Giving Up Paying Off $186,000 Student Loan Debt

Giving Up Paying Off $186,000 Student Loan Debt
businessinsider.com

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.

Hard to judge anything just based on this article, but I'd have to say that if you have a full tuition scholarship and still need to take on 100k in debt you might want to rethink it. Also she had 3 children within 3 years of graduating, which would make it impossible to pay off anything unless you get a much higher paid job.

A friend of mine and his wife took out something in the neighborhood of 100k/each, so they have(or had, been paying a bit now) 200k of student loan debt recently. I think it was a bit of a bad investment, since I think they could have gone to cheaper schools, however they stayed in NYC and make enough for this.

Short story: If you want to take on a big student debt, paying it off is going to require you to go where the high paying jobs are. If you want to raise a family and work for the state, don't take on the debt, your life will be easier.

3 kids while earning $100k in debt? If that's not the embodiment of America's dire lack of financial and family planning skills, then I don't know what is.

> "I’ve stressed to my daughter the importance of not borrowing any money."

Maybe she should just teach them to make responsible decisions instead? Borrowing money can be the right thing to do, but you need to carefully measure the costs and benefits.

Also, it would help not to have 3 kids when you're up to your ears in debt and only earning enough money to support yourself.