Hi, my wife and I have over $100k in student loan debt. We don't plan on paying much of it back
Hello and welcome.
I don't really agree with this. If you are more than able to repay your debt, I feel like you should, instead of leaving it for us taxpayers to pay. Just my two cents.
(Sorry for beating around the bush and highjacking the other thread with this)
I get your concern and I understand how some could think I am shirking my responsibility and doing something underhanded. I fully intended to repay the loan when I entered into the loan agreement. I am still paying it and will continue to pay it per the terms of this (IMHO) overly generous student loan program.
If it is any consolation, we have been paying the loans for at least 10 years.
I don't think that the fact that we might end up having $80-100k of debt forgiven in another 23 years is the biggest cost to the tax payers fyi.
The whole higher education funding structure is so byzantine and full of money sloshing around, I can't even begin to assess the ethical dimensions of our eventual forgiveness of debt.
Allow me to explain. Between Mrs. RootofGood and I, our undergraduate educations were subsidized by the state to the tune of around $100k (in state tuition discount plus some reasonable amortization of capital costs used to fund our proportional share of classrooms, facilities, and support infrastructure). Continue those subsidies into our combined six years of law school and you have another $100k. Throw in a buttload (I learned that term of art in the state-subsidized law school I attended) of federal student loan interest subsidies and interest rate reductions, and you are probably talking another $100k over the life of the loans (our 30 year fixed rates are 0.75% on debt incurred when prime mortgage rates were in the 7% range, and interest did not accrue on Stafford Subsidized loans while the student is in school). I'm leaving out a number of other smaller ways that our educations were subsidized (tax deduction of student loan interest, universities don't pay local property tax, "need based" tuition grants, etc).
We have been the recipient of over $300k in subsidies for our educations. The eventual forgiveness of our student loan indebtedness is in addition to that sum, and represents a small portion of the total education subsidies we received for higher education.
Who knows, our income from investments may far outpace my projections and we will end up repaying a much larger share of our loans (or all of them). I would be completely okay with that, as I don't mind sharing my good fortunes with the federal coffers. I would also be okay with abolishing the income based repayment plan completely, or somehow modifying it so that I would not qualify.