Student loan nightmare. Man finds out his student loan balance is 200k after he graduates [View all]

[Liberal_in_LA]

My life and career have been scarred by the naïve exchange I made at college: an education of questionable value for a dangerous amount of debt.


After completing my master’s in 2008, I got a job working as a contractor science policy analyst at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. I was lucky to land a good, bioethics-related job in a very bad economy. Like most people with loans, I started getting repayment letters within six months of leaving school.

I already knew that I had about $70,000 in federal loans from Penn and some federal loans from Conn—but I had no idea I also owed $100,000 in Sallie Mae–serviced private loans.

I was shocked. It turned out that my parents and Conn had had me ink them during my semesterly flurry of document-signing without discussing them with me. Now I was making $50,000 a year in an expensive region with close to $200,000 in loans. I was completely unfamiliar with the—at the time very limited—repayment options. It was a nightmare.

The decisions were unwise, certainly. But while I was in school, my parents were too stressed and embarrassed to take stock of my loans. They wanted me to focus on doing well and felt, as do many middle-class families, that they were in a financial Catch-22: They made too much to get enough aid but not enough to cover the cost of college. Financial aid awards come once per year, giving them little time to plan, and again, they expected similar aid and tuition rates as my brother. They’d lost much of their savings dealing with career challenges and the house fire. They didn’t want to take me out of a school I was heavily invested in. Given the grant funding I received every year from Conn, even if they had pulled me out and sent me to our flagship state school—the University of Wisconsin—the full cost there still could have left me with a fair amount of debt.

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With every bump in salary comes a bump in payments. My current payment is about $1,500 a month—that’s almost 40 percent of my take-home pay—and despite having paid more than $75,000 toward my loans, I still owe about $190,000. Remember, I started with $200,000 in debt. With more than eight years of some of my private loans at 8 and 9 percent interest, and my federal loans at more than 6 percent, Sallie Mae and the federal government have made it very hard to make progress.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2016/01/student_loan_crisis_at_its_ugliest_i_graduated_and_found_out_i_owe_200_000.2.html