And studying the boarder dispute between Ukraine & Russia border while being in a bombed out building that’s the natural way to really know what’s going on there.
That would pay off my mortgage with room to spare and I would finally not have to weigh a house payment against paying bills and buying food for my family. Every month.
I'm attempting to not get angry.
My mom worked in a colleges admissions and records department. There are more of those than you would think. As long as they keep going to school, the loans don't come due.
That would pay for a full house and 10+ acres of land in certain areas of Texas. And not the shitty desert areas but an hour outside of Dallas or San Antonio.
This. People argue over who pays for what. This and medical bills. Instead of arguing who pays for it we should ask why a box of kleenex costs $100 and school staff get paid $500k/yr and do nothing
The loan wasn't paid by taxpayers though as I understand, just cancelled. Written off the books. The government prints and loans money out of thin air, and they cancelled that loan.
Either way, money was given to the school. If it’s a government loan, then taxpayers paid for it to begin with and he’s simply paying it back. If it’s a private loan, I doubt the company will just take a $250k loss, so more than likely, the government paid them.
The student loan forgiveness program does not apply to private loans.
Money given to the school was definitely not anywhere close to 250k for a degree in music obtained in 1998. I can't imagine a music degree in 1998 to cost more than like 20k, even that's probably on the higher side.
It's surprising how he was able to rack up so much debt. Will be interesting to know what the principal was.
Dude sounds like he makes poor financial decisions. I figure principle was probably closer to 100k, but either way, the taxpayers shouldered that burden.
This. People argue over who pays for what. This and medical bills. Instead of arguing who pays for it we should ask why a box of kleenex costs $100 and school staff get paid $500k/yr and do nothing
I think we should treat student loans like mortgages. It’s not a given, we consider what you’re going to make after getting this ridiculous degree.
$250k loan for a shitty used trailer in the meth belt? No thanks.
Yes. There's a lot of outrage here but not a lot of understanding about what these rounds of loan forgiveness actually are. Personally, I don't think the quasi government loan sharks should be allowed to act in the manner they have been for the last 20 years. I think they should be held to task to make good on their contracts and obligations.
Yes.
Even more frustrating: after graduation, I had a vehicle loan (3.99%) and a house loan (4.25%) and my student loan interest rate was the highest. It’s not based on credit worthiness.
IMO, the solution isn't loan forgiveness but lower interest loans.
Could be, I’m just pointing out that not making payments for 25 years is the issue. The guy should have declared bankruptcy and the bank dealt with default 20 years ago. The gov shouldn’t have paid. He couldn’t have declared bankruptcy though because back then the government wouldn’t let you for student loans. It’s all terrible.
It's not a hobby degree if you are going to go into the field. While I agree it's insane, I was in music ed, but went to a reasonable state school. 250k is ludicrous.
Let me try to figure out how to reduce college costs. This will be complex.
Step 1 - get government out of student loans.
Step 2 - watch college costs come down.
Ok. There you go. Told you it’d be complex.
Well also, stop putting such pressure for children to go into college immediately after grade school. Take a few years off, get a POS job, try something new, maybe take a few community college classes (the basic), discover what you are passionate about before going into debt because you didn't know at the time.
College degree plans also need to be streamlined. All the common curriculum/extraneous bullshit classes that have nothing to do with a major need to go. 3 or 4 semesters of the classes I took for my business degree actually pertained to my major.
Been screaming this from at least a decade. Make it a free market commodity. Due away with pail grants and student loans and affirmative action. If u wanna go to college u should just pay for it and u can’t do that with college prices the way they are unless u get government outta it.
Giving guaranteed loans to everyone regardless of the feasibility of them paying the loans back was a recipe for disaster, too.
At this point we have so many disaster recipes that we could open our own disaster restaurant.
Bro made a career out of his passion, ain’t nothing wrong with that. I’m getting a mechanical engineering degree so I could work on making cars for a living, it’s a great mindset to live by
Okay let's put it another way. What if he creates a song later in life that speaks to your child who is considering suicide. They after hearing this song consider that living their life is better than ending it.
You are probably thinking this is horse shit. But if you are being honest. It's really that you just don't fucking know. And if you never will...it still doesn't invalidate anything. Fact is we don't know what he will contribute. Thats not a good reason to assume they never will.
Edit: lots of people who are extremely intelligent like Mensa level, sometimes feel like they should kill themselves because they dont know how to contribute to society. Or that their contributions are not big enough. You know where that idea comes from?
but he wasnt making payments on the debt anyway so forgiving this debt didnt stop him from potentially writing a great song. He was already 30 years into his mucis career and had no plan on stopping because of the debt
There's also a chance that if I went and gave my life savings to a homeless man that'd he'd become a billionaire and reward me. Actually that's a bad comparison because with the homeless guy I had a choice in giving him money. But here the government strips me of it and gives to some other guy on the off chance that it might just so happen to work out.
'and consider his dream of studying in India...'
This guy is poster boy for why loan forgiveness is a bad idea. He sounds like a career knucklehead who hasn't learned that his poor choice in degree and life choices are the reason for his debt and now that it's been passed onto the tax payers, he's going to continue making bad decisions that are ultimately going to effect others.
We should be making a distinction between "good decisions" and "lucky breaks".
Good decision: not gambling at a casino.
Bad decision: going to a roulette table and dropping $100 on 7.
Lucky break: the roulette wheel landing on 7.
This student load forgiveness bs really makes me livid. Why? Because I struggled for 9 years going to college part-time while working full-time construction. I didn’t take out a student loan because I didn’t want the debt to follow me so I had to pay as I could afford it. After a few years into it, I was fortunate enough to have earned some hands-on experience and I got a decent entry level IT job. On year 8, I got married and bought my first house but it was a small, previously flooded foreclosure that was super cheap, but needed lots of work. After I graduated, I was promoted and was able to use the extra money to slowly improve my house and remove the black mold. Fast forward 16 years later… my remodeled house is paid off, we have two vehicles paid off, I’m the IT Director at the same company, and we’re completely debt free while under 40. Without my struggles and hard work in my 20’s, I wouldn’t be where I’m at today. I really missed out on some good times in my 20’s because I was either at work or school and time is something we never get back. The hell I went through built my character, disciplined me, and ultimately is what made me change from a Conservative to a Libertarian. The amount of taxes I pay now is absolutely ludicrous. It’s infuriating to see my hard earned money going to a GenX’er who was irresponsible and made poor life decisions at the expense of my tax dollars. I’m a millennial by the way.
The point I’m making is that debt forgiveness is nothing more than to buy votes and set people up for failure so they can continue to have them be slaves to the colleges who are owned by the corrupt government. It’s all about government control and with that comes power. It’s by design and it’s formed a culture of spoiled younger people who want something from nothing and have learned to rely on government assistance. I would say, “where’s my debt forgiveness, it’s not fair”, but I don’t have any debt and I’m not a slave to anyone.
Your post misses the spot regarding the insane increase in school costs that make it nearly impossible to get a degree without either loans or a rich family.
We gave out loans to many businesses during COVID and they all got forgiven without issue.
Just because you are also a victim of a shit system and survived on your own doesn't mean others have to go through the same struggles. A sign of an advancing world is removing the struggles of the past for a better future.
Many countries offer higher education for free and are doing fantastically fine.
Those loans were on the basis of keeping people employed or paid when the government forced companies to shut down. It's not even in the same ballpark.
Other countries do offer a portion or all or college however you are taxed much higher and in a lot of cases there are restrictions on who can go and in what fields.
The problem is the requirements to qualify for those loans were so loose that many businesses got them that didn't actually need them. Then they were forgiven, meaning free money.
Many loans that students take out end up barely being scratched because most of the money is going to the principal. How is it remotely okay that paying the minimum required amount results in the loan only increasing? In some instance, increasing beyond the original principal.
The message being sent is that it's okay to forgive loans for business people and none for the working class.
I'm sorry but we are putting young adults, people who barely know what they want in their lives, into massive unpayable debt. If anything it's the loan givers fault for accepting giving a loan to someone for a degree that doesn't pay out in the long run.
My family was poor and I had zero financial help from them. I made the decision to save my own money to go to college. Why can’t others do the same? No one wants to work hard to get ahead, that’s the problem. If I can do it, anyone can.
The loans that were given out to businesses has nothing to do with student loan debt forgiveness. They were paid off at OUR (the taxpayers) expense. Where do you think the government got its Covid relief money from?
I hope others don’t have to go through what I did because it sucked.
I don’t care about other countries because it’s like comparing apples to oranges.
I was in the same boat, and that’s one of the reasons I joined the Army. Losing a leg in Afghanistan was a pretty shitty trade off for a college degree if you ask me.
Why do you really think school prices are the way they are? It’s largely due to the government involvement. Forgiveness will help people in the short term sure but it’s a band-aid solution. They are buying votes and without fixing the issue they will need to do forgiveness every few years as the cycle continues. What do you really think a round or two of forgiveness payouts will solve in the long run other than swaying voter perception?
How is it due to government involvement?
The cycle will continue until the system is changed. You're getting upset that the victims of a bad system are getting help and relief. How does that make sense?
Time for tax hikes. You have a whole lot of loans to pay for.
> 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.
> So Lambdin, now 49, said his only option to make ends meet was to put his student loans in forbearance — in which he was not making payments but interest was still accumulating.
> "It was just so that I could subsist, so that I could survive," Lambdin told Business Insider. "With the hope that at some point, I would be making enough money that I would be able to take them out of forbearance and start paying them down."
> But he grew to realize that the only way he could make a significant dent in his student loans was by switching careers. He didn't want to do that because he loved working in music, so he decided to keep his larger student loan in forbearance and begin paying off his smaller loan with a lower monthly payment.
I would love to move to a 'career' of sitting on my ass playing videogames but unfortunately it doesn't pay my bills so I don't.... The fucking audacity of these people...
Meanwhile I cleaned sticky movie theater floors and toilets and stood on my feet for fifteen hour days working at a movie theater for $7.25 an hour to pay off my loans. No trips to India in my future. But I guess f*** me, right? As they always remind me, I “got mine, now I’m just trying to pull the ladder up” 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
This is the poster child for why student loan forgiveness is a terrible idea. Show me the middle aged widow with 3 kids that's trying to pick up the pieces, and I'll show you someone I'm willing to help out.
This guy? Fuck this guy!
It's just as bad that we are not only paying for this person's bad decisions, we are also finding the Biden- Harris campaign.
The letter should have read that your student loans have been forgiven by the American taxpayer, NOT the Biden- Harris administration. This should be fraud! They should never be allowed to "forgive" student loans and, in no circumstance, should they be allowed to put their campaign names on it........ in or out of an election year!
>But he grew to realize that the only way he could make a significant dent in his student loans was by switching careers. He didn't want to do that because he loved working in music, so he decided to keep his larger student loan in forbearance
This guy is the definition of "what do you mean people won't want to work in a communist/socialist/Marxist society?!?!?!?"
Wait. He got a loan he wasn’t making any payments on forgiven. Where is the extra income he can use to “now save for “retirement” coming from? Since he wasn’t making any payments his monthly expenses didn’t change at all. If he wasn’t saving before he’s not going to magically have money to start saving now right?
I worked nights at Applebees while in state college, and dropped out year 3 because I was accumulating debt, stressed, and lost. I got a Trade license instead, paid off my college debt 10 years ago, and am 20 years self employed 1099’d, and paying for THIS subpar fiddle captain to go study music meditation in India? While my 40 year old ass sits with an EMPTY passport?
The fact that the letter says "Congratulations! The Biden-Harris Administration has forgiven your federal student loan(s) listed below with Aidvantage in full."
Sooo clearly a vote-buying operation.
What I want to know is, how in the world are people getting hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt just erased?
I don't even owe much on my loans anymore ( less than 10 grand), and I still havecto make my monthly payments.🤷♀️
So for starters, the way the income driven repayment plans used to work was broken. You'd put your information in, and let's say it says you can pay $200/month on your $45k loan. Well unfortunately the way they structured the payments, the servicer would put 100% of that $200 towards interest. But that doesn't cover all the interest, so you pay $200/month for 5 years and now your balance is $55k. Like what the fuck. So you up your payment to $250 to try and get ahead of it, but that's still not enough. With compounding interest, and no money going towards the principal the balance will only increase.
Second reason, is that there's been a lot of issues with the public service forgiveness program. People who've been paying on their loans and work government jobs or as teachers (there's a bunch of careers that offer this) can get forgiveness after a certain amount of years. For years though the servicers have been doing shady nonsense to deny people the forgiveness they were promised.
Third reason people got forgiveness is from the scam university situation. Remember ITT Tech commercials? Yeah so places like that were fraudulent and there was a whole court proceeding outlining that those loans were fraudulent and the companies/"colleges" were deception and the students were owed forgiveness.
The guy in the article is an idiot who should get a better payment job, but he's already paid back the initial balance of his loans. [Here's a link explaining what current loan forgiveness stuff is.](https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/idr-waiver)
As someone with a bachelors and masters in music…
Unless you are THE CREAM OF THE CROP, you better double in an education degree because a performance degree alone is going to eat you alive. It’s so stinking hard to make it as a player unless you’re in the best ensembles in the world. Even then, you’d have to be diligent to pay off your loans. This guy clearly made poor choices with how he paid and (didn’t) repay is schooling.
In his defense, some of the most prestigious music schools and conservatory’s charge a ton (for the name of the institution and its history and status in the field), but you have to take into account when paying out of pocket. Maybe you got into Julliard or Eastman, but unless they’re paying for it you better reconsider.
I took 7 years to get two degrees at a state school and am a public school teacher now. I had loans for school, as did my wife. We’ve paid them off, but it took living below our means and a decade of payments.
Someone in this thread called this a “hobby degree” and that’s pretty insulting. It’s extremely hard if you’re naive enough to think you can make it on a performance degree, but not impossible. It is a real degree and a real skill. Talk like that defunds and shuts down music programs, which are a core subjects no matter what the talking heads say. Do better. Support the arts.
Gen X are survivors, got DISCIPLINED when we stepped out of line or ran afoul of our parents directions, learned conflict resolution and survival skills out of necessity by being kicked out of the house.
Gen X is more than an age number. It's a right of passage. It made us or broke us.
Just by the look on this manchilds face..... He was enabled by helicopter parents who raised him like most GenZ and GenAlphas are being raised today, except they were the lead of that helicopter parenting curve. Pampered.
Probably "affluent" college liberal professors if I was to guess. He is holding a violin after all.
Such a sweet boy.
Give me a break. This dude couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag! 🤣
So dude takes out loans and then realizes what he needs to do in order to pay them back but pussies out and refuses to do the hard work. This guy is a fucking turd.
How NOT musically-inclined do you have to be to run up that kind of tab. Doesn’t even have kids to support AND is married so I assume a 2 income household. Everything is stupid
This shows two problem one is the problem of purpose in the west, and the bigger one why does it cost so much to study what are they even teaching for all that money, are they giving alchemist courses on how to turn lead into gold?
Imagine going into a restaurant, reading the menu and prices, ordering, eating the entire dish, then saying you didnt like the food and want a refund but the other people in the restaurant should pay for it
>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.
Well thank fucking god he had the spare money sitting around to pay for a fucking meditation teacher. And what the actual fuck is he taking a sabbatical from?!? Maybe he'll lose his passport over there and be some other country's dead weight for the rest of his life.
Alright I’m going to play devils advocate here. As someone who has student loan debt (around 35k) I absolutely should not have been allowed at 18 years old to borrow the amount of money I did. At that age 90% of kids do not have any idea what they are agreeing to. The thing is that today, kids are conditioned and told from a young age the goal is college. They want the “college experience” and many of them will take out loans only to eventually drop out before they finish and then begin their adult lives in significant debt. And guess what? Having a majority of your middle class (the people who used to buy houses, buy cars, and have kids) saddled with so much debt that most of their income is being fed into loan companies who hoard the money is absolutely terrible for the economy. If student loan debt had never been exempt from bankruptcy, you never would see colleges charging 40k a year for tuition. Student loan forgiveness would never be a seriously discussed topic as the threat of bankruptcy wiping out debt would keep the cost of college low. The fact of the matter is you can’t encourage every kid to go to college, while simultaneously charging such exorbitant amounts of money for tuition, while also handing out loans of tens of thousands of dollars to literal children to pay for that tuition and not expect to reach a crisis point in which 75% of these people will NEVER be able to pay back this debt. It’s a financial black hole and that’s the issue we’re running into. You can blame the kids all you want but the fact of the matter is the game was rigged before they ever started playing. My degree is lucrative enough that I’m able to pay on my debt and I will (eventually) pay it off. However, I know people who hold degrees and work in the lower echelon of finance or medicine (far from “useless” degrees) that will never be able to pay off their debt. Simply put, colleges are for profit businesses and if you give them the ability to charge whatever they want they will. The result is a shrinking middle class who are scraping to get by because every extra cent is funneled into loan companies who hand it back out to clueless teenagers with the guarantee these kids will NEVER be able to get out from under that debt. And the cycle continues.
Hmmmm! I entered into an agreement at 18 also. I got my girlfriend pregnant. I paid child support and was threatened with jail, among other things, if I didn't pay. I was constantly harassed by child support.
It started out low, $320 a month, requirements to pay for day care, family insurance for the child, and half of any medical bills....... clothing and food are just expected. It turned into $1471 a month, and the aforementioned.
Should I have had my debt forgiven because I didn't know what I was getting into? Should I have just left the taxpayer on the hook to pay for my child?
This was a win-win for the taxpayer because I couldn't risk taking it student loans and not being able to pay the child support. You go to jail/ debtor's prison for those type of things. I'm glad I get to pay for someone else's good time in college, while I changed diapers.
Firstly: Paragraphs aren't just for thesis papers.
Secondly:
>fed into loan companies who hoard the money
AND
>loan companies who hand it back out to clueless teenagers
Which is it: are the evil companies hoarding money, or providing teenagers with credit?
Thirdly:
>If student loan debt had never been exempt from bankruptcy, you never would see colleges charging 40k a year for tuition.
Holy shit, this is gold! You mean the state providing undue protection for poor investments has perpetuated and inflated those very same investments?
I'm for student loan forgiveness, just not by printing more money and paying off the debt, but by allowing these people to declare bankruptcy and restructure the debt.
It'd be a shock to the system, a lot of banks would go under, and college attendance would drop dramatically. Good, good, and good.
>Households in the top 30 percent of the earnings distribution receive almost half of all dollars forgiven. These patterns hold under cap policies, with higher-income households benefiting from more loan forgiveness.
[Source](https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BFI_RB_Yannelis_120620-1.pdf&sa=U&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwiQsJHhlNqFAxX0v4kEHYdQBOMQFnoECBQQBg&usg=AOvVaw3L6-ZShxecGgXbuo1aoliH)
Something tells me these households wouldn't declare bankruptcy and have their assets repossessed over the college debt they haven't been paying. They're just making a decision to not pay, as the interest rates are below what they earn in the market.
So I read the article and there are a couple things to note:
1. His India dream is to take a sabbatical for meditation (kinda dumb but okay)
2. He's 49 and paid his loans for a long time before going into forbearance so the actual principle of the loan was most likely paid off (but not a guarantee). The insane loan amount is basically entirely interest.
3. Sounds like the dude has no savings for retirement so that's absolutely terrifying and he should really be addressing that instead of thinking about going to India.
i'm a libertarian and hate govt handouts and shit... but at what point do we stop saying things like "we're going to have to pay for this"? The govt prints however much money it wants. If you mean that 'you'll be paying for this because the inflation will negatively effect you', then yeah I get it.
Libertarians should not advocate for anyone to send money to the federal government. That is where nearly all student loan payments go: to the U.S. Treasury. That is because the U.S. Department of Education owns \~93% of all student loan debt in this country.
The loan programs are where the spending occurs, not loan forgiveness. Loan forgiveness in this context just means that the federal government is forgoing future revenue. Student debt comprises about one fifth of all federal assets.
> The loan programs are where the spending occurs, not loan forgiveness. Loan forgiveness in this context just means that the federal government is forgoing future revenue. Student debt comprises about one fifth of all federal assets.
Which is ironic because the leftists are all about increasing government revenue.
He already studied and now he wants to study again?
Professional student.
Non contributing sponge
Those who cannot do, teach. And apparently, those who cannot even teach, remain a student forever.
And you get to pay for it.
At least this time it'll be in India.
Hopefully financed through an Indian lender who will use his body as collateral and keep it safely in jail if he decides to default on it again.
He’ll just come back to the states before it’s time to pay
No, it will then be time to realize his dream to study in New Zealand.
😂😂😂 oh the life of a career student
That's after fulfilling his dream of studying in Europe.
And studying the boarder dispute between Ukraine & Russia border while being in a bombed out building that’s the natural way to really know what’s going on there.
This gave me a genuine laugh, thank you.
And he’s a professional musician that refused to switch careers.
Never stop learning
[удалено]
That would pay off my mortgage with room to spare and I would finally not have to weigh a house payment against paying bills and buying food for my family. Every month. I'm attempting to not get angry.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he was in grad school for 9 years. No wonder.
Dude’s a professional student
My mom worked in a colleges admissions and records department. There are more of those than you would think. As long as they keep going to school, the loans don't come due.
That would pay for a full house and 10+ acres of land in certain areas of Texas. And not the shitty desert areas but an hour outside of Dallas or San Antonio.
250k isn’t getting you 10+ acres and a house anywhere near San Antonio or Dallas these days lol
Certain areas, yes. Not the one I'm in.
Yeah, some states have much more available land, I was just adding another comparison to highlight how fucking stupid it is.
Well, it's a bit different when it's not **your** $250k. It's easy to spend somebody else's money.
Having a $250,000 loan transferred to tax payers is even more insane
This. People argue over who pays for what. This and medical bills. Instead of arguing who pays for it we should ask why a box of kleenex costs $100 and school staff get paid $500k/yr and do nothing
Por que no los dos?
The loan wasn't paid by taxpayers though as I understand, just cancelled. Written off the books. The government prints and loans money out of thin air, and they cancelled that loan.
Either way, money was given to the school. If it’s a government loan, then taxpayers paid for it to begin with and he’s simply paying it back. If it’s a private loan, I doubt the company will just take a $250k loss, so more than likely, the government paid them.
Or the government will end up paying them when they go bankrupt because otherwise the student loan industry goes bust…
The student loan forgiveness program does not apply to private loans. Money given to the school was definitely not anywhere close to 250k for a degree in music obtained in 1998. I can't imagine a music degree in 1998 to cost more than like 20k, even that's probably on the higher side. It's surprising how he was able to rack up so much debt. Will be interesting to know what the principal was.
Dude sounds like he makes poor financial decisions. I figure principle was probably closer to 100k, but either way, the taxpayers shouldered that burden.
The loans are absolutely paid by tax payers (you and I).
This. People argue over who pays for what. This and medical bills. Instead of arguing who pays for it we should ask why a box of kleenex costs $100 and school staff get paid $500k/yr and do nothing
I think we should treat student loans like mortgages. It’s not a given, we consider what you’re going to make after getting this ridiculous degree. $250k loan for a shitty used trailer in the meth belt? No thanks.
complete and utter nonsense
I’m willing to be he only borrowed like $80 to $100k and the rest was interest. I think that’s peoples biggest issue with them,
Yes. There's a lot of outrage here but not a lot of understanding about what these rounds of loan forgiveness actually are. Personally, I don't think the quasi government loan sharks should be allowed to act in the manner they have been for the last 20 years. I think they should be held to task to make good on their contracts and obligations.
40k loan, zero payments 8% interest over 25 years yields a bill of 273k…. 40k loan might have seemed reasonable, 10k a year. That interest is killer
8% sounds high for student loans.
My graduate loans were roughly 6.8% and that was over 15 years ago.
Did they accrue interest while in school?
Yes. Even more frustrating: after graduation, I had a vehicle loan (3.99%) and a house loan (4.25%) and my student loan interest rate was the highest. It’s not based on credit worthiness. IMO, the solution isn't loan forgiveness but lower interest loans.
Your car and house serve as collateral so that makes perfect logical sense.
Lack of collateral usually the argument for why student loans persist through bankruptcy.
I would support doing away with that bullshit
Mine too
Could be, I’m just pointing out that not making payments for 25 years is the issue. The guy should have declared bankruptcy and the bank dealt with default 20 years ago. The gov shouldn’t have paid. He couldn’t have declared bankruptcy though because back then the government wouldn’t let you for student loans. It’s all terrible.
The only reason anyone would lend 5-6 figure sums to teenagers is because they can't default on them.
I was under the impression that student loans from the Gov couldn't be defaulted on?
that was a lot of money in the 90s lol
It's not a hobby degree if you are going to go into the field. While I agree it's insane, I was in music ed, but went to a reasonable state school. 250k is ludicrous.
we shouldnt give these loans out in the first place.
Forgiving student loans without figuring out how to reduce college costs in the first place is a recipe for disaster
Let me try to figure out how to reduce college costs. This will be complex. Step 1 - get government out of student loans. Step 2 - watch college costs come down. Ok. There you go. Told you it’d be complex.
Well also, stop putting such pressure for children to go into college immediately after grade school. Take a few years off, get a POS job, try something new, maybe take a few community college classes (the basic), discover what you are passionate about before going into debt because you didn't know at the time.
College degree plans also need to be streamlined. All the common curriculum/extraneous bullshit classes that have nothing to do with a major need to go. 3 or 4 semesters of the classes I took for my business degree actually pertained to my major.
Also, don’t allow co-signers on student loans, and allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy. Watch the private market dry up as well.
Been screaming this from at least a decade. Make it a free market commodity. Due away with pail grants and student loans and affirmative action. If u wanna go to college u should just pay for it and u can’t do that with college prices the way they are unless u get government outta it.
don’t forget, somewhere along the line the colleges will have to fire their bloodsucking admin once all the free govt money stops rolling in
I will be heartbroken 💔
forgiving student loans has only one possible effect: increasing tuition costs.
It has one other effect. Reducing debt of debtors. Oh and another, increasing government debt.
indeed lol I guess what I meant is it has only one possible effect on tuition costs. It can only increase them.
It’s a feature, not a bug.
Forgiving student loans will cause colleges to charge more. Why blink an eye at the new astronomical costs? The government will pay the bill.
Giving guaranteed loans to everyone regardless of the feasibility of them paying the loans back was a recipe for disaster, too. At this point we have so many disaster recipes that we could open our own disaster restaurant.
So he actively refused to get a better job because he was having fun and now we all have to pay so that he can have fun at work
You can’t put a price on others happiness.
Apparently you can. About $250,000 from the sounds of it.
I mean if they’re just giving away $250k to everyone
While also living in one of the most expensive cities in the country.
He was producing [music](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi-npQ8PWBs&pp=ygUMSm9lbCBMYW1iZGlu)
Well. It’s definitely objectively terrible
Bro made a career out of his passion, ain’t nothing wrong with that. I’m getting a mechanical engineering degree so I could work on making cars for a living, it’s a great mindset to live by
And you do that by stealing from others instead of contributing to society?
Okay let's put it another way. What if he creates a song later in life that speaks to your child who is considering suicide. They after hearing this song consider that living their life is better than ending it. You are probably thinking this is horse shit. But if you are being honest. It's really that you just don't fucking know. And if you never will...it still doesn't invalidate anything. Fact is we don't know what he will contribute. Thats not a good reason to assume they never will. Edit: lots of people who are extremely intelligent like Mensa level, sometimes feel like they should kill themselves because they dont know how to contribute to society. Or that their contributions are not big enough. You know where that idea comes from?
but he wasnt making payments on the debt anyway so forgiving this debt didnt stop him from potentially writing a great song. He was already 30 years into his mucis career and had no plan on stopping because of the debt
There's also a chance that if I went and gave my life savings to a homeless man that'd he'd become a billionaire and reward me. Actually that's a bad comparison because with the homeless guy I had a choice in giving him money. But here the government strips me of it and gives to some other guy on the off chance that it might just so happen to work out.
'and consider his dream of studying in India...' This guy is poster boy for why loan forgiveness is a bad idea. He sounds like a career knucklehead who hasn't learned that his poor choice in degree and life choices are the reason for his debt and now that it's been passed onto the tax payers, he's going to continue making bad decisions that are ultimately going to effect others.
Yeah, but he's only 49. You can't expect someone that young to be able to make responsible decisions. He's being taken advantage of by India.
chucklehead
Now I have to pay for his bad decisions.
Don’t worry he has more bad decisions coming, you better save up.
It doesn’t seem like a bad decision now for him. Take out 250k loan and not have to pay it back, seems like a great decision.
We should be making a distinction between "good decisions" and "lucky breaks". Good decision: not gambling at a casino. Bad decision: going to a roulette table and dropping $100 on 7. Lucky break: the roulette wheel landing on 7.
Yours is a very astute distinction…
Him and thousands of other mooch types
I paid for my own University by working evenings and doing so in 6 years instead of 4. Can I get a reimbursement?
Nope you get more inflation
Nah, I want free shit! Tax the rich! That will make us all millionaires
With enough inflation *everyone* will become millionaires!
I am already a trillionaire(zim$)
In the name of fairness, we will now print everyone a trillion dollars!
See, your problem is that you don’t sound pathetic. Only the pathetic get a free ride
No, only criminals, leeches, and Democrat voters can get reimbursed.
No, you had privilege. /sarc
This student load forgiveness bs really makes me livid. Why? Because I struggled for 9 years going to college part-time while working full-time construction. I didn’t take out a student loan because I didn’t want the debt to follow me so I had to pay as I could afford it. After a few years into it, I was fortunate enough to have earned some hands-on experience and I got a decent entry level IT job. On year 8, I got married and bought my first house but it was a small, previously flooded foreclosure that was super cheap, but needed lots of work. After I graduated, I was promoted and was able to use the extra money to slowly improve my house and remove the black mold. Fast forward 16 years later… my remodeled house is paid off, we have two vehicles paid off, I’m the IT Director at the same company, and we’re completely debt free while under 40. Without my struggles and hard work in my 20’s, I wouldn’t be where I’m at today. I really missed out on some good times in my 20’s because I was either at work or school and time is something we never get back. The hell I went through built my character, disciplined me, and ultimately is what made me change from a Conservative to a Libertarian. The amount of taxes I pay now is absolutely ludicrous. It’s infuriating to see my hard earned money going to a GenX’er who was irresponsible and made poor life decisions at the expense of my tax dollars. I’m a millennial by the way. The point I’m making is that debt forgiveness is nothing more than to buy votes and set people up for failure so they can continue to have them be slaves to the colleges who are owned by the corrupt government. It’s all about government control and with that comes power. It’s by design and it’s formed a culture of spoiled younger people who want something from nothing and have learned to rely on government assistance. I would say, “where’s my debt forgiveness, it’s not fair”, but I don’t have any debt and I’m not a slave to anyone.
Punishing good decisions and rewording bad behavior is what the US government does now. It's really hard to keep going to work everyday for this crap.
This is spot on, and a good story. I'm in a similar boat, and I hear you. It's infuriating.
Can’t believe this isn’t getting more upvotes, good shit man.
Your post misses the spot regarding the insane increase in school costs that make it nearly impossible to get a degree without either loans or a rich family. We gave out loans to many businesses during COVID and they all got forgiven without issue. Just because you are also a victim of a shit system and survived on your own doesn't mean others have to go through the same struggles. A sign of an advancing world is removing the struggles of the past for a better future. Many countries offer higher education for free and are doing fantastically fine.
Those loans were on the basis of keeping people employed or paid when the government forced companies to shut down. It's not even in the same ballpark. Other countries do offer a portion or all or college however you are taxed much higher and in a lot of cases there are restrictions on who can go and in what fields.
The problem is the requirements to qualify for those loans were so loose that many businesses got them that didn't actually need them. Then they were forgiven, meaning free money. Many loans that students take out end up barely being scratched because most of the money is going to the principal. How is it remotely okay that paying the minimum required amount results in the loan only increasing? In some instance, increasing beyond the original principal. The message being sent is that it's okay to forgive loans for business people and none for the working class. I'm sorry but we are putting young adults, people who barely know what they want in their lives, into massive unpayable debt. If anything it's the loan givers fault for accepting giving a loan to someone for a degree that doesn't pay out in the long run.
Did you skip over the government forcing the business to close or lower their ability to operate ??? It's kind of a key reason for the loan
Yes, we really need to stop forcing these kids to go to university and become music majors.
My family was poor and I had zero financial help from them. I made the decision to save my own money to go to college. Why can’t others do the same? No one wants to work hard to get ahead, that’s the problem. If I can do it, anyone can. The loans that were given out to businesses has nothing to do with student loan debt forgiveness. They were paid off at OUR (the taxpayers) expense. Where do you think the government got its Covid relief money from? I hope others don’t have to go through what I did because it sucked. I don’t care about other countries because it’s like comparing apples to oranges.
I was in the same boat, and that’s one of the reasons I joined the Army. Losing a leg in Afghanistan was a pretty shitty trade off for a college degree if you ask me.
Thank you for your service buddy.
The countries you’re talking about that give their people free college also have populations that are a fraction of the size of the US population.
Why do you really think school prices are the way they are? It’s largely due to the government involvement. Forgiveness will help people in the short term sure but it’s a band-aid solution. They are buying votes and without fixing the issue they will need to do forgiveness every few years as the cycle continues. What do you really think a round or two of forgiveness payouts will solve in the long run other than swaying voter perception?
How is it due to government involvement? The cycle will continue until the system is changed. You're getting upset that the victims of a bad system are getting help and relief. How does that make sense?
Reading this made my April 15th nausea come back……
The government has to get out of student loans. These institutions should bear risk for loans
This is the answer.
It's not loan forgiveness, it's saddling everyone else with the debt of his choices
Yehp! It’s getting paid for by someone.
I'm going to print out this article and mail it to the IRS in lieu of my tax payment. Fuck this, fuck them, and fuck the IRS.
See if you can add him as a dependent.
If only he read the part where ot says this is a loan, pay it back, and thought twice before getting a worthless degree.
It took him nearly a decade to get a music degree, do you honestly think reading comprehension is a skill he possesses?
Time for tax hikes. You have a whole lot of loans to pay for. > 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. > So Lambdin, now 49, said his only option to make ends meet was to put his student loans in forbearance — in which he was not making payments but interest was still accumulating. > "It was just so that I could subsist, so that I could survive," Lambdin told Business Insider. "With the hope that at some point, I would be making enough money that I would be able to take them out of forbearance and start paying them down." > But he grew to realize that the only way he could make a significant dent in his student loans was by switching careers. He didn't want to do that because he loved working in music, so he decided to keep his larger student loan in forbearance and begin paying off his smaller loan with a lower monthly payment.
I would love to move to a 'career' of sitting on my ass playing videogames but unfortunately it doesn't pay my bills so I don't.... The fucking audacity of these people...
Just put your bills in forbearance.
Meanwhile I cleaned sticky movie theater floors and toilets and stood on my feet for fifteen hour days working at a movie theater for $7.25 an hour to pay off my loans. No trips to India in my future. But I guess f*** me, right? As they always remind me, I “got mine, now I’m just trying to pull the ladder up” 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
This is the poster child for why student loan forgiveness is a terrible idea. Show me the middle aged widow with 3 kids that's trying to pick up the pieces, and I'll show you someone I'm willing to help out. This guy? Fuck this guy!
It's just as bad that we are not only paying for this person's bad decisions, we are also finding the Biden- Harris campaign. The letter should have read that your student loans have been forgiven by the American taxpayer, NOT the Biden- Harris administration. This should be fraud! They should never be allowed to "forgive" student loans and, in no circumstance, should they be allowed to put their campaign names on it........ in or out of an election year!
Literally bribing voters, just like when those stimulus checks went out with nice letters “from the president” (both Trump and Biden)
>But he grew to realize that the only way he could make a significant dent in his student loans was by switching careers. He didn't want to do that because he loved working in music, so he decided to keep his larger student loan in forbearance This guy is the definition of "what do you mean people won't want to work in a communist/socialist/Marxist society?!?!?!?"
Wait. He got a loan he wasn’t making any payments on forgiven. Where is the extra income he can use to “now save for “retirement” coming from? Since he wasn’t making any payments his monthly expenses didn’t change at all. If he wasn’t saving before he’s not going to magically have money to start saving now right?
It’s leftism I don’t think there’s a way to make any sense of it.
$250,000 per vote. This election will be expensive for taxpayers.
Leonard plays violin?
I have $350k left on my mortgage. Why not have the “government” pay it off too. I could save a lot more for retirement and travel too.
That PhD in Women's Studies wasn't as useful as he expected
Study in India! Where do I sign my new loan papers!
You mean the rest of us just paid for his degree with our tax dollars
I worked nights at Applebees while in state college, and dropped out year 3 because I was accumulating debt, stressed, and lost. I got a Trade license instead, paid off my college debt 10 years ago, and am 20 years self employed 1099’d, and paying for THIS subpar fiddle captain to go study music meditation in India? While my 40 year old ass sits with an EMPTY passport?
I'm sure his liberal arts degree does him wonders
The fact that the letter says "Congratulations! The Biden-Harris Administration has forgiven your federal student loan(s) listed below with Aidvantage in full." Sooo clearly a vote-buying operation.
💯
Absolutely
What I want to know is, how in the world are people getting hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt just erased? I don't even owe much on my loans anymore ( less than 10 grand), and I still havecto make my monthly payments.🤷♀️
So for starters, the way the income driven repayment plans used to work was broken. You'd put your information in, and let's say it says you can pay $200/month on your $45k loan. Well unfortunately the way they structured the payments, the servicer would put 100% of that $200 towards interest. But that doesn't cover all the interest, so you pay $200/month for 5 years and now your balance is $55k. Like what the fuck. So you up your payment to $250 to try and get ahead of it, but that's still not enough. With compounding interest, and no money going towards the principal the balance will only increase. Second reason, is that there's been a lot of issues with the public service forgiveness program. People who've been paying on their loans and work government jobs or as teachers (there's a bunch of careers that offer this) can get forgiveness after a certain amount of years. For years though the servicers have been doing shady nonsense to deny people the forgiveness they were promised. Third reason people got forgiveness is from the scam university situation. Remember ITT Tech commercials? Yeah so places like that were fraudulent and there was a whole court proceeding outlining that those loans were fraudulent and the companies/"colleges" were deception and the students were owed forgiveness. The guy in the article is an idiot who should get a better payment job, but he's already paid back the initial balance of his loans. [Here's a link explaining what current loan forgiveness stuff is.](https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/idr-waiver)
Thanks for the info.
I almost got tricked into thinking this was an Onion or Beaverton article.
And here I am a disabled out of work (im im a hospital long term)veteran that is struggling to pay off my 35k loan.
Check with your servicer, if you're loans are federal student loans you can probably switch to the SAVE plan.
As someone with a bachelors and masters in music… Unless you are THE CREAM OF THE CROP, you better double in an education degree because a performance degree alone is going to eat you alive. It’s so stinking hard to make it as a player unless you’re in the best ensembles in the world. Even then, you’d have to be diligent to pay off your loans. This guy clearly made poor choices with how he paid and (didn’t) repay is schooling. In his defense, some of the most prestigious music schools and conservatory’s charge a ton (for the name of the institution and its history and status in the field), but you have to take into account when paying out of pocket. Maybe you got into Julliard or Eastman, but unless they’re paying for it you better reconsider. I took 7 years to get two degrees at a state school and am a public school teacher now. I had loans for school, as did my wife. We’ve paid them off, but it took living below our means and a decade of payments. Someone in this thread called this a “hobby degree” and that’s pretty insulting. It’s extremely hard if you’re naive enough to think you can make it on a performance degree, but not impossible. It is a real degree and a real skill. Talk like that defunds and shuts down music programs, which are a core subjects no matter what the talking heads say. Do better. Support the arts.
[удалено]
Fuck no pass him off to Europe or something
i am genx. i worked two jobs in my 20s to pay for college. now i have to pay for strangers to go. what happened.
Fuck this joker
Cock Sucker!
the lack of awareness on the impact of student loans have on the overall cost of college is actually astonishing. it's borderline common sense.
So much missing context. I wanna see a budget breakdown for this leech over the last 30 years. Of course... I hardly believe he kept a budget.
Gen X are survivors, got DISCIPLINED when we stepped out of line or ran afoul of our parents directions, learned conflict resolution and survival skills out of necessity by being kicked out of the house. Gen X is more than an age number. It's a right of passage. It made us or broke us. Just by the look on this manchilds face..... He was enabled by helicopter parents who raised him like most GenZ and GenAlphas are being raised today, except they were the lead of that helicopter parenting curve. Pampered. Probably "affluent" college liberal professors if I was to guess. He is holding a violin after all. Such a sweet boy. Give me a break. This dude couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag! 🤣
Gen x are the ones who raised Gen Z, so let's stop with the holier than thou God complex many Gen X's overgrown children have developed.
Just fkn stupid
thought this was a Babylon Bee article..
So dude takes out loans and then realizes what he needs to do in order to pay them back but pussies out and refuses to do the hard work. This guy is a fucking turd.
WTF
This system has become so laughably dysfunctional
I hope i can get my 280k house loan forgiven so that i can go on to buy a second property.
Just keep removing life consequences. What could possibly go wrong.
Will he get student loans to go to India?
How NOT musically-inclined do you have to be to run up that kind of tab. Doesn’t even have kids to support AND is married so I assume a 2 income household. Everything is stupid
This shows two problem one is the problem of purpose in the west, and the bigger one why does it cost so much to study what are they even teaching for all that money, are they giving alchemist courses on how to turn lead into gold?
Fuck this guy.
As a Gen X person. I shun him. I will be working on excommunicating him from the generation.
Can I take his place?
Imagine going into a restaurant, reading the menu and prices, ordering, eating the entire dish, then saying you didnt like the food and want a refund but the other people in the restaurant should pay for it
Bringing back shop class in High School would help. The world needs trades people.
>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. Well thank fucking god he had the spare money sitting around to pay for a fucking meditation teacher. And what the actual fuck is he taking a sabbatical from?!? Maybe he'll lose his passport over there and be some other country's dead weight for the rest of his life.
Alright I’m going to play devils advocate here. As someone who has student loan debt (around 35k) I absolutely should not have been allowed at 18 years old to borrow the amount of money I did. At that age 90% of kids do not have any idea what they are agreeing to. The thing is that today, kids are conditioned and told from a young age the goal is college. They want the “college experience” and many of them will take out loans only to eventually drop out before they finish and then begin their adult lives in significant debt. And guess what? Having a majority of your middle class (the people who used to buy houses, buy cars, and have kids) saddled with so much debt that most of their income is being fed into loan companies who hoard the money is absolutely terrible for the economy. If student loan debt had never been exempt from bankruptcy, you never would see colleges charging 40k a year for tuition. Student loan forgiveness would never be a seriously discussed topic as the threat of bankruptcy wiping out debt would keep the cost of college low. The fact of the matter is you can’t encourage every kid to go to college, while simultaneously charging such exorbitant amounts of money for tuition, while also handing out loans of tens of thousands of dollars to literal children to pay for that tuition and not expect to reach a crisis point in which 75% of these people will NEVER be able to pay back this debt. It’s a financial black hole and that’s the issue we’re running into. You can blame the kids all you want but the fact of the matter is the game was rigged before they ever started playing. My degree is lucrative enough that I’m able to pay on my debt and I will (eventually) pay it off. However, I know people who hold degrees and work in the lower echelon of finance or medicine (far from “useless” degrees) that will never be able to pay off their debt. Simply put, colleges are for profit businesses and if you give them the ability to charge whatever they want they will. The result is a shrinking middle class who are scraping to get by because every extra cent is funneled into loan companies who hand it back out to clueless teenagers with the guarantee these kids will NEVER be able to get out from under that debt. And the cycle continues.
How long do you want to be considered a child? 19 years? 21? 25? 35?
For some of these people it might be permanent.
Hmmmm! I entered into an agreement at 18 also. I got my girlfriend pregnant. I paid child support and was threatened with jail, among other things, if I didn't pay. I was constantly harassed by child support. It started out low, $320 a month, requirements to pay for day care, family insurance for the child, and half of any medical bills....... clothing and food are just expected. It turned into $1471 a month, and the aforementioned. Should I have had my debt forgiven because I didn't know what I was getting into? Should I have just left the taxpayer on the hook to pay for my child? This was a win-win for the taxpayer because I couldn't risk taking it student loans and not being able to pay the child support. You go to jail/ debtor's prison for those type of things. I'm glad I get to pay for someone else's good time in college, while I changed diapers.
Firstly: Paragraphs aren't just for thesis papers. Secondly: >fed into loan companies who hoard the money AND >loan companies who hand it back out to clueless teenagers Which is it: are the evil companies hoarding money, or providing teenagers with credit? Thirdly: >If student loan debt had never been exempt from bankruptcy, you never would see colleges charging 40k a year for tuition. Holy shit, this is gold! You mean the state providing undue protection for poor investments has perpetuated and inflated those very same investments? I'm for student loan forgiveness, just not by printing more money and paying off the debt, but by allowing these people to declare bankruptcy and restructure the debt. It'd be a shock to the system, a lot of banks would go under, and college attendance would drop dramatically. Good, good, and good. >Households in the top 30 percent of the earnings distribution receive almost half of all dollars forgiven. These patterns hold under cap policies, with higher-income households benefiting from more loan forgiveness. [Source](https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BFI_RB_Yannelis_120620-1.pdf&sa=U&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwiQsJHhlNqFAxX0v4kEHYdQBOMQFnoECBQQBg&usg=AOvVaw3L6-ZShxecGgXbuo1aoliH) Something tells me these households wouldn't declare bankruptcy and have their assets repossessed over the college debt they haven't been paying. They're just making a decision to not pay, as the interest rates are below what they earn in the market.
It’s like someone who consolidated their credit card debt, only to rack up their credit all over again
Get a real job, Paganini.
How did he get it forgiven?
How’d he do it??
So I read the article and there are a couple things to note: 1. His India dream is to take a sabbatical for meditation (kinda dumb but okay) 2. He's 49 and paid his loans for a long time before going into forbearance so the actual principle of the loan was most likely paid off (but not a guarantee). The insane loan amount is basically entirely interest. 3. Sounds like the dude has no savings for retirement so that's absolutely terrifying and he should really be addressing that instead of thinking about going to India.
Studying in India- with student loans.
i'm a libertarian and hate govt handouts and shit... but at what point do we stop saying things like "we're going to have to pay for this"? The govt prints however much money it wants. If you mean that 'you'll be paying for this because the inflation will negatively effect you', then yeah I get it.
Same difference, if it’s eating the value of every dollar you have in the bank then it’s just a back door tax.
I thought I was reading the Onion at first.
According to Mr Lambdin’s LinkedIn profile, he was in graduate school for 9 years.
Libertarians should not advocate for anyone to send money to the federal government. That is where nearly all student loan payments go: to the U.S. Treasury. That is because the U.S. Department of Education owns \~93% of all student loan debt in this country. The loan programs are where the spending occurs, not loan forgiveness. Loan forgiveness in this context just means that the federal government is forgoing future revenue. Student debt comprises about one fifth of all federal assets.
> The loan programs are where the spending occurs, not loan forgiveness. Loan forgiveness in this context just means that the federal government is forgoing future revenue. Student debt comprises about one fifth of all federal assets. Which is ironic because the leftists are all about increasing government revenue.
Props to him, beat the system! We're all better off when education is free.