you are working a job that barely allows you to pay your bills and then, on top of that, you run out of forebearances on your student loans and you have to start paying down the interest if only to keep them in check, while waiting for the economy to improve and for jobs to start opening up. Meanwhile governors declare war on educators and law firms start outsourcing document review projects to India. People like this have been FUCKED by the system that exacted a price and then didn't live up to its end of the bargain. Before you make such severe allegations, find some proof that people struggling with student debt are just sucking at the public teat. I'm so fucking sick of people attacking people who struggle and blame them instead of the causes of their struggles. Blaming the victim will only earn resentment. The Protestant Work Ethic is a fucking lie.
Yeah, this is a pretty complete description of the problem <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">right now</span> the last 5-10 years.




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0
 09.18.2011 12:00am


Milky Ore
Kickin' it old school



Actually, yeah, I do also think the interest rates are completely fucked up. It seemed during the start of the downturn, they played this completely shitty little game where they would trade my loan around, increasing the % a little each time.

Fun stuff if you take a look at this:

https://www.finaid.org/loans/scripts/interest.cgi

The inflation rate is 0 yet interest rate is practically 8%? (I remember it over 8% for one of mine.) Now that's fucked up, and yes, absolutely crippling for someone that had to take out a larger loan.

How to fix it? Well, if there was a vote to line them up in front of a wall and shoot them, I'd go for that.




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0
 09.18.2011 12:27am


Amer
pew pew pew



The only way I could agree with this is if there were some strict standards on who and who doesn't get forgiven.

If you haven't completed your degree, you don't get forgiven. If you owe less than say...$8k, you don't get forgiven.

If you have a degree in a "high cost degree" field like law or medicine, you get forgiven, but only if you are currently unemployed in the field or have only been employed for X years.

Or maybe instead of forgiveness, it's just a debt reduction?

I don't know. I'm thinking back to when I bought a house. We bought one right before prices here dropped. The house is probably worth 20k less now than what we bought it at. We retroactively got "first time homebuyer" credit due to when we bought it. It was the first, $7500 credit that you pay back over 15 years. If we had waited 6 months we would have got the second homebuyer credit of a free $8k that didn't need to be repaid. I was sitting there thinking, why do I have to repay my credit when you just gave all these people 8k for free.

ITT: liberals and future conservatives




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0
 09.18.2011 12:49am


Call
Firefightin' Administrator
Administrator



Don't even get me started on welfare. I love nothing more than going to someone's house, finding out they dialed 911 for "finger pain," walking into public housing, and seeing nine kids running around a 55" LED HDTV.

I do agree with MD about choosing a school you can afford. Ohio University cost me about $10,000 a year, with room and board.

And a tip for anyone paying off loans...make sure you know what it's costing you, down to the penny. I was paying extra, assuming it would come off principal, just like...well, every loan I've ever had. It wasn't. It was being applied to future interest or some such bullshit, and I wasted a ton of money before I realized what was happening, and had no recourse. Much like all these people who were "forced" or "duped" into bad mortgages, read before you sign.

Again, all for interest rate reductions across the board, but not for forgiveness. Sorry. You borrowed it.







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0
 09.18.2011 1:44am


Fukiyama
Sysadmin of my brain



College education is the next great bubble precisely because the government has made it so easy for America's children to sign up for loans.

Instead of facilitating a broken system by forgiving loans, we should be fixing the system by weaning Big College off the government teat.




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0
 09.18.2011 2:42am


Southern Comfort
silently judging all of you



I don't think forgiveness is the correct answer, but I can see automatic deferment of payment if you are unemployed or underemployed. You don't start owing on your education until your education starts earning its keep.




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0
 09.18.2011 5:16am
 (Edited on 09.18.2011 at 5:22am)

Monetary Dragon
Just keep swimming

In this economy, with money being basically free (at least from the source, the Fed), people in this thread who want student loan forgiveness should be looking into refinancing. Of course, read all the fine print, and ensure it's a good idea to do- there are all sorts of traps that you could run into if you aren't careful. But there's no reason to be paying a higher interest rate than you need to be.

EDIT: [b]Fukiyama[/b] is onto something- the stupidly high increase in college education costs, far beyond inflation, is likely driven in large part by the availability of student loans. Medical school costs are almost incomprehensible if you don't consider that the loans are readily available and the job you get later eventually allows you to pay them off.




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0
 09.18.2011 7:15am


Murasame
HALE YEAH



<span style="font-size: 11px; color: #959595;"><a href="/forums/profile/73">Fukiyama</a> said:</span>

College education is the next great bubble precisely because the government has made it so easy for America's children to sign up for loans.

Instead of facilitating a broken system by forgiving loans, we should be fixing the system by weaning Big College off the government teat.
How do you get "Government Teat" from "Too many loans"? A sensible, standardised, means-tested Government based loan system makes plenty sense. Infinite, crazy interest rate, student exploitative loans do not.

@SC: That's precisely what starts happening here if you start earning above the minimum threshold (which is a little below average wage), so you don't start paying your loans until you're capable of paying them.




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