Life led Elizabeth Hadzic and Kim Coles to bankruptcy court.
Hadzic, 50, a psychotherapist in Maryland, doesn’t make enough to support herself and her adult son, whose health struggles set her back thousands of dollars. Coles, an accountant in Oregon in her late 60s, was laid off last year.
Both have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Although they have been making payments on those loans for years, they no longer can. And both, in the absence of an alternative, have resorted to taking the costly, typically unsuccessful route of trying to get their loans discharged in bankruptcy court.
That’s where things diverge.
For Hadzic, bankruptcy is proving to be the answer to her financial woes. After months of litigation, she’s on track for a full discharge. In Coles’ case, the government is putting up a fight − though she is of retirement age − against discharging the balance of a loan she’s been paying down for more than a decade.
“I always paid my student loans,” Coles said in an interview. “I was never late.”
The disparity in how the government is treating their cases is indicative of the intractability of one of the country’s most extreme and inaccessible forms of student debt relief, as the Biden administration grapples with finding alternatives to the kind of sweeping student loan forgiveness option that the Supreme Court struck down in June.
When my wife and I went through bankruptcy we didn’t get any student debt relief. And now the want to give people student debt relief!? That’s awesome, we should be try to help people out of debt any way we can.
Had me in the first half
one of these women is in her ‘late 60s’ and only been paying student loans for ‘more than a decade’–they would have phrased that differently had they been paying for more than 20 years.
so she went back to school on loans at what? aged 50? 55? older? why??
How dare she want to continue her education!!
Am I not allowed to go to uni because I got a job? The fuck?
I believe this is a strategy to encourage young student voters to vote for Biden.
Don’t borrow what you can’t afford to repay. Easy. Not everyone was stupid enough to get indebted up to their eyeballs, and many weren’t “fortunate” enough to even try.
Student debt is sold based on a lie about earnings potential for graduates. Debtors are told that they’ll be making X amount of money and will be able to pay off their debt in Y number of years. Then they graduate and find out it was all a lie.
