To me, this is the flip side of the "predatory lending" coin: People who did it to themselves. I'm not even sure what the point of the article is supposed to be, if not a warning against financial irresponsibility.
This person made mistakes. Yeah, we all do that, and some people's have worse consequences than others, but we're all pretty much stuck with them. In this case, someone went to law school, made some very contradictory life decisions (having kids -- and failing to prevent having more -- kind of takes away whatever victim angle might have been there), realized they were doing very poorly but kept going anyway, and then... for years and years... did not pursue a career that could possibly have any chance of addressing the debt before the rates ballooned.
So we end up with someone who screwed up, screwed up some more, and then decided she'd screwed up so much that she's going to screw up again, by just not even trying to address the negative results of the previous screwups.
Not very responsible, in my opinion, and certainly not a good lesson to pass on to your kids (along with your debt, because guess where that's going when you die, since you've decided not to pay it off?).
I guess I'm still just not sure what the article is going for.
> Not very responsible, in my opinion, and certainly not a good lesson to pass on to your kids (along with your debt, because guess where that's going when you die, since you've decided not to pay it off?).
What? Loans don't pass to kids at death, that's absurd. They stay with the estate. If the estate doesn't have enough funds to cover the debt, tough shit for the lender. Though there are lenders who try to con kids into taking over their parents debt obligations. There is a special place in hell for them.
Public loans are discharged upon death, so there's that. Private loans are not though, and there can still be tax consequences for public loans.
I think the most important theme to this article, aside from the individual story of debt and irresponsibility, is that this looks an awful lot like the way the housing bubble came about. Cheap debt that the borrowers are unable to afford long term. The difference here is that student debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, so it seems there would be more people defaulting.
As a side note, the price tag of a degree should not be so high that a career with that degree cannot pay back the debt. This story is unique in that the debt is much older and ballooned due to interest accrual, but there have been a lot of recent graduates with high debt right out the gate with degrees that are much less employable than they used to be.
She had a 6 figure job, but quit because she was miserable. Not to sound Callous...but she should have kept that job and made paying down those loans the first priority.
This person made mistakes. Yeah, we all do that, and some people's have worse consequences than others, but we're all pretty much stuck with them. In this case, someone went to law school, made some very contradictory life decisions (having kids -- and failing to prevent having more -- kind of takes away whatever victim angle might have been there), realized they were doing very poorly but kept going anyway, and then... for years and years... did not pursue a career that could possibly have any chance of addressing the debt before the rates ballooned.
So we end up with someone who screwed up, screwed up some more, and then decided she'd screwed up so much that she's going to screw up again, by just not even trying to address the negative results of the previous screwups.
Not very responsible, in my opinion, and certainly not a good lesson to pass on to your kids (along with your debt, because guess where that's going when you die, since you've decided not to pay it off?).
I guess I'm still just not sure what the article is going for.