I paid off my student loans at the beginning of this month. it took me 16 years and like $65,000, right? If someone else comes in behind me, goes through the same shit that I went through, and then gets their loan forgiven or paid off in a couple of years?
Then I’m happy for them. Good for them, their life is gonna be so much easier without that burden over their head, and happier people means I get to live in a happier society, which means that I get to be happier too.
are you happy for them if they had the ability to pay off their loans and refused to do so so they could travel, eat out, and buy luxury goods? should their luxury lifestyle subsidized by the government?
Because i’ve met plenty of people who have done that instead of pay back their loans. not everyone involved in this is some noble actor who is struggling… many are just assholes who refuse to pay their debts w/ the expectation that is someone else’s job. not that different than kids who go to school and party and then end up dropping out. should their loans be forgiven too?
I paid down my debts too. I lived cheap and prioritized paying them back early and haven’t had any debt for almost 10 years now. at one point I was paying 30-40% of my income to my debt but I knocked down almost 40K in loans in 5 years by doing that and paying down the high interest debt ASAP. I really little empathy for people who have student loans who are traveling, partying, and spending 40% of their paycheck on luxuries while they make minimum or no payment son their debts because they expect someone else to pay it back for them.
Honestly, why would you even care?
In America student loans cannot be discharged unless you have a fatal disease or you die, and sometimes not even death causes your student loans to go away.
If they would rather sacrifice their late 30s and 40s to paying off debt the hard way that they could have paid off the easy way in their 20s, then what does it matter to you?
They’re going to actually pay more back because the interest is going to keep accruing on their debts for all of those years.
You’ve saved yourself a lot of money, you’ve opened the door for yourself to have a higher quality retirement or possibly even an earlier retirement because you’re being financially smart and that’s good on you.
Why would you take the thing that is good on you and make it a bad on somebody else?
because if you fuck yourself over I shouldn’t have to bail you out. your personal choices are not my responsibility. go ahead and party in your 20s and let your debt accrue to 200K. but don’t whine about how unfair your life is when you are living paycheck to paycheck at 40 and have nothing for retirement. you did that to yourself and life is not ‘unfair and cruel’ because you made bad choices.
this is like you getting drunk crashing you car, and demanding someone else pay for the damages, because ‘it’s not your fault’. It is your fault entirely, and nobody else’s. But by a lot of lemmy logic it’s the fault of the alcohol company, the bar owner, and etc. as if they were suppose to prevent you from doing all of that.
personal responsibility exists. college students are not hapless victims of a cruel system. they are making choices and now they are crying that they should not have to face the consequences of the choices. I wanted to go to grad school at my dream school, but it turns out i’d have 60K in debt from going there, so I went to a place where they gave me a scholarship, even if it wasn’t what I ‘truly’ wanted.
But plenty of people make the other choice, and go to schools and get degrees they can’t afford. And further, they do nothing responsible/productive with that degree. I had a friend I stopped interacting with who got a comp sci degree from a top uni, had lots of debt, but now works part time in a bicycle shop for 15/hr and refuses to pay back loans and keeps ranting about how the govt should pay off their debt for them. I stopped interacting with this person once I realized what pathetic joke of a human being they. And they love ranting about how everyone is privledged and should pay more tax and they are so poor and helpless and they have financially abused many people with this routine. They are just a lazy entitled jerk who is throwing away their life because it’s cool be a bicycle hipster and ‘uncool’ to work a computer programming job.
Why in the hell would anyone think this person deserves loan forgiveness? They do not. They should use their degree, get a good job, and pay back their loans themselves.
If this person however, got a degree teaching computer science and was doing something productive to society should they qualify for a partial loan forgiveness, totally.
your mistake is you assume all people are well intention ed an good actors. many are not. many human beings are exploiters, abusers, cheats, and generally shitty people who are seeking to exploit everyone/everything they can for personal gain at the loss of other people. lemmy assumes that all such people are billionaires or something… there are plenty of them who are poor who are like this as well.
I feel like that’s an incredibly harsh analogy, and I don’t really think it’s appropriate.
It implies, relating your analogy back to student loans, that people who are incredibly intelligent and capable and good with technology chose to take a $200,000 PhD in underwater basket weaving and then they don’t want to pay their student loans.
I would say a more apt analogy would be if an orchard owner didn’t take proper care of their orchard and then their neighbors came over and helped them dig out all of the stumps so that they could plant new seeds.
i’m not implying anything dude. there are lots and lots of people in the real world who do stupid crap like that. for real. I have know dozen and dozens of them over the past 20 years.
but you seem to assume all people are fundamentally good by default. they are not. there is a significant percentage of people who you would hire for your orchard, and kill your trees, and then sue you for firing them. why would you want to reward these people?
FWIW I have worked with community non profits much of my adult life. A good 1/3 of the people involved, both providers and clients, are immoral shitheads. I’m not talking analogies here, I’m talking the real world. You have to setup litmus tests, waiting periods, and lots of other mechanisms to prevent those people from getting/access resources, and rooting them out even when they do. a significant part of the job, sadly. One of the reasons many ‘assistance’ programs are so fucking onerous w/ paper work and waiting periods is because so many bad actors seek to exploit them to the detriment of those who actually need the assistance.
and those systems break down when shitty people come in and hoover up all the resources and exploit the generosity of others. and most of those shitty people… don’t need help. they just seek a method to avoid hard work.
I totally agree with this. If someone is opposed to student loan forgiveness because they had to pay theirs off, that person sucks. But if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too, and not as part of opposition, then I am sympathetic.
What if Im against it because “fuck you, you took out the loan knowing full well what it meant”?
Don’t take out a loan that you cannot afford.
How do you know what loan you can afford before you have any income? How do you expect a 17 year old who’s never lived on their own and only financial experience is maybe a part time job to be able to comprehend money on the scale of 10s of thousands of dollars?
Sure you can try to be smart and look at the BLS data to get an estimate of your income after college, but a ton of minutae gets lost when doing so, such as what you’ll make early on in that position vs after 20 years in that position, regional pay differences, etc. that also assumes you’ll graduate and get a job like you researched in your field but maybe you picked a field that’s about to collapse for reasons outside of your control, maybe the field you picked is already saturated with talent, or is experiencing some other significant shift.
I worked with one person who had gone to university to be a biologist just to graduate right after a significant number of university research positions were closed and laid off, leaving him fighting with folks who have 20+ years of experience for a handful of job openings
Student loans are the one type of loan you can’t simply perform a debt to income calculation to determine if you can afford the loan. There’s a million and one things that can happen between when you accept the loan and when you start paying on it that can greatly impact the affordability. The risk of course grows with the cost of education, but so does the potential reward.
I was saving for college and aware of the costs from the age of 14. That’s why I got a job at 15.
It was pretty easy to understand. They showed me a piece of paper with all the numbers. Basic mathematics.
The issue is that people ‘follow their passions’ and then later find out there are no liveage wage jobs in those areas, and act outraged and like life is unfair. But… if you need a job after school that pays a certain amount… well you need to plan for that too.
Your friend went into a field were jobs are scare and difficult to get even good times and you often need a masters or better in any science field to get an entry level position. His lack of research is his own fault. Not anyone else’s. Nobody is owed a job inbiology just because they studied it, and most people who get those jobs go to top programs and are top performers.
Your friend needs to get a job in an office, pushing papers, like vast majority of us. Those are the jobs that are available. Take their bio dataset skills, and join a marketing firm, like the rest of us.
Sorry, I just have no empathy for the tons of people who get an edcuation, then throw it all away because they didn’t get the dream job they think they are owed who actively refuse to apply to jobs that are ‘below’ them. FWIW I have a brother who is in this rut right now. He refuses to get jobs that are ‘below’ him so he has been unemployed for 3 years now. He’s a prideful idiot.
I went to an ivy league school and my first job was pushing papers because it was the first job I could get. And I built up my job skills and my career. I didn’t sit around living at home for months/years whining about how there are ‘no good jobs’. I got to work and started paying off my loans. I have zero empathy for the people who sit around and refuse to work because they feel it is ‘below’ them to work outside of a certain field/industry or income level.
