Category Archives: Student loans

In October 2023, the Department of education has come out with a new wrinkle that may help a few borrowers who have been waiting for Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) for their student loans. Broadly, PSLF wipes out student loan balances for borrowers who have done full time work for a non-profit employer for a […]

Paying off student loan debt can be plenty challenging enough when you are trying to finance your own education; but parents who borrow to help put their children through school are in a whole other league when it comes to repaying the loans. That’s partially due to the fact that parents are usually in a […]

With federal student loan forgiveness scrapped by the Supreme Court, beginning around September, 2023 millions of Americans will have to start making Federal student loan payments again. But if your annual income is below a certain level, and you are accepted into an income – contingent repayment plan, monthly payments will still be nada, nil, […]

As of May 16th, 2014 there has been a new development, a bit of a surprising twist, you might say, in the saga of student loan collections. Seven Democratic congressmen (including Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts) have sent an open letter (text here) to the Department of Education asking them to clarify what qualifies as […]

Student loans are impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, right? So goes a lot of street wisdom, but take a look at what actually happened in court in Massachusetts in January, 2014. A disbarred lawyer with criminal convictions stemming from some wild incidents in his law practice (he was tossed from the bar after a mere […]

Getting out from under a load of privately held student loans is no easy trick, even in bankruptcy court. Debtors may have a new weapon soon, however, as the idea of re-financing these loans at lower rates is just getting started. According to Sheryl Harris in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Charter One Bank in Ohio […]

Over the Easter weekend, a lot was written about the massive growing problem of student loan defaults — which some commentators think might soon approach the problems associated with the recent real estate crash. In an Associated Press article, William Brewer, president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, “This could very well be […]

Recently I published an article over on AVVO about how debtors trying to get themselves out of student loans through a bankruptcy filing soon find themselves caught in a Catch-22 situation. You can read it here. It wasn’t always this way; up to the mid 1990’s, student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy seven years after […]