Gen Xer got $250K in student loans forgiven after decades of payments There can’t be a single person on either side that thinks this is ok. If this story is accurate it’s waaaay over the top. The bold is what happens when you have no moral hazard. Beyond financial goals, Lambdin said the relief was also allowing him the freedom to pursue some of his long-term dreams, including taking a sabbatical to study with his meditation teacher in India. That account adjustment led to a letter Lambdin received on January 31, reviewed by BI, from his student-loan servicer Aidvantage. It said: "Congratulations! The Biden-Harris Administration has forgiven your federal student loan(s) listed below with Aidvantage in full." For Lambdin, that letter meant his $249,255 outstanding student-loan balance was effectively wiped out.
Not enough information to know if I'm ok with it or not. How much did he originally borrow? How much has he paid back?
If this guy was like me and paid back his loan plus a down payment on a yacht before the forgiveness, I have no problem. I have no info other than he graduated in 1998 and paid for “decades.” But I suspect he likely did pay a handsome premium during that time. My two repays returned those enormous profits in a single decade. Basically, if you take longer than 10 years, you are working toward paying Double+ the original loan. At 10 years, you still end up paying in the 20-40% range. 15 years will get you to 50%+/-, 20 years is a virtual 100%+ lock. Depending on the amount, rate, payment amount and count, he could be anywhere on the continuum. The pertinent details are missing and it is unclear to me in which way I am supposed to be all indignant.
LMAO… That account adjustment led to a letter Lambdin received on January 31, reviewed by BI, from his student-loan servicer Aidvantage. It said: "Congratulations! The Biden-Harris Administration has forgiven your federal student loan(s) listed below with Aidvantage in full." No, dumb ass. The American people forgave his loans.
ha. Pot meet kettle. So glad he now gets to pursue meditation in India. Hopefully he leaves before he casts his vote. Fiscal Responsibility ewwww. You’re a bright guy. Perfect example of something deep down you know is rediculous but your ideology won’t allow you to publicly admit it. It’s ok. Intellectual honesty is honesty in the acquisition, analysis, and transmission of ideas. A person is being intellectually honest when he or she, knowing the truth, states that truth
Joel Lambdin finished graduate school in 1998 — but as a professional musician, he was hardly making enough money to pay off his student loans and other bills
True, though it was simply added to the tab. Don’t worry about that though. Our kids and grandkids got us.
Still don’t know. “Hardly making enough to pay” is an emotional way to say he was paying. So what was the loan amount and how much did he pay? That one-time adjustment referenced in the article only worked for people who had made 20 or more years of payments.
appreciate and applaud the desire to stay impartial until more data. Keep being consistent with that. Anyone of sound mind and healthy body has no business getting their 249,000 debt forgiven unless they contribute in civil service which he states he has not. He’s just lazy and didn’t want change jobs and make more to pay it back. Made a decision to take on debt to learn to play an instrument eyes wide open. Shameful that debt was transferred to others.
I agree. But you go into forebearance and make barely the minimum and string it out should hardly be an excuse for debt transfer to others who will pay it
He completed BM and MM degrees at University of North Carolina School of the Arts In 1998. 1998 tuition was $1,100 per semester including fees. Make of that what you will. My guess is he borrowed $20k and racked up $220k in interest which is 7% for 35 years. All just a guess. https://cashier.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/259/2016/05/AY-1998-99-and-summer-1999.pdf
Something doesn't add up . . . And, according to Federal Student Aid, federal borrowers who are not currently enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan can still benefit from this adjustment as long as they have made at least 20 years of qualifying payments. And yet . . . It lets the department evaluate borrowers' accounts and update payment progress toward forgiveness on income-driven repayment plans and Public Service Loan Forgiveness Perhaps this individual made 20 yrs of qualifying payments. If that's the case, why are folks belly-aching over this? As another poster noted, the tuition at NC SoA was not so exorbitant back when this person went to school. I have a hard time understanding how the loan ballooned to 250k, unless he took out a loan and then went to grad school w/o documenting things with the lending agency (this happens all too frequently for grad students). Subsidized loans will refrain from accruing interest during further study. Maybe the loans were unsub, but I wonder if/how the gov could possibly forgive those. I had a private loan taken out by my Mom during undergrad. It was 2k and by the time I graduated with my masters, it was 4k. Same could be true for someone who received a 25k loan, where it ballooned to 50k. This case, however, is extreme. I can't imagine too many scenarios where a person borrows 200k, let alone 250. Only example I can think of is Berklee CoM, which comes with a tuition rate of more than 80k/year.
Forbearance doesn’t count toward your tally. The “pause” did indeed count. We could debate whether that was OK or not, I can understand a negative attitude towards that one. In forbearance interest accrues and then is capitalized when you exit. My total speculation is that is how it got to an absurd quarter million. 6% interest on not a lot in forbearance will add up fast. Just accrued interest while on the standard four-year path makes your principal a LOT more before you make the first payment. And forbearance on a lot obviously adds up to a lot of interest. You CAN pay your interest first, before it capitalizes, but in my day it was a lump sum, and payments still continued. So you’d have to pay like $13K or so on $50K as a graduate. In my case, if I could have come up with a $13K check I would have just paid tuition, not get a loan. So I feel like that sounds like a good philosophical option but also doubt that reality matches up for the vast majority. So this guy may have not paid his loan and more, I suppose. My own experience and others I know suggest that is next to impossible but I’d still need to know his specific details. But again, the one-time adjustment referenced would require 20+ years of actual payments. I am def side-eyeing the lack of these details. I can’t tell which side of this debate is being hidden from view. If it were me as the payer, I’d def want everyone to know I didn’t get a $250K loan and barely paid any back. I’d scream that it was $50K, I paid $100K, and still owed $250K after 25 years (and obviously I just invented those specifics, based roughly on my own two paid-in-full loans.) I have a third loan (grad school) now that passed the original amount about 15 months ago, still about 27 to go, all lender gravy.) When it is all said and done I will have paid the grand total of my loans about three times over, and that is with the much friendlier terms of the SAVE program. But that just started late last year. If I were trying to inflame forgiveness foes I would omit all that and let everyone assume this guy got a quarter million dollars to do on-site Original Yoga and practice the pan flute. Even “professional musician” is oddly unspecific. That could be almost anything. Is he a trained classical pianist teaching inner city kids to express their emotions through music instead of joining gangs? Does he have a keyboard and does a wedding every few weeks when the PlayStation account needs to be refreshed? Adding in going to his “meditation coach” in India or wherever it was is super specific given all the other vagueness.
