Saturday, June 6, 2015

Why I Defaulted On My Student Loans

This is Lee Siegel, author of five books and writing a memoir about money, here for mobile.nytimes. com.

The gist:


Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face. I could give up what had become my vocation (in my case, being a writer) and take a job that I didn’t want in order to repay the huge debt I had accumulated in college and graduate school. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society. 
I chose life. That is to say, I defaulted on my student loans.
This is where whatever sympathy there might have been falters.
By the end of my sophomore year at a small private liberal arts college, my mother and I had taken out a second loan, my father had declared bankruptcy and my parents had divorced. My mother could no longer afford the tuition that the student loans weren’t covering. I transferred to a state college in New Jersey, closer to home.
Then this.
Forty years after I took out my first student loan, and 30 years after getting my last, the Department of Education is still pursuing the unpaid balance. My mother, who co-signed some of the loans, is dead. The banks that made them have all gone under. I doubt that anyone can even find the promissory notes. The accrued interest, combined with the collection agencies’ opulent fees, is now several times the principal.
He makes good points but he said forty years after the first student loan. Let's say, fifty-eight years of age then, old enough to have wised up, well long enough to have repaid it multiple times, that was long before the real student debt problem developed to the monster it is today. At this late point he's run out of excuses. The odd thing is I see only four comments at the original NYT site, as of this writing, but the link on Twitter to the piece seems to not stop with comments. It does stop loading comments but I was surprised how much people have to say on this subject.

Another thing, writers write. If that is the impulse then there is no stopping it. All that education is just goofing around. His real education is actual writing and he kept making excuses for putting that off. Five books later he's still goofing on himself, on his parents, on us.

3 comments:

bagoh20 said...

You stole your education from your fellow citizens by breaking a promise for selfish hedonistic reasons. What you value and take pride in, what defines you is simply stolen property. Your life is a theft. Pay up or shut up.

I'm Full of Soup said...

I have lib friends who, when convenient, pick and choose which taxes they will ignore if it suits them. One did not file their fed tax returns for about 8 years so they avoided [but not forever] paying several hundred thousand dollars in fed taxes so they could use that money to send their two kids to expensive private colleges [one went to Oberlin.

bagoh20 said...

I defaulted on my student loan back in the early eighties as I was broke and essentially homeless on the street. I eventually got a minimum wage job and then two more part time jobs at the same time. I was still broke, though no longer homeless when I paid it back. Those payments were no treat and kept me broke longer, but I never considered not paying it off as an option. I made a promise. I kept it the best I could,and I never even used my education as a carreer.