Curious why https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/24/sofi-is-a-buy-as-biden-forgives-student-loans-mizuho-says.html
Anyone here have cnbc pro?
Borrowers that paid off their loans are being told the system sucks and while we aren’t doing anything for you, we are trying to make it better for others still effected by forgiving 500 billion in loans. You should be happy for them.
Why not say to past college students, the system sucks and while we aren’t doing anything for you, we are putting 500 billion towards making college affordable for future college students ( like the 90s ). You should be happy for them.
Is the difference just that future college students can’t vote yet? To make this bandaid even worse, a current high school senior gets the same or higher cost of attendance in the fall with no access to $10k forgiveness.
3 Likes
“You did the right thing, but instead we’re going to reward the guy who didn’t do the right thing.”. What is there to be happy about? And what lesson does it teach besides “don’t do the right thing because you’ll just get penalized later”?
3 Likes
Just wait a while… Those current high school graduates will eventually vote and demand the same or bigger write-off for them too. This is a slippery slope to be exploited by AOC and future Squad members.
5 Likes
Same way with investments just b/c I don’t like the company’s policies I would still invest in it if was a good ROI, which my education WAS (GI Bill+Pell Grants+ now loan forgiveness).
How did you end up with so much student loan debt with both GI Bill AND Pell Grants?
That sounds crazy, unless it was med school or law school, and the income doesn’t imply the former.
1 Like
FYI, DOE = Department of Energy. Department of Education = ED.
When you fail to pay your loans back to the DOE, they turn your house into the next portal to the Upside Down.
3 Likes
I mostly get that impression from you, BUT when you mention how much interest you’ve paid, you kinda bring it up in a similar way when I hear other people explicitly say it wasn’t fair that they had to (or still have to) pay all that interest. I have yet to be convinced by someone that had to pay tons of interest on their loans that they we preyed upon when they took them out.
3 Likes
I think he said earlier he went to an ivy for undergrad and then an MBA. There will be tons of ivy league/MBA grads that benefit from this and that should make 80% of the country angry as hell.
I don’t know how many people clicked on that article I posted from national review about what the republicans in congress and at the state level should do in response to this, but I really do believe, from a political perspective, this is a burn-the-whole place down sort of move that Biden and the democrats have brought upon themselves. Moreso than Obamacare. Moreso than the Kavanaugh hearings. Moreso than fake Russian collusion.
I think he said earlier he went to an ivy for undergrad and then an MBA.
Ah, I wasn’t considering an overly expensive undergrad when Pell and GI Bill were mentioned, since a Pell Grant recipient “should” get significantly discounted tuition from the Ivy in the first place.
MBA on the other hand, depending on where they went could have really pissed away some money.
But, having a “general sense” of his age (knowing of him by username from the old FWF days), I didn’t connect the dots that his income level might include an MBA, since it just seemed like fairly normal mid-career income for a “professional”.
Anyway – not really any of our business other than him having brought it all up. But it does make me curious, because I am always interested by how these student debt situations come about.
I assume you’re skewing this because of membership on fwf and here. Over $125k/yr is NOT normal mid-career income for a professional with or without a masters degree.
Over $125k/yr is NOT normal mid-career income for a professional with or without a masters degree.
It certainly isn’t “abnormal” 
It may require some level of specialization, but doesn’t require an exotic educational background (Ivy) or a follow-on degree like an MBA (and I would argue that an MBA making that amount probably didn’t get their money’s-worth versus any other masters they might have pursued, where a technical field masters should be paid-for and come with a stipend, if you really belong there).
There are all sorts of “levels” of MBA out there now. I know of a few dopey MBA that got theirs online and just use it as a resume builder. We’re no longer talking about only people that got executive MBAs while working full time in a legit managerial role that turned their MBA into a stepping stone to the c-suite.
But as for normal - I always consider median to be normal. The median annual earnings for someone with a masters is $80k. That includes people 1 year into their career, and people about to retire. The median for an MBA is higher, I’m sure. But I don’t believe it is 56% higher. When I searched for a comparable number to the $80k masters figure, all I could find was the average MBA salary. That number to me isn’t useful when looking for a normal salary because it can be so skewed by ginormous CEO salaries.
But as for normal - I always consider median to be normal.
I think that considerably undercuts what is meant by the word “normal”.
The median is certainly the center of whatever bounds as “normal”, but higher or lower than median is still “normal” by any practical use of the word I’m familiar with.
Arguably, for income “normal” would probably include the middle 3 quintiles AT LEAST. (i.e. 20-40%, 40-60% and 60-80% percentiles)
And quite reasonably, I think, one could even argue that up to the 90% decile is still quite “normal” in terms of what that income implies both in terms of spending power and how one got there in terms of career trajectory.
Regardless - simply saying that $125k is “56% higher than median income” does NOT imply any level of “not normal”. That is just comparing two income levels by magnitude – it says absolutely nothing about how many people, relatively, earn at the higher level – or even what percentage of people earn at the median itself.
And I want to be clear – I’m not saying that an individual earning $125k is “middle-middle class” – they have probably broached the toe-hold of “upper middle class” for individual income, if they have a spouse that earns anything at all – but they are still “normal” in the amount of income they are earning, in that it isn’t an major outlier that can’t be reasonable acheived.
1 Like
But as for normal - I always consider median to be normal. The median annual earnings for someone with a masters is $80k. That includes people 1 year into their career, and people about to retire.
That last bit is in conflict with my comment of “mid-career professional”, in that most professional career trajectories I am familiar with involve a steeper rise, early on, and start to plane-out mid-career through the end with smaller increases in salary.
That is – the “median” earnings for a professional are likely somewhere in the earlier years (before the “mid-career” mark not “during”).
Then again – maybe we have different definitions of “mid-career”, since we clearly have different definitions of what we consider to be “normal” 
1 Like
These headlines write themselves
It’s unfair to force a truck driver to pay a loan for someone who got a PhD in gender studies.
Taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for student loan relief and Biden’s order isn’t constitutional.
If anything, universities handing out worthless degrees should be on the hook.
3 Likes
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven.
Wonder what her “business” does?
I do agree w/ DeSantis that universities should be on the hook, but just like the mortgage brokers/wall st. they are the ultimate beneficiaries of bad govt. policies.
He will get my vote b/c he’s qualified, intelligent . Only thing he needs to tone down his bravado a la Trump.
More than likely the pendulum will swing the other way. No more moderates.
With his level of typos/grammar, I’m very glad that only one of my kids went to an Ivy. No offense, @jesselivermore, but I will presume that you’re so incredibly busy paying off your loans that you can’t run a spell/grammar check … or learning how to avoid paying off your loans.
Curios not only about year that will be used but also definition of Gross Income, is it adjusted gross income? Will be income from investments counted? If they will use 2021 - nothing could be done, but if that is 2022 - there are some opportunities to slide under the limit.
2 Likes
Back to the topic of student loans…
I saw several posts online in my facebook feed about people claiming they have been paying on their student loans for years and their balance has either not gone down, or in some cases, gone up. I also saw a claim from someone that said they had one with 100% interest. I have cordially questioned these claims from people and so far, only one person has responded. It was a 47 year old lady that says she owes 3 times as much as she originally borrowed ($120k from $40k) and says she’ll never be able to pay off her loan. After I asked her nicely how this all happened, she explained that early in her post college life, she was unemployed for 4 years and didn’t pay her loans at all during that period (I assume it was medical related, but she didn’t go into it). After that (she didn’t say the date), she got on a income based repayment (IBR) plan. She now pays a whopping $5 a month. When I asked her specifically, “so you now pay what you can afford and will have it paid off in 25 years?” She said it would never be paid off. I informed her that people on IBR automatically have their loans forgiven after 25 years. I also pointed out that she will pay only $1,500 total to extinguish her original $40,000 debt. And if, for some reason, she isn’t actually eligible for forgiveness, if she keeps paying until she’s dead and lives to be 100, she’ll only pay $3,180 to extinguish her $40,000 debt. She “liked” those responses, but then replied with, “Honestly, it’s the interest. It’s ridiculous and unnecessary.” I wanted to scream at her, “You are not only getting out of paying the interest, you aren’t even going to pay 96% of your original principal!”
It really steams my hams when someone posts their “woe is me” story like that (all her original post said was that she owes 3x what she borrowed because of interest) and then leaves out the fact that what happened makes perfect sense - she let the interest accumulate and add to her total amount owed because she didn’t pay for years AND she is now paying almost nothing, yet not considered in default, and will eventually only have to pay a small percentage of what she actually took out. Had I not pressed her for answers, everyone would just take at face value that student loans don’t work the same as every other loan and can balloon into these giant albatrosses around people’s necks through no fault of their own - just greedy bankers sticking it to the little guy to make exorbitant amounts of profit through predatory interest rates.
5 Likes
My observation from that exchange, and considering how the interest can considerably exceed the actual payment size, with an IBR – is that it creates a problematic disincentive to actually earning more money, since you are building up a growing balance-owed, that will presumably factor into how much you’ll ultimately need to pay off when/if you earn more money to handle the payments.
It would probably make sense to have IBR payments cap accrued interest at the size of the payment, so that, while you may not bring down principal, you’re at least not digging the hole deeper in the meantime.
2 Likes