Okay, I get it. If you paid back all your student loans, it feels kinda crappy that other people got theirs ‘forgiven’. I put that in quotes because the word forgiven doesn’t quite capture what happened to me.
I was recently chatting with a friend who loves me. I told her I was relieved that, after four appeals, my student loan ‘forgiveness’ was finally approved. I could tell by the look on her face that she was trying to be happy for me. But she also felt a little jilted. She had paid back all of her student loans. Financially, we were in similar situations. We’d both been teaching for about 20 years. And we had both worked hard to pay off our loans.
I’m not a finance person. And I was absolutely clueless at the age of 18 or 22 when I took out my school loans. So, I’m not sure exactly how my friend and I wound up in such different situations, but this is what I explained to her.
I took out $37,000 in loans for my graduate and my undergraduate degrees, in total. (These poor kids today need to pay that much in a year. At least.)
As a young person, I struggled to make my payments. I called the loan company for advice and suggestions. I was pointed toward deferments and consolidation loans without fully understanding what I was agreeing to. I mistakenly trusted their advice, and lowered my payments for a time, to something more manageable.
Over the past 20 years, I have paid back more than $72,000 in student loans. I have paid my loans back twice over. And at the time of my loan forgiveness in March, I still owed $34,488.
Listen, I understand that I was an idiot. And that’s probably why more people aren’t talking about this. Those of us who fell for this scheme feel stupid. We’re embarrassed to admit our mistake. But I keep seeing snarky memes and nasty posts. “You take out the loan. You pay it back.” That kind of thing.
And after our conversation, my friend looked at me and asked, “Why aren’t more people talking about THAT? It’s not the loan that’s being forgiven. It’s the interest. That’s a totally different thing.”
And she’s right. I think more people should be talking about it. So I am. I’m trying to let go of the embarrassment so that we can all focus our anger in the right place. Don’t be mad at the people who fell for it. Be angry with the people who set up a system designed to take advantage of young, gullible kids. Be angry with the lenders who deliberately mislead consumers into poor financial choices. Be angry with the soaring, exorbitant costs of college. Because these memes and arguments about loan forgiveness are designed to distract us. They are designed to pit us against each other, so our bickering keeps us too busy to address the real problems.
Don’t fall for it.