More Tips on Student Loans
What you should know before the debt gets you down.
June 30, 2009 — -- To parents and students alike, I have one, simple piece of advice when it comes to borrowing for college: Pay attention.
It's clear to me from the volume of e-mail I received over the past week that too many college loan borrowers give too little consideration to the implications of signing on the dotted line.
Consider these snippets from a few of the e-mails I received:- I have been paying my loans for 9 years, yet due to the interest accumulated, my loan keeps growing. It has gone from 23K to 38K.
- So in 1999 I owed $42,000 and today in 2009 I owe $170,000.
- That's a total of 6 loans that we are currently making payments on. We don't make a lot and it starting to take a toll on our financials.
- Now the government says I owe them a total of $48,159.
- I've had to keep deferring repayment for years, so now I face payments of $275 a month for a 25 year term.
The e-mails came in response to a column I wrote last week outlining the new federal Income Based Repayment plan designed to help former students struggling to pay back college loans on modest salaries.
In some cases, my unsympathetic response boiled down to this: That's why they call them loans; they have to be paid back.
True, in many cases, that's harsh. The truth is I do sympathize with those who need to borrow money to finance the outrageous cost of higher education in this country.
I graduated from college with my own student loan debt (since paid off), and now my wife and I are paying down the money she borrowed to attend graduate school a few years ago. So I know what it's like make a monthly student-loan payment.
But what was clear to me in reading more than three dozen e-mails about college-loan debt is that many borrowers – both students and parents – do not pay attention to the details of borrowing to finance a college education. Then a few years down the road they find themselves in a bind.
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