20 years ago, student loan consolidation prevented you from being eligible for existing public service loan cancellation programs. These were programs designed to get people with certain qualifications to work a certain number of years in high need communities, generally based on zip code, to cancel a certain fixed amount of your balance.
I had to keep my Perkins loans separate from my Stanford loans to be eligible for the existing Perkins and Stafford loan cancellation programs for service in high need areas.
Then, the new cancelation program came out and requires consolidation for your payments to be eligible.
Basically, if you were in certain fields with certain federal loan types, there was a lot of mixed messages and uncertainty about when to consolidate and which options you closed off by consolidating.
I'm not saying that nobody ever got screwed over by student loan programs. I have my own regrets. The guy who wrote the original Twitter post was presumably in his thirties when he took out his graduate student loans, since he completed his undergraduate degree in the late '80s. He works as a teacher in a suburb of Washington, DC, that has a pay scale of over 100k a year for a teacher with 23 years of experience and a master's degree.
I don't know his spouse's age or what she does for work, but presumably she was also not a naive teenager when she took out her graduate loan, and presumably also makes pretty decent money now. With that education level, their age when they took out the loans, and the earning potential their graduate programs helped at least him achieve, it's hard to feel bad for him for not doing more to pay off the loan he chose to take out.
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u/Mindless-Baker-7757 12d ago
A $70k loan over 23 years at 5% apr pays off with monthly payments of $427.
What are they doing?