this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Quick question: How does it reach this figure?
It was the CitiAssist.
It had to be a private student loan because my parents made slightly over the max to qualify to public loans even though they refused to pay for school. That left me with loans with insane interest rates. Most of what I had to borrow was to cover $150k to pay rent in the college town I lived in while attending school.
Then, Joe Biden wrote the bankruptcy protection bill, making it impossible for students to disburse their student loans in bankruptcy two years after I graduated. They also refused to allow me to consolidate 8 loans which all had monthly payments that were each intentionally calculated as if it was the only loan I had to pay. Then my loans got bought and moved around and are now owned by Trellis. There’s a lot more to it as well. Housing and healthcare plays a HUGE part.
TLDR; hyper-commodification of basic human needs like education, housing, healthcare, and food coupled with legislation that sentences those that can’t pay their feudal lord up front to a lifetime of serfdom. (Not to mention my union wages barely keeping pace with inflation).
I had a loan like this one. Probably a plus loan. For a while the rates for plus loans eclipsed 8% and plus loans accrue interest while you are in school. So if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can take on 4 years of interest before you even start paying. Turns a $20k loan into a $30k loan before you even graduate. Plus loans recapitalize interest whenever they come out of deferral so you actually pay interest on the interest as well. So by the time you pay the loan off that is then $41k in total payments for what was originally a 20k loan
Do this 4 times for each year of undergrad and you’ll have 164000 in total loan payments over your lifetime.
Plus loans are a government backed scam to fuck over poor kids who can’t front the cash for what the federal aid program covers. My base grants were only ~40k over 4 years and my federal unsubsidized and subsidized loans only were ~24k over 4 years.
Meanwhile the prestigious university I was accepted to charged 24k per semester. So I had 64k of aid and low interest loans to pay a tuition of 192k. After my work study added an additional 20k/yr I was still short 48k and poof there the plus loans were to “help” me.