Garnishing SS
 

Ouch!




Carl

Student loan has to be repaid.

Generally 15% per month is the amount taken for student loans, old tax debts, etc.

Of course, but the system is fucked. The whole educational system in this country is fucked sideways...but I suspect you and I might differ a smidgen regarding the primary causes.

Yes, it is.

Dave

Agreed. Student loan rates are way higher than mortgage rates with no reliable mechanism in place for collections.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemc...5-school-year/

And quite frankly even some professors are beginning to state that a university degree is not worth the cost. That is because they are simply turning out trained seals for business, not teaching people how to think.

One of the worst problems is that student loan paper is bought and sold like every other kind of loan paper. Sometimes the providers are decent, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they don't last in the business very long.

My niece is a PhD classics professor...classics in Latin and Greek. She's got a ton of loan debt from the years it took to get her PhD. When she got her state university job, she enrolled right away in the federal student loan forgiveness program and has spent 7 years working there to fulfill the 10 year requirement of employment in a state funded institution, for full loan forgiveness. Her paper has been sold and bought and sold 5 times in 7 years. This spring she received notice from the current lender that because she failed to fill out a renewal form three years ago, she is no longer enrolled in the forgiveness program. I believe her when she says she never received any paperwork from the lender at that time...the lender that allegedly send the form went belly up and there is no way to contest it. The lenders have paperwork obligations to the government to maintain their standing...some get it done, some don't. So she's screwed and stuck in her current position. She's had opportunities to move on to tier one classics programs in several private universities...and now she can't for another decade. And she can't afford the legal costs to take it to court.

The US student loan aid system is shit all the way around.

A thinking populace is dangerous to the powers that be. The student revolt of the late 60s/early 70s demonstrated this, and our public education system has been going downhill since.

I am sorry about what happened to your niece. Apparently there are some
unscrupulous %^&*# hustling the student loan system.

I have great respect for people in the classics. Every now and then I read a
little Latin just to reconnect and keep the old brain active.

And with search engines, information is at their finger tips so the quest for knowledge is a lost pursuit. One of my customers said it best sarcastically, "we don't want answers, we want solutions". Skip the why and the what and go directly to how.

We've had the opportunity to sit in on a few of her classes in the last couple of years. She's an amazing teacher and the extent of her study shows in her presentation.

Ike, sounds like the sort of problem your niece might take to her congressperson. Used to be they loved to do 'constituent service' and set bureaucratic wrongs right. Created great goodwill in the district. But maybe not so important in these gerrymandered, corporate-funded times. Still, costs nothing to try.

Gee... When one borrows money one is expected to pay it back. Who'd a thunk it? 😏

She's tried a number of things without much success. She's in WV and I believe she's still waiting for a response from Nick Joe Rahall. And I suspect if you're a resident of West Virginia you want to expect your rep in Congress will have a name like "Nick Joe".

C'mon. "Nick Joe?" Really?:p Well...coulda been Jim-Bob or John-Boy, I suppose.

I think we all agree with you in general Barbara. I would hope nobody's in favor of greedmongering banksters being able to garnish anybody's SS for their commercial debt screw ups.

Student loan forgiveness? Why should the loan be forgiven any more than a car or mortgage?

In this case, Congress did this to benefit state universities. It supplements salary, thus making their lower salary more competitive with private schools. The rationale is that state school students benefit from better profs.

I don't know if this deal is still available, but when the blonde got her BA in education (back when your diploma was chiseled into a piece of rock), her school loan, which was probably only 1500 bucks or so, was forgiven because she taught in what was identified as a financially disadvantaged neighborhood, in an elementary school on Chicago's west side for, I'm pretty sure, 5 years.

Seems to me it oughta be.

The "state school" identifier thing is interesting. There are a lot of state schools that don't need any help in attracting top professors. UC-Berkely, Michigan, Illinois, North Carolina, Ga Tech, Cal Poly, come immediately to mind.

I agree with that.

However I also feel that higher education is way way way too expensive here in the US. It's about four times (adjusted for inflation) as much as it was when I went to college in the late sixties. If Cuba can afford to send their kids to college for free, we sure as Hell can do better here.

Sure we can. But I'm not inclined to pay for some deadbeats education when I cannot afford college myself. (and I'm already paying taxes to support the universities)

When my oldest son graduated in 1996 he had 30K in student loan debt and he was too broke to even buy a decent set of clothes to go on job interviews, let alone work clothes if he got the job. He had two pairs of jeans both of which had holes in them.

So he went down to the various recruiting offices in town. They didn't mind how he was dressed.

It turned out that the Army had the best student loan repayment program so he joined up and they paid off his loans plus gave him work clothes. The deal was they paid 1/3 at the end of each year of honorable service, so it took three years to pay it off. The student loan people apparently didn't like the Army's payment plan so they hassled him the whole three years but he just told them they would have to deal with the Army.

So in the end it got paid in full, but the government still managed to get a pound of flesh because they reported those payments as income to him, and since he was in the 15% bracket the net result was that he it cost him 15% out of his pocket and his net gain was only 85%, not 100%, which of course the recruiting office doesn't tell you when you sign up.

When I hear these horror stories it makes me glad that I never bothered with university.

I hear the horror stories but there is no sympathy here. When they signed their name on the loan papers, they should have been well aware of what they were getting themselves into.

As someone said earlier, we don't get a break on car loans or house mortgages....

As for educators who pay back by working in low income areas..... If that is the deal they made then good for them. The point is..... When you make a deal and sign your name to the contract.... You are obligated to follow through.

From what I have read these private lenders are really good at providing misleading information to applicants. Mind you I take everything a banker tells mme with a large portion of salt.

All lenders are good at misleading information. That's why it is so important to read and understand the contract before putting your signature on it.

That makes me chuckle because when we signed the six inch stack of paper at the title company taking out the mortgage on this house I think I would have had the mortgage paid before I finished reading it all.:)

It seems everything has to be done the hard way here. I had writer's cramp before I gat it all signed. As well I would have had to get Don to translate the legalese for me.

I would not hesitate to have a lawyer look over a contract if I didn't feel confident that I understood it.

I don't find those six inch stacks too intimidating. But, I write gov contracts as part of my job so maybe my viewpoint is a bit skewed. 😉

So let's just pidgeonhole anybody who's participating in the higher education loan forgiveness program as a deadbeat. Really???????

Maybe we should pidgeonhole anybody who takes their full legal compliment of tax deductions as a deadbeat. Maybe we should pidgeonhole anybody who takes their social security every month as a deadbeat.

Of course you're paying taxes to support public education. Unless maybe you don't feel you should pay taxes to support public education...on all levels available to Americans who pay taxes to support your kids in school. Like me and the blonde, who did not have children, and have been paying for the public education of everybody else's children (perhaps yours as well) from K through PhD for the past 50 years.

Tell ya what I'm not inclined to do regarding education. I'm not inclined to contribute a penny of my tax dollars for somebody else's kid's religious indoctrination on their school vouchers. You for that? Eh?

I went to college for an AAS in network engineering a few years back. I should have my student loans paid off this year. I'm not sure why I did it. Probably just so I could say I went to college. I still work for the same company that I was working for then and my job has absolutely nothing to do with computers.

I put myself through undergraduate school working three part time jobs. Not easy but I managed but would not recommend it to others. And my brother would have helped me if I needed it. I was fortunate to have had help from the state in graduate school though and without it, I would not have been able to manage.

If we tax payers do not fund public education at all levels, we would be handing out a lot more H1B's.

She was railroaded by a shitbag loan acquisition company that didn't do it's government prescribed paperwork like they were supposed to, and then took their bonuses and folded like a bad poker hand. And now she's paying for it. And she's one of thousands who were hung out to dry like this in a system that is not monitored as it should be by the government. Why? Like it's become with almost everything in this country...nobody wants to pay for what it costs. It's the greatest country in the world, it's just not worth paying for.

So...if you don't give a shit in your hat about the fact that my niece, and so many other college professors, who have been responsibly paying their monthly nut on their school loans for years, have been teaching in circumstances less than ideal as their part of the contract for years, and then got fucked with their pants on for it...then you don't.

Ain't it the truth? Ask any direct service mental health professional how much of what they learned in grad school is actually applied in the work they do and they'll tell you...about 5, maybe 10 percent. The only thing I ever really used regularly was how to use the DSM as a diagnostic tool. As far as actual therapeutic interventions I learned about in grad school...nothing really.

Potter never called your kid a deadbeat Ike.

I never said he called my niece a deadbeat. Seems to me his post, which you noted, was a general statement. In fact it was a broad brush stroke and it rubbed me the wrong way. We all pay for all sorts of shit. Sometimes it comes back to us, sometimes it doesn't. But I got the distinct impression that he doesn't look favorably on those who have utilized the student loan program. If he wants to clarify what he was talking about, and I'm wrong about it...I'll be happy to make amends for it.

Ike, sounds like your niece learned that life ain't always fair and that's too bad. I'll bet everyone here has a hard luck story they could tell and ya know what..... After we've all told our hard luck stories.... Life still won't be fair.

I never said I "don't give a shit" .... I stated that there will be no sympathy from me....

By the way.... The deal your niece made was nice and all.... But there are teachers who have worked in less than ideal situations for years because of their commitment and dedication to the profession sans any deal to forgive their loans. Now I'm sure your niece is committed and dedicated, but would she have chosen that teaching situation if not for the deal made?

Yep. It's not like there are classics openings at any universities anymore. She took a job in a small state school, achieved tenure, and made a name for herself. And she's had offers that one only gets when they've shown themselves to be academically, uh...special, I guess. Most of the people she graduated from the U of Washington program have been stuck on jobs for a year or two on grants that various colleges have landed. And then the grant money's gone and the job's gone and they're back at home living with mom and dad.

The point is...she, and hundreds of others, from what I have been able to gather, have been screwed by loan paper banksters focused on the student loan market. Just like all of us were screwed by the loan paper banksters in 2008. Maybe because they're college professors and there aren't that many of them, nobody's gonna be going out to occupy anything on their behalf. But it's not really any different from the crap that loan acquisition and derivative investment people pulled on us 6 years ago. Seems to me that a lot of us...even on the left...just have a bug up their ass for educators these days. If you say you don't...OK then, you don't.

I got nothing against educators. But there is nothing special about getting screwed in life. It happens. Hopefully your niece is mature enough to assess her situation, deal with the circumstances and move on.

I'm apparently more pissed off than she is. Reckon is this indifferent attitude you have toward everybody getting screwed in life by the rich, powerful, and otherwise predatory keeps your blood pressure down, eh? Myself...I'm from the payback is a mother, and the "you can stand me up at the gates of hell but I won't back down" schools.

When I took out a mortgage in Quebec it was in the presence of a Notary Public who explained that his function was to represent the law. He explained that it was his duty to see that both sides were represented fairly and honestly.

Then when my job took me to Ottawa we found a property we liked. We went to Royal Bank (who we had been with for years) gave them the property address and the asking price. Royal called us a week later and asked to come down to the bank. The mortgage agreement was maybe five pages long and we only had to sign in one place. There was none of that title insurance crap where the title company takes $320 of the $400 we paid as there commission here, in fact there are no title companies, that is a racket.

I swear that they couuld screw up the Lord's Prayer here.