Originally Posted by
Williamsmith
The lower your payment, the less each individual loan gets addressed, the less principle you pay, the more interest accrues, the more interest accrues, the more they will eventually make off you when by no fault of your own through life's cruel odds (insert accident or physical/mental illness here) you will violate their terms of the loan and they will jerk the rug out from under your feet and tell you that there will be no loan forgiveness. The longer you remain owing, the more they maximize their ability to soak you for as much as possible by virtue of increasing the odds something bad happens to you. The best case scenario for them is to keep you paying until death do you part.
Minimalism does include not only freedom from the burden of things but freedom from financial burdens also......right? Unfortunately, at least with an auto or home loan, you can declare bankruptcy and allow repossession of the asset. Not so with your student loan, what are they going to repossess? Which ought to get you thinking about how honest they are being when they allude to an eventual forgiveness of part of your loan.
And at at this point with just 100 or so physical possessions, what is your total net worth?
I know now the amount of money you owe sounds insurmountable but that's how they planned the scam in the first place. I recommend picking the smallest loan with the highest interest rate and target that one. Get off the income based repayment scam one loan at a time.
Be be a loan minimalist. Easy for me to say, I really do sympathize with you.