If the dollar collapses do we get out of student loans ?

reply to post by Xtraeme

Actually it sounds like we're in complete agreement.

Yes, we are. I reread my reply to you, and I can see where what I said might be misconstrued. I think I might have misunderstood the "however" part of your post. Sorry about that. Another senior moment!

Originally posted by spinkyboo

Originally posted by badgerprints

Originally posted by admriker444


It really pisses me off that the goverment gives out trillions to banks but the average citizen cant get out of student loan debt.

It really pisses me off that somebody would borrow a quarter of a million dollars and think that they shouldn't have to pay it back.
You are no better than the banks if that's what kind of integrity you have.

It really pisses me off that we live in a society that would charge $250,000 to become a doctor and then tack on another $350,000 - Why do we do this? Why do we make it so difficult to get an education to become better people and citizens.
This is what is wrong with our great America.

thank you, finally someone sees the real issue here.

If Banks werent inflating the currency we wouldnt be forced to borrow to begin with. Of course this is done on purpose to force people into debt.

a 100 years ago your great grandfathers paid cash for their homes and farms. It was possible to do that back then. Today nobody has the money to pay cash for a home because of inflation. So unless you want to live in a box and work at walmart your only choice is to borrow money and pray inflation and interest dont kill you.

Oh I forgot to mention property taxes. Mine have doubled in the last years.

end the fed, give back money to the people and back it with gold and inflation ends. Then maybe there wont be any loans to default on

oh and to the jerk who made the rude comments.....

my wife and i both worked two jobs at one time or another. We both attended community college and lived with our parents as long as we could. We both attended state colleges after and worked part-time while in school. We did our part to cut expenses so dont blame us. You act like we went to Yale and Harvard and are complaining because we owe money.

This is about the banks and their unfair interest and rules that steal our money

[edit on 1-2-2009 by admriker444]

reply to post by admriker444

a 100 years ago your great grandfathers paid cash for their homes and farms. It was possible to do that back then.

For SOME, it was. However, they worked 90-100 hours a week, the home was virtually all that they owned, they had no cars, no TV's, no laptops, no video games, no trips to the Caribbean, no college education,......and on and on ad infinitum...In addition, women didn't become doctors, they had no washing machines, dryers, microwave ovens, and the average home had a kitchen, maybe two bedrooms, no electricity, an outhouse, and you had to cut down wood for heat.........
It is always easy to see greener pastures elsewhere.
Your great-grandfathers led a rough life by todays standards.

If you're looking for sympathy, I don't think you'll get much here. I believe our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers also accepted personal responsibility a lot better than many do today.

I borrowed 11,000, and I owe $36,000. I have paid for 5 years now and the principle has not budged. Well, it went down to 34 and change, but I have paid about 10k back to them. Somehow, the math just doesn't add up, but trying getting an explanation or figuring out the fine print. My degree was waste of time, it never got me hired anywhere. I have worked in construction since I left college. I got a consolidation loan by the Dept Of Educ a few years ago, was put on an income contingent repayment plan. I use to make three times what I make now for the same work, everything in life costs more, but I make less. I am slowly going bankrupt. I haven't paid in a year, and I'd feel pretty good if those of you that are so HIGH on your horses, get stuck with the bill. This is NO LONGER A MORAL issue to me...I had to stop killing myself with that type of thinking. See you all of you that owe in debtor's prison someday...if the cancer doesn't get me first.
PS...I drive a used pick-up (which cost me $200 a week to fill early last year), my furniture is thrift store, as are my clothes, I rent an apartment, I don't own any JEWELRY or HIGH DOLLAR cell phones, in fact I have always lived within my means. But my means don't get much anymore. I work 60 hours a week to get by...ain't workin an hour more.

[edit on 1-2-2009 by odd1out]

Originally posted by admriker444
My wife has a ton of student loans. Medical school is very expensive. She owes over 250,000 dollars. Her monthly payment is 2,100 dollars. This is for 30 years.

If we make the minimum payment, we will have paid over 600,000 dollars. Thats totally ridiculous in my opinion.

My wife is a pediatrician and doesnt make the type of money a brain surgeon makes. We can barely afford to make our house payment and this student loan payment. Forget about putting money aside for our two kids for college.

BUY A SMALLER HOUSE... boohoo. the doctor and her husband have bills....

Is there any trick to getting out of this debt ? We dont qualify for loan forgiveness (you need to be disabled). You cant get rid of the loan by filing bankruptcy.

Yes. Scale back your spending. Live within your means. Move to city where she can make more money. Somehow, I cant feel sorry for a doctor that complains about bills...

We have seriously considered just leaving the country and moving to canada. We'd lose our social security retirement but Im guessing ssn wont be around anyway when we retire in 30 years. The pay for a doctor in canada is lousy though so it would probably come out even.

Riiiight... The poor doctors will have to survive on social security. you should have enough saved up and invested you wont even need it.

Any hope that if the goverment goes bankrupt we could slip through the crack and not have to pay ? Id hate to root for a total economic collapse but if it got us out of student loans Im all for it.

This is the single worst statement I have read on here all night and encapsulates everything that is wrong with our country. Greed, selfishness and ignorance. You'd be all for our entire countries economic collapse, so long as your DOCTOR wife doesnt have to pay back her student loans? Omg.. be happy that their are mods on here, because I could tear you to pieces over that statement. (grammatically,speaking). You better pray it doesnt collapse or all of your wifes precious degrees wont matter a bit. You'll need a wheel barrel full of dollars just to buy a loaf of bread. If I was you, Id be selling the BMW and the yacht now! Or maybe the beach house...

It really pisses me off that the goverment gives out trillions to banks but the average citizen cant get out of student loan debt.

Ya, and it pisses me off that my crappy job has no insurance and I cant afford it on my own. It really pisses me off that for staying one week in the hospital and being seen by three different doctors, I now have 65 grand owed to hospitals and 18 grand owed to various doctors. It pisses me off to end that I owe 83 thousand dollars for getting sick for one week. It pisses me off that I owe one guy 5 grand, and alls he did was come in my room twice in a week. It only took me a week to acrue half of your wife's degree cost. BooHoo. Get back when you have real problems.

Um, I have news for you. You are not "average". You are married to a doctor. If you are broke or having a hard time with your bills, its YOUR own fault. BooHoo. She doesnt make brain surgeons money. Well, she should have stayed in school longer then. The average pay for her work is 120-200k a year. Cry me a river. Dont make the minimum payments.

reply to post by odd1out

I borrowed 11,000, and I owe $36,000. I have paid for 5 years now and the principle has not budged. Well, it went down to 34 and change, but I have paid about 10k back to them. Somehow, the math just doesn't add up, but trying getting an explanation or figuring out the fine print.

When you take out a long-term loan, the interest rate, the length of the loan, the number of payments per year, and the amortized periodic payment are set.
In the early years, most of your periodic payments go towards interest. Furthermore, depending upon the type of loan you got, although you may not have to start making payments until you graduated, interest on the loan may have started from the day you got the loan. As a result, although the original amount may have been 11,000, by the time you graduated, and had to start making payments, the loan may have been a great deal more.
That is why I made my comments about understanding all of the details of the loan before you take it. If you ask, by federal law, they have to explain it to you in detail, and if they don't, then don't sign.

reply to post by spliff4020

After reading your response, perhaps your more direct approach would have been better on my part. I was trying to be a little more delicate in saying the same thing as you said, but I can see that yours in much more effective! A star for you.

Originally posted by whoshotJR
If the dollar does a complete collapse getting our of your loans is the least of your worries. Your wife knew what she signed up for yet she still signed the dotted line and that debt is hers.

I agree. I would have liked to go to medical school myself, but I could not afford to, and didnt want to indebt myself for life. Instead, I worked in construction overseas to save up the money to pay cash for a Bachelors degree.

If your wife agreed to pay back all that money it was her choice. Scrimp and save and pay it off early. Doesnt honor mean anything to you at all? Or is honoring your commitments for suckers?

reply to post by Illusionsaregrander

I agree. I would have liked to go to medical school myself, but I could not afford to, and didnt want to indebt myself for life. Instead, I worked in construction overseas to save up the money to pay cash for a Bachelors degree.

Kudos to you. You HAVE acted RESPONSIBLY. If more people in this country were like you, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now.

Originally posted by Xtraeme

So why is it exactly that banking institutions with more gross income than the GDP of a third world country, companies that are critical to the global financial system, can declare bankruptcy and instantly eliminate all responsibility, but a single person who invested years of their life educating themselves, often for the betterment of society (ie/ doctors, scientists, engineers) under almost no circumstance can discharge their student loans?

You are right, we shouldnt bail the banks out either. I invested 8 years of my life working overseas so that I could invest another 6 years of my life educating myself, (and still working while going to school) so that I did not have to accumulate debt at all.

Originally posted by Xtraeme
So, the real question is why do we reward the incompetent and punish the responsible?

Exactly. So why reward the incompetent and punish the responsible? Those of us who might have LOVED to go to college right out of school but did not frivolously sign up for quarter million dollar loans we had no desire to pay back? I would have loved to go to med school, but even after working 8 years and saving it wasnt practical to take on that kind of debt. His wife is not working for the betterment of society. She is working for her own betterment. You think doctors are more valuable than plumbers to society? Go ahead, stop using plumbing and stop seeing a doctor and you see which one you come crawling back to first.

Originally posted by Xtraeme
but we have got to stop letting STUPID people off the hook! I'll be paying student loans for the next 20 years of my life and I'll probably pay 40-50K in interest. And that's fine. I signed up for that and I knew what I was getting in to, but when I see everyone else getting a free ride while I work 100 hour work-weeks (yes, I really do work that much) then I'm going to look for every way I can to cheat this broken, dishonorable system. Why should I play fair when everyone else is gaming the system?

Because we arent all gaming the system. Some of us pay as we go, and if that means we dont get the career of our dreams then thats what it means. You and Ms. Doctor arent smarter than those of us who couldnt afford to go to school and who were unwilling to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars we did not know we could pay back.

You arent more deserving, more valuable, and you sure as hell arent more noble. I am willing to wager you arent even more intelligent. You should play fair because it is exactly people like you, like her, that are all standing around looking at one another saying "well she does it why cant I?" while the rest of us lead honorable lives, not taking on more debt than we can afford, and sometimes working jobs that are "beneath" us intellectually so that we can do the right thing.

You are the very person you are bitching about. Get a mirror.

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus
reply to post by Illusionsaregrander

 

I agree. I would have liked to go to medical school myself, but I could not afford to, and didnt want to indebt myself for life. Instead, I worked in construction overseas to save up the money to pay cash for a Bachelors degree.

Kudos to you. You HAVE acted RESPONSIBLY. If more people in this country were like you, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now.

give me a break. we are in the next great depression because of Banks, not the tax payers.

Your exactly why the country is in such bad shape. You place blame where it shouldnt be placed.

Oh ever read the Constitution by the way ? Your arguments are all moot as the foundation upon which you defend is ILLEGAL. Only congress shall print money and it must be backed by gold.

You act as though this crisis happened because some folks borrowed too much and couldnt make their payments.

Wake up, this crisis was generated on purpose by the Banking families.

reply to post by spliff4020


we live in a 900 square foot home. that small enough for ya ? We own two used cars, a 93 pontiac sunfire and a 99 plymouth voyager. Both over 100k miles and always breaking down.

your clearly biased against doctors, as though theyre all rich. ever heard of malpractice insurance ? continuing education seminars ? taking the boards every 7 yrs is another major expense.

I know people in construction that make more than my wife and they didnt spend 15 years in school and 250k in costs.

While the average Joe is working from age 18-32 doctors are in school or training and making squat. That 14 yr headstart in income is a big bonus most tend to overlook. My wife will be in her 50's before she catches up.

But she didnt go into it to become rich. She loves kids and wants to help them. Her reward is 80 hr weeks, arrogant jerks like you who assume she's rich, and a student loan we can barely afford.

Paying the minimum is all we can afford so we're stuck. And since people arent paying their bills and the goverment is lowering medicare reimbursements we might not even be able to pay that.

And doctors have medical bills too buddy. My MRI left me a nice 1,000 bill because I didnt meet my deductible yet.

Stop blaming doctors for your problems and bills. Place blame where it belongs, the Banks.

reply to post by admriker444


I actually not only have read the Constitution, but carry a nice little pocket sized copy. How does any of that you quoted relate to your wifes debt? And no, I am not blaming the wrong person. I am blaming the right people. People who go to college, and thus presumably arent stupid, who enter into agreements, but then renege on those agreements and leave the "little guys" holding the bag.

This whole economic crisis was not a grand conspiracy. It was a bunch of self serving, incompetent, (though well educated) people who ran companies into the ground by trying to greedily grab all they could and leave the empty bag for someone else to have to explain. Much like you would like to do.

It isnt 'you" personally that is responsible for this mess, of course not. But it is people just like you. That went to college, took on enormous debt, gambled high, and then felt entitled to act unethically and pawn it off on everyone else. Dont gamble what you cant lose. Dont spend what you dont have, and if you do, dont borrow more than you can pay back. They arent difficult rules.

What are your rules? Everyone else should agree to pay my wife for her services if she allows them credit, but we dont have to pay our creditors because we are special? I am sure no matter how you phrase your rules, there is a "but our case is special" clause. I bet if someone promised to buy your house, and took possession of it, you would want your money now wouldnt you?

Originally posted by admriker444
If we make the minimum payment, we will have paid over 600,000 dollars. Thats totally ridiculous in my opinion.

Thomas Edison:

People who will not turn a shovel of dirt on the project, not contribute a pound of material, will collect more money than will the people who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest. Interest is the invention of Satan.


If a moneylender at the time of Christ had lent an ounce of gold at 5% interest compounded, then today the debt owed on this amount would be larger than the mass of the entire planet Earth.

People might say "yes, but I'm not borrowing any money." It turns out that this is irrelevant. Since ALL our money comes into existence as a debt, ALL of our money is earning compound interest to a bank somewhere. And while a few percent per year seems doable it turns out that this is really a problem. I'll explain...


There are three types of equations you find in mathematics:

Type 1: One that grows fast in the beginning, then levels off. This is the type of growth pattern you find in nature. Organisms and populations grow fast in the early stages, then reach a balanced equilibrium and level off.

Type 2: The second kind is a straight line that keeps increasing. This is called a "linear" equation.

Type 3: The third kind is a line that grows slowly in the beginning, but begins to get larger and larger at an accelerating rate. Eventually the graph shoots straight up. This is an "exponential" equation. This kind of growth does not happen in nature, except in 1 very specific circumstance: cancer. Cancer cells grow slowly in the beginning, but begin consuming more and more and their growth rate accelerates until it kills the host.


Guess what kind of equation compound interest is? You guessed it... exponential. So there is eventually a time when the amount owed to banks increases so quickly that it becomes practically impossible to run a business for profit and keep up with all the outstanding bank loans at the same time. Once this starts to happen, a complete breakdown of the economy becomes inevitable. It's like falling past the event horizon of a black hole. Once you do, there's no escape. We're seeing the beginning of this today.


Now you know why depressions and revolutions happen. It's the demon seed in the economy known as compound interest.


Do not forget, anyone, that every dollar you use to buy and sell with is already owed to a bank. When a bank created that dollar as credit, it became money, but when it's paid back to the bank, it disappears. The banks profit from creating money not by spending it, but by fooling the public into thinking they had something to loan you. But the money banks create is less than the money we owe them in return, so there isn't enough money in existence to pay them back. This fact makes it inevitable that people will default on loans, and give the banks the profitable opportunity to foreclose on real property.


So they loan money that comes from nowhere, you can't pay them back enough because they didn't create enough, then they get to take your real property away from you by convincing you that they gave you something. Think about it, did the bank really give you anything? No, it was the people who you gave the bank's newly created credit money to that really gave you something of value: car, home, or college education.


Many people might argue that credit is needed in a modern economy to make things run, and to that I'll say that there are other ways to create credit than going into debt to a privately owned corporation run for profit and owing them more and more as time goes by. Other plans have worked in the past, but the people in power right now don't want you thinking about that...


You might have to start thinking about it anyway. Our lives could depend on it.




[edit on 2-2-2009 by username371]

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus

For SOME, it was. However, they worked 90-100 hours a week, the home was virtually all that they owned, they had no cars, no TV's, no laptops, no video games, no trips to the Caribbean, no college education,......and on and on ad infinitum...

Don't mistake technological or political progress for actions by bankers.

Our progress has been due to our labor, research, and technology. The banks have always parasitically siphoned this prosperity from the people, and contributed nothing of their own.

Originally posted by admriker444
We had no idea that we'd have to pay 600,000 dollars on a 250k loan. The loan officer doesnt give you those kind of details.

The only ripping into you I'll do is to say that I'd have hoped a $250,000 education would have at least taught the basics of calculating compounding interest and ending values for a loan. I'm actually a little disturbed that this figure was unknown to you because a loan officer didn't provide that detail. Unless they concealed the interest rate from your wife (which, if they did a whole other ballgame has started and you would definitely have a legal case for full dismissal of the loan), all the information needed to compute the total amount you would owe was at your disposal in just the base loan value, interest rate, compouding factor, and maximum lifespan of the loan.

Aside from that, I have only two pieces of advice, take them for what they're worth...
1. I hope you have at least taken the time to consolidate the loans and lock into a low fixed interest rate over the past couple of years while the rates have been quite favorable. If the loan is still carrying a floating rate, then you're costing yourself a lot more money every month.
2. If the dollar completely collapses and we move to am 'Amero' currency, it will mean that the dollar has or will become hyperinflated and be essentially worthless. As your wife took out the original loan in dollars, and as I'm almost 100% certain unsecured loans do not have any clauses in them allowing banks to change their demand to payment in forms other than the US dollar, you'd find yourself able to rapidly pay back the loan in full with worthless little green pictures of US presidents.

Finally, I will say that I find our student loan system to be a joke by and large. I think there are some cases where the loans should be treated as any other debt and be dismissable through legitimate bankruptcies. If you have someone who's suffered a massive medical disaster, for example. I also think that just like unemployment benefits and social services, the forebearance/deferment periods for student loans should be extended during major recessions. That said, from what I have read of your situation, if they added more forebearance time to your wife's loan, it would probably be immediately used and ultimately just add more interest onto the loan making you have to pay more anyway.

reply to post by Illusionsaregrander


I can see how you misconstrued what I wrote as a personal statement advocating gaming the system. However if you re-read everything I wrote, top to bottom, I'm confident you'll see I was making the point that people, being people, will for the most part take the easier path if it means receiving a bigger payout – morality be damned. Therefore I was arguing we should address the problem by rewarding people who are financially responsible as well as people who contribute their time towards pursuits that have significant social benefits, especially those that require a large upfront initial investment.

If I had been encouraging people to game the system why would I have written:

So, the real question is why do we reward the incompetent and punish the responsible?

There are a lot of people with big degrees from great universities that are smart in their field, but horrible with money. I think those people, just like the rest of us, need to be held to account. I think everyone needs to pay their dues, as I said over:

Why do we allow a person who doesn't even possess a high school degree to accumulate 10 or 20 credit cards, max out the limit, and then declare bankruptcy with little more than a slap on the wrist?

and over:

Why is it that the government is trying to placate people (through mortgage rate renegotiation, abatement, and subsidies) who purchased homes they couldn't afford?

and over again:

Investment bankers who lied should be forced to return their bonuses and pay other monetary damages. If they can't afford to do it immediately, they can pay it back over time.

There's no reason to be unduly cruel to any of these people, but everyone should pay their debt.

You sound like a responsible person. I'm of the philosophy that a penny saved is a penny earned. I pay on time. I live frugally. I read the small print and because of that I have a good credit rating (834) and extra money in the bank in case of emergency.

However it's completely irrelevant if you, I or anyone else on ATS is or isn't taking advantage of the system. What matters is macro socio-economic behavior. The majority of people look to benefit themselves however they can. Judge those people all you want, but your sense of righteous indignation won't matter much because their value system is based on dramatically different principles from your own.

If you accept that line of thought, then I hope you'll agree with me, that the only way to genuinely create a fair system is to reward people for fair behavior, rather than what we're presently doing, which is the complete opposite. That's why I said:

So this becomes a question of what values do we want to enshrine in our culture? Do we want to devolve to a game of last-man standing, because that's where we're headed. Or do we want to instead encourage people to stand up and be accountable?

Bottom line when one group gets a free-ticket, everyone's gonna want one, and if they don't get it what's the individuals motivation to play by the rules?

My more controversial point that you didn't address head on, but seemed vaguely offended by, was that bankruptcy rules are dramatically more favorable for businesses and individuals that don't have student loans.

It's ridiculous. Why single out students?

I think as a person grows older we can assume a certain bit of financial maturity. Therefore people most likely to fall prey to bad loans are people in their late teens to early-mid twenties. I'd much rather forgive the loan of a kid who couldn't repay his student debt because he couldn't cut it in college and had to drop out; than say cancel the indebtedness of a person who thought their credit card was a magic Pez money dispenser.

Originally posted by ProfEmeritus
reply to post by Illusionsaregrander

 

Kudos to you. You HAVE acted RESPONSIBLY. If more people in this country were like you, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now.

Haha..This country would NOT have ANY DOCTORS if people "acted responsibly"
Listen to you two, tooting your own horns... Who CAN afford to go to medical or dental school in this country without borrowing a s#i#-ton of money???
Your bachelor's degree, what is that getting you these days??? About half of Dentists and doctor's end up AT LEAST 200k in the hole. That has A LOT to do with doctors and dentists having some of the largest PROFESSIONAL suicide rate...go look it up.

[edit on 2-2-2009 by odd1out]

Here's the story of two young doctors. I find the part about them financing their Condo with an ARM very interesting. I wonder how these two made out? Were they able to re-finance...probably not. Did their condo appreciate...probably not.



money.cnn.com...

Tip 1: move out of america to europe where education is free.

Tip 2: move out of america to europe where healthcare is free.

Tip 3: move out of america, does not really matter where you go.