People like this highlight the crucial need for financial literacy.
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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Everybody in the comments like, “I LOVE INTEREST RATES!!!”
Completely missing the point here.
The system is meant to keep you poor and enslaved.
Similar to making the minimum payment on your credit card.
The real question is why does the government penalize citizens for becoming more productive and educated and thus contributing more to society? In most European countries university students automatically receive government stipends and pay very little, if any, tuition. Unlike the US these countries value education and while we’re at it, health care. Why do we have government subsidies for billion dollar corporations but not students? Oh, right crony capitalism…students need better lobbyists if they wanna stop getting screwed over by the government.
I don’t understand why the government should profit off of higher education.
You can be financially literate and agree with this statement…
Hey guys…. We all understand what interest rates are. The interest on education (a service that should be free) is still absurd.
We can do the math. But this isn’t math that should exist.
If they don’t see the issue, then I guess they’d be happy to lend me money and I’ll pay back the same amount in 20 years.
But in this case, questioning the value of the education they received is fair. If they have a graduate degree but don’t understand interest, it seems to be a low quality education.
ah… another Sallie Mae victim. I felt that pain back in 2011. I pulled out my entire 401K to pay off my $18,000 loan that grew to $23,000 after 4 years of making the minimum monthly payments (yes, Sallie Mae told people the minimum payment was below the interest accrued per month and lied on their statements, showing an incorrect number).
This should never be an option to happen in the first place though.
I don’t get why this is some kind of leftist view or opinion either. You shouldn’t need a lawyer and reading the fine print on agreements. You should be able to have good faith agreements without some kind of trickery or malicious behavior like this that traps people into some kind of eternal debt or problems if they don’t do this one little trick that isn’t made clear.
Things like this are exactly why people form governments and law, so that the public has a say on the fairness of transactions and contracts. When that gets abused, society gets pissed off and overthrow the systems.
In order to buy a house, car or even agree to the terms of service of most software today you would need a legal degree of comprehension and days of reading just to look over the agreement, much less comprehend then understand the consequences of the thousands of pages of information you’re agreeing to with a signature.
This is fucking bullshit and everyone knows it. This isn’t acceptable. It’s parasitic and fraudulent at best, malicious and entrapment in practice.
The stupid part about this kind of stuff is the States, for some reason, is the only country on the planet as far as I know that sets up agreements like this to suck the wealth and gains out of the population only to then complain and blame that very population for being too poor to buy homes and raise a family and have kids.
This is fucking stupid.
Making money off the education of the young people that will inhabit this country is such a shame, too many brain washed bootlickers just can’t see it.
I suggest cancelling credentialism first
Colleges/universities are ridiculously overpriced
Remove government loans all together and they will have to reduce prices
I personally feel all credit payments should be capped to at least 2x the principal. Also minimum payments should be required to cover some of the principal. 20% of the US adult population is literally illiterate. I’m sure far fewer understand amortization. It shouldn’t be legal to pray upon people like this. These are college grads, they should have known better. If we can afford to make private equity deferred interest tax credits a priority, student debt should be forgiven for low and middle income citizens.
This is strange to me. I made considerably smaller payments on my student loans and I saw them go down until I finally paid them off. Yes, there was money that was wasted on paying interest, but this is just insane! I don’t know what I did differently or what they are doing differently.
But, why is the minimum payment set up this way? I think we all know the answer to that. Education loans should be zero or super low interest if they are to exist at all. Many developed countries are able to provide free low cost education where you basically just pay for books because an educated populace is good for the country.
With an 8.3% interest rate, if they had paid $860 per month, the loan would have been paid off in 10 years. However, if they had paid $570 per month, it would have been paid off by now.
The crazy part is you know that you are getting screwed and you still pay them. Fk Them!
We need financial literacy… but at the same time, write this off. I can’t speak for people who graduated 23 years ago (2002), but I know a bunch of people who graduated in 07-09, right as the housing crisis took off. They didn’t get great jobs out of university and didn’t have the means of making larger payments.
I don’t like the term “student loan cancellation”, because I absolutely don’t support writing it off to fresh grads. It’s stuff like this, and the worse ones. The ones who don’t make enough gross income to pay off the fucking interest. They just get deeper in debt, and they can’t discharge it. They’ll never afford anything nice, and they’ll never be able to pass anything of value to children. (they probably shouldn’t be having children, but that’s a different issue)
Call it “retroactive interest reduction”.If my math is way out please correct me, but it seems like what this is describing would be a loan at 8.37% interest. So retroactively change the terms to 6.75%, and the loan is gone. Loan company gets a deduction for overstated interest in prior years, recipient pays back the tax benefit.
It special school without mathematics lessons?
Because if you make a choice you have to deal with the consequences
Ah yes I also take out loans without a clue about how they will be repaid or how long it will take.
This is bcuz
#nMbErS hArD
$500 x 276 mos (**23** years) is not $120k.
But $500 for **20** years sounds like 120k.
Oh yeah, remember during the pandemic.. **those 3 years** you weren’t **”required”** to repay your student loan(s)?
Ok say you needed a brief loan of $100, but I and want 10% interest by months end. **SO** after thirty days, you should bring me $110 ; we’d be square and that concludes our business.
OR** you can paying me just the $10 interest, yet your balance will remain stuck at $100 and we’d be back where we started. INSTEAD you show up and hand me just $6. So I tack the missing $4 owed… onto your balance, now becoming $104, again subject to 10% due after thirty days.
You now have $104 loan balance at 10% interest. Paying me $114.40 when due, which would conclude our business OR just make the $10.40 interest payment, keep the $104 in play, so on and so on..
Understand?
So during the pandemic, you didn’t make a payment of **a single penny for THREE YEARS**. What did you think was going to happen?
It seems as though neither you or your spouse majored in any subject, which requires some familiarity of basic math.
WORD TO THE WISE, regardless if you are dem or rep : Don’t you EVER TRUST a single politician, **even one** you like, agree with & perhaps voted for.
(Case in point). Biden made it a talking point during the 2020 campaign about student debt problem. I bet you were **convinced that by voting biden, that he would repay you** by erasing your student loan debts. All he needs to do is wave some magic wand like POOF!, Right? Meanwhile your balance from the time your non-payment began … **nearly doubled**. A sizable monetary loss you suffer, and life setback you now endure.
ALL THIS not because you like biden, or that you agree with biden, you support biden, or even because you voted for biden.
This happened to you… because you **trusted** a politician, and believed a single word. You belief said politician so much, that you actually risked jeopardizing your own personal finances, hoping they would come thru and would deliver you a miracle. Even if somehow that gamble DID pay off, which it didn’t btw, then it’d still be considered a foolish move on your part.
It’s completely normal for everybody to have a favorite politician. But **only a fool** would EVER trust a politician.
I found the people with arts degrees
Because you took a loan and are obligated to pay it back. Seems to be the terms of said agreement. Just saying 🫠
That might not be the point.
The real problem is interest but at face value they are asking a question that has nothing to do with the premise.
Arguments can be made both ways for why student loans should or shouldn’t be able to be cancelled none of those are have to do with Op making minimum payments and not understanding compounding interest.
I mean you did your research, understood the terms and financial blue print, and found the deal agreeable. Explain to me why you suddenly have a problem now.
And MAYBE some consumer protections.
The biggest problem is the predation. How many people that left college with 70k or more debt could’ve gotten a $1k loan from a bank at the time they got the student loan? My guess is very few.
Then there is no oversight whatsoever. Oh you borrowed 50k from us to get a degree in liberal arts to pursue your dream of opening a muffin shop? We can’t wait to see you succeed!
Well I understand. I paid for two degrees one with student loan one out of pocket. my degrees paid for themselves over time.
to stop the debt set limits on what degrees get loans. I know that sounds unfair however, a person who never went college but has a skill that makes money should not have to pay someone else’s student loan debt.
it actually hurts everyone and their kids for years.
if we paid the national debt down, does anyone know how rich Americans would become? All Americans not just the top?
it not even hard to do. No new taxes or raised old taxes: Just have everyone pay what they actually owe. No breaks for not paying.
Also if we cut aid for just a few years could pay it off then be able to help world.
Student loan debt shouldn’t be canceled. But interest shouldn’t exist on the loans.