Saw this one yesterday, and it really pissed me off... some excerpts:
"Sallie Mae brought more than 100 of its employees to Hawaii in August to celebrate a record year — $5 billion in student loans to 374,000 borrowers." - This equates to an average loan of $13,368.98, but clearly they are taking advantage of people...
Then they get into the "woe is me, I was taken advantage of by a big company" bit - this is where I lost it:
"Paige McDaniel, 39, took out a federal Sallie Mae student loan to pay for her undergraduate degree 20 years ago. Six years later, before the Sallie Mae split with Navient, she took out a private loan with the company to pay for her grad school.
'I thought they were the same kind of loans,' McDaniel, of the Denver suburb Elizabeth, said. A mother of two,
she borrowed $120,000 for her tuition at Lakeland College for a master's in business administration, to
help with the cost of living as she worked through school.The agreement, which
included a warning to read it before signing, said the interest rate was variable, but she says
she doesn't remember being told the rate was much higher on the private loan.
After graduation, Sallie Mae expected McDaniel to pay 'well over $1,500 a month,' she said.
'When I told them that, you know, I couldn't afford that, could we make some payment arrangements, they essentially said, 'So sorry, we'll put a lien on your house and garnish your wages if you don't make those payments,'' McDaniel said.
Now, McDaniel owes $304,000, even though she
declared bankruptcy to protect her house after being unable to make her payments. She’s hired an attorney to sue Navient, arguing that
bankruptcy should have cleared her debt because it was a private loan.
'There’s no way anybody can ever dig themselves out from underneath that,” McDaniel said. "
They just don't see that there are families on the other side of this. It's not just my generation cause I have the loans, it affects my children. How am I going to send them to college?'"
So let me get this straight... you went for your MASTERS DEGREE in Business Administration, took on an additional $120,000 in debt to "help" while you're going to school, don't pay attention to the terms of your loan agreement, get upset that you can't just make the debt go away, then expect me to feel sorry for you and your kids??? Hopefully the kids learn from their mother's terrible example. I just... can't... wow...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sallie-mae-execs-tan-maui-retreat-while-student-debt-crisis-n1063826