this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 83 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (11 children)

Real talk - How will not paying convince conservatives to be for student debt forgiveness? They’re the ones blocking loan forgiveness, and this is a demographic of people that does lean toward them, so why would they listen?

IMHO, showing up to vote is what would actually put the fear of god into these politicians. Not paying a loan will totally fuck up your ability to rent, get a credit card, get reasonable car insurance, and even get a job. Bad credit is no joke.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It won’t, but I hope most of these people realize the only way it’ll change is consistently going to vote and keeping their family updated on what to vote on.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah these people are only hurting themselves. The US isn't hurting for cash and sooner or later those loans you're avoiding turn into garnishments.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

And they’re not eligible for bankruptcy relief either

Correction: You can but it’s hard. It’s a little easier under this administration though

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/17/politics/student-loan-debt-bankruptcy/index.html

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Can't say I blame them at this point but the consequences of that are probably going to suck for them.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Paycheck to paycheck and your payment is more than you spend on groceries. And your loan has doubled in size because of interest. And will continue to grow. Meanwhile your credit is garbage and you can't get ahead. Bad credit? Crappy car, needs fixes. Higher interest rate. I'm 41 and trying so hard to get ahead of it.

At the very least cap the interest for people. Or how about no interest. You can't chip away at something that's growing faster than you can swing at it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

Best we can do is crippling debt in a dystopian shitscape to pay off the degree they lied to you about being able to get a good enough job to raise a family because you got that degree, taking on tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I agree with you here. I've always said, if you're putting in work to get an education, the interest on the loan should be zero. Yes, zero.

Over time it means the lender (read: govt) loses money, so what. The increased tax income for an educated employee more than accounts for that. Even if it didn't, what's the downside to an educated workforce for anyone but those in power?

Education should not be a for-profit scheme.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Counter argument--having bad credit is also meaningless if you can never afford to purchase something like a house, and you're ok with purchasing used vehicles and renting from smaller landlords and not property management companies.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Credit is a fucking scam to begin with. It's insane what companies like Equifax have gotten away with.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's a far less bad scam than the previous version of be a white guy that's friends with the local bank.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Wholeheartedly agree. And then we go around panicking about the authoritarian social credit shit China has. Mfer we've have social credit for decades

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (3 children)

The consequences already suck. It's damned if you do damned if you don't. At least I can keep (some of) my money this way.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Not very effective when they can just garnish your wages, your taxes, and your social security. I'm fully on the side that believes student loans desperately need reform, and Biden's forgiveness plan getting shot down has definitely negatively impacted my life, but I'm not dealing with ruined credit and the stress that not paying causes when I know they'll find a way to get their money unless I basically throw away my career to work cash jobs. That would impact my life way worse in the long run.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

Right now borrowers are incentivized to keep low income jobs and avoid settling down (they can’t buy houses anyway) which isn’t exactly excellent from a state perspective.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That kind of sounds like when people say that anyone on welfare could be doing better but chooses not to so they can keep their benefits. Of course there will always be people right on the cusp who determine that the little extra money they'd make by working more hours or trying to get a slightly better job won't make up for what they'd lose (either in benefits or in savings from a lower student loan payment), but anyone who can afford to do significantly better generally tries to do that for a lot of reasons.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Sure but right now you can essentially defer forever under 60k, 60k vs 120k I absolutely agree, but that usually happens in steps and $60k to $70k you might not see a benefit.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Reminder that student loans, like mortgages, are rolled up into an investment vehicle called the SLABS, or Student Loan Asset Backed Securities. Student Loan Forgiveness would tank the value of the SLABS, and I guarantee you our elected officials have money tied up in them. Since a student loan can't be discharged through bankruptcy, it's typically a very safe investment.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (4 children)

It is absolutely HORRIBLE and immortal to have an investment that gains money of others being in debt. That is SO fucked up

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What..... What do you think a loan fundamentally is?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Welcome to capitalism.

Inb4 all the MBA nerds come to chime in about why making money off of someone else's failure is a good thing...

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I mean... right or wrong, FAAFO with banks does not sound fun, I hope they have an exit strategy like to live with someone else as they drop off the grid.:-|

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I agree. More power to them, but I'm way too risk adverse to personally stop paying. I genuinely hope they can induce some change. I guess that makes me a scab.

I hope this debt is forgiven someday, but I don't have enough faith in the powers that be to risk my future on it.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, much as I'd like to participate, I'm scared into being a scab. Life is hard enough as it is.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Don't beat yourself up - ~~that's the banks job~~.

Like if someone scams you and you follow them to their house, break in and take your money back... you become the assailant at that point - e.g. if someone spots you, maybe not even the owner, and shoots you dead or whatever, then the fact that it's their house is all that police are going to see and care about.

Movies and TV shows about vigilantes are fun to watch but the reality is that it is quite dangerous. Right or wrong, they have the entire weight of society behind them.

Find a way to resist that does not involve the likelihood of losing everything you have.:-)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What if they've built a system where peaceful resistance is encouraged but designed to be ineffective so the only way to resist effectively is to risk everything you have?

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago (1 children)

As someone who was bright-eyed and bushy tailed when I started college, I was not expecting that being a student was a constant bleed of money.

The college partnered with some student loan vendor? and that vendor issued only a debit card which only worked on campus at specific ATMs. There was no apps for this shit. There was no bank withdrawal. Is was only the card and the ATM. They charged a fee for every use of it. So when I need to get that tuition money, I had to pay to get my money. It limits at 300$ so you’d have to repeatedly get charged to take multiple sums out. Tuition was exorbitant too. Didn’t include cafeteria or anything else. Books also out of pocket and 3-4 new ones each semester. We were also forced to pay ‘health fees’ for access to the newly built rec center, which you paid whether you ever stepped foot there or not.

Look it’s one thing to have a ‘way about things’ but by this point it was more like an excuse to fleece us for everything we had and more.

After 2.5 years of it I finally had to get a job on top of everything just to afford to be there. The job then took most of my time and it was not easy working around the school schedule. I finally had to quit school. What did I do? I stayed in my job because it was the only income source I had as a young person without a college degree and at least I was literally getting working experience.

Tell me, who benefited here? You can argue it was me, but I have no degree in my hand. I have now almost 20,000$ on top of my original amount (40k) due to interest. I’ve always struggled to make ends meet and I’m essentially trapped with this debt. Is this really fair? I didn’t know the true consequence of these loans adding up. It was only after I got so far and saw how big a problem was growing that I had to bail. There was no way I could afford it. I was a kid, I was told I had to go to college and I had no choices in life unless I did that. So much pressure growing up.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Civil disobedience is making a comeback.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (16 children)

I've said it once and I'll say it again: if you need your citizens to have a post-secondary education to keep your country humming along, MAKE IT AS EASY AS POSSIBLE FOR PEOPLE TO GET THE EDUCATION AND NOT BE BURDENED WITH BULLSHIT DEBT. FREE COLLEGE. FREE UNIVERSITY. FREE TRADES SCHOOL.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Beene added that there are other options if you want to make your viewpoint on student debt forgiveness clear that don't involve risking your financial future, like protesting and writing to your elected representatives.

"But have you considered begging?"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

All of that relies on the belief that anyone with any significant student loans have a financial future. Most of us are so far up shit creek, give me that civil disobedience paddle.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (5 children)

All these comments whining about how this will hurt credit scores, pay attention to the laws that we have currently. Student loan companies cannot take any action on unpaid loans for 1 year from the start of repayment. Interest still accrues but they cannot garish wages like all these morons are saying. That means for most, you don’t need to pay anything until after the next election. Use the only leverage we have and don’t pay back the loan for at least a year. Make them earn the vote and do something else to cancel these loans

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago

hard af.

can't you all clown on them in the facebook comments? AKSCHUILLY the government will always win yeah no shit thanks

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I was gonna do this, then my partner badgered me into it saying she wanted to buy a house someday, and my credit being crap would screw that up.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Your partner wants to finance a house someday. I know I'm on the losing side of this battle but I really wish people would stop associating BUYING a house with taking out a LOAN from a bank.

It just feels like people are only deceiving themselves by saying "I need good credit to buy a house" when what they really mean is "I need good credit so I can take on a lot of debt and pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest over the next 30 years."

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

One way or the other, you're paying every month. Either it's rent (paying for the landlord's house, including taxes, insurance and interest), or you're paying towards your own. The general populous has never really been able to buy a house outright. One way or another you're mortgaging your time to spread out the time to either pay for a house, or pay for property and building your own.

Yes, people have been going WAY to far into debt, pushing the size and prices of houses to unsustainable levels. Hell my mom grew up just fine with 5ppl (2 parents, 3 kids) in an 800sqft house (plus a tiny finished attic) with 1 bathroom. Nobody really needs 2500-4000sqft houses.

But even if we go back to reasonably sized homes, in no realistic world are mortgages going away.

The best you can hope for is to live as cheaply as possible to save up a large down payment (and emergency fund), and buy only as much house as you really need, for as little interest as you can manage, and then pay it off as quickly as you can.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

How precious, your partner thinks housing will be affordable some day.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I took out my student loans to get a teaching degree. I worked full time during school, but tuition at my public university was 10k$/year when I was making $16k. My state has effectively made it illegal to be transgender in a public school, so despite a devastating shortage in my area of expertise, I can no longer work in the career I took the loans out for. My option is now to take out more student loans to pay for a masters degree and hope that I’ll be able to save up enough to move out of state, because I want to do the thing that I love to do and am good at. I will be a debt slave for the rest of my life.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You should look trying to move to a state before taking the loans. Plenty of states need teachers and are willing to pay for you to get your master's as part of retaining you.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Is this one of those things where is enough people don to pay, one of the financial systems will be ripped down?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Pretty sure this "story" is sponsored by Sallie Mae.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

If so joke’s on them, they didn’t put the propaganda in the headline so this will just make more people boycott. And if it leads to financial ruin for 1 in 10 borrowers that just costs the taxpayers even more.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Refusing to make payments on a debt that can never be repaid is smart.

That guy wrecking his credit over $1200 is not.

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