Giving Up Paying Off $186,000 Student Loan Debt

To me, this is the flip side of the "predatory lending" coin: People who did it to themselves. I'm not even sure what the point of the article is supposed to be, if not a warning against financial irresponsibility.<p>This person made mistakes. Yeah, we all do that, and some people's have worse consequences than others, but we're all pretty much stuck with them. In this case, someone went to law school, made some very contradictory life decisions (having kids -- and failing to prevent having more -- kind of takes away whatever victim angle might have been there), realized they were doing <i>very</i> poorly but kept going anyway, and then... for years and years... did not pursue a career that could possibly have any chance of addressing the debt before the rates ballooned.<p>So we end up with someone who screwed up, screwed up some more, and then decided she'd screwed up so much that she's going to screw up again, by just not even trying to address the negative results of the previous screwups.<p>Not very responsible, in my opinion, and certainly not a good lesson to pass on to your kids (along with your debt, because guess where that's going when you die, since you've decided not to pay it off?).<p>I guess I'm still just not sure what the article is going for.

&#62; <i>She graduated in 1994 with more than $100,000 of debt. Within three years, she had one daughter, a surprise set of twins, and was earning less than $50,000 per year.</i><p>3 kids while earning &#60; $50k and trying to pay off &#62; $100k in debt? If that's not the embodiment of America's dire lack of financial and family planning skills, then I don't know what is.<p>&#62; <i>"I’ve stressed to my daughter the importance of not borrowing any money."</i><p>Maybe she should just teach them to make responsible decisions instead? Borrowing money can be the right thing to do, but you need to carefully measure the costs and benefits.<p>Also, it would help not to have 3 kids when you're up to your ears in debt and only earning enough money to support yourself.

This story is mostly about TERRIBLE money management, not the cost of education. Her parents paid for her undergrad in full and she got a full scholarship to law school. So really, none of this money went directly to education.<p>Apparently she couldn't work and focus on school at the same time, so she started taking out loans to cover living expenses. She took out $26k in federal loans each year (starting in 1994) to cover these expenses. Factoring in inflation, that would be like taking out a loan for nearly $41k/year in 2013 dollars. I think it's a hard argument to say that was even close to reasonable.<p>The article doesn't say how long she was in school, but if I'm doing the math right, it took her at least three years (isn't that a long time for a full time law student with no other job?).<p>Then, after school while she's studying for the BAR, she takes out another $20k in private loans to cover living expenses ($31k in 2013 dollars).<p>She screwed herself, plain and simple.

I have seen a lot of these articles on student debt, and they use the most bizarrely unsympathetic subjects. The meat of this article is not that student loans are bad, but rather that you shouldn't go to law school (or any graduate program, in my opinion), without first deciding what you want to do and your priorities in life. It's way too common to see people watch a lot of Law &#38; Order and go straight through from college (my wife calls them "K-JD's") and then realize that $200k of debt is a lot and they really don't like working 12-14 hours a day at the beck and call of clients. Your first 80 hour work week sleeping with your Blackberry under your pillow is a shock, and you should really get it out of the way and decide if you're okay with it before you're $200k in the hole.

Wow. She can cry me a damn river.<p>She HAS a degree. She HAD a 6 figure job that she quit because it was "too hard" She still HAS debt.<p>Me? That's right. Injured, under Voc rehab. I'm going to a 2 bit state school (drafting, cad). Right now, I can't afford the GAS to get to and from school. Voc rehab (state agency) will pay for it, only after a 6 week wait. And I don't have the money.<p>What I'd need is a few hundred to get to and fro school. Food would he nice, but soup kitchens provide that. I can sleep in my car to reduce trips.<p>Where's the help for people like me?

If she had a full tuition scholarship how did it cost $26k a year to live in the '90s? I started college in 2005 and could get by spending $11k to $15k a year for rent, food, books, and such. It ought to have cost even less in the '90s... (Of course I did without a car for nearly 4 years and lived in cheap apartments and such, but that seems pretty normal. And I'm pretty sure my cost of living wasn't even as frugal as some.)

Son of a bitch that is a lot of debt. It stresses me out just reading about it. I guess few people do the math correctly when they go get a degree.<p>Can anyone here who opted to take a student loan for a technical degree speak to whether it is daunting to them or they are comfortable with the trade?

This is a pretty fluffy article. It says she borrowed $26k/year during law school, even though she was on a scholarship with tuition paid, and took out another $20k in private loans.<p>Hard to judge anything just based on this article, but I'd have to say that if you have a full tuition scholarship and still need to take on 100k in debt you might want to rethink it. Also she had 3 children within 3 years of graduating, which would make it impossible to pay off anything unless you get a much higher paid job.<p>A friend of mine and his wife took out something in the neighborhood of 100k/each, so they have(or had, been paying a bit now) 200k of student loan debt recently. I think it was a bit of a bad investment, since I think they could have gone to cheaper schools, however they stayed in NYC and make enough for this.<p>Short story: If you want to take on a big student debt, paying it off is going to require you to go where the high paying jobs are. If you want to raise a family and work for the state, don't take on the debt, your life will be easier.

I'm not sure what sort of choice she has, besides not working again. You can't clear student loan debt through bankruptcy, so unless she decides to not work again, I'm not sure what her options are to never pay off the debt. Maybe this is a negotiation tactic with the debtors to pay a fraction of the loan instead?

I thought this article was going to be somewhat insightful as to another option for me, as, like many others, I have quite a bit of student loans. Including interest, I owe about $250k (BS and MS). I don't regret going to the school I went to - the experience and what I went through there was life changing for me; however, it does put a severe stranglehold on what I am actually able to do in life right now. I am basically forced to work for others at a decent salary (which I am certainly very fortunate and thankful I'm in the software engineering field) instead of being able to completely set off on my own.

I'm sure we can all pick this apart and talk about all the bad decisions she's made. The fact that she'd allow an article to be written about her regarding this just shows that she's certainly not the sharpest tool in the shed. The only thing I would ask is if she's not going to pay for her education, go ahead and take down that law degree that your private practice is established on and find some other kind of work. I know it sounds ridiculous, but so does her whole story. Not going to pay for it? Don't use it. You can't have it both ways.

If you "give up," your lenders will eventually garnish your wages anyway. Better to pay what you owe voluntarily than have the choice of how much and how long to be taken away from you.

One of the great advantages of third world countries - good education is cheap. A student at a top rated engineering school (iit/nit) in India pays less than ~$2k/year in tution, and about ~$200/month in other expenses. Sure, even this is not affordable to everyone without loans, but the salaries these people draw make the ROI tremendous. No wonder these schools are so hard to get into.

Where exactly is the guy who fathered these three children? Is he at least paying child support or am I missing a chunk of this story? It seems like with that money she would have been able to get the loans paid with her own money.<p>The article sounds like bad career planning given the missing or unwanted partner.

Chapter 13 bankruptcy is practically made for her case: They can change the monthly payment amount to something possible to pay.<p>Student loans have a high standard, but not an impossible one.

I suspect this is a possible case incomplete journalism.