How a Daughter Helped Her Mother Get Her Student Loans Forgiven
After that, Susan went to her second job working with autistic toddlers, while her daughter was in after-school care. Pickup was at 7, sometimes earlier, and then came the slog of traffic back over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge to their home, a modest townhouse in the Huguenot neighborhood that Susan had purchased in 2004.
The debt repayment process had kicked in while she was raising Arianna, as did the confusion that so many borrowers have faced over the years. There are different types of loans and various interest rates for each of them. There are a bunch of ways you can repay them, a variety of ways to consolidate them and several ways to have the loans canceled. The cancellation programs have varying eligibility rules, and it’s not always clear if you’re meeting them. Owing to all of the complexity, people on the phone at the loan servicers have often given out incorrect or incomplete information.
In the midst of all of this, Susan made some choices that came back to haunt her. An employee at one of the four entities that had serviced her loans suggested consolidating her debt so she could make just one payment each month. This can be good advice for many people, depending on the circumstances. But postpartum and sleep-deprived, she said yes without asking enough questions. Her interest rate spiked as a result.
Then, in the first dozen years of Arianna’s life — when expenses were high and Susan’s income hadn’t yet risen into a more comfortable range — she frequently put her loans into forbearance when expenses overwhelmed her. During those 86 months, interest compounded and the balance grew even when she did start paying again. By last year, it had climbed to over $90,000, even though she’d made more than $30,000 in payments.
Source: The New York Times
