This is a bitch post, so take it with a grain of salt. Also ignore posters that have less than 100 posts. ITT Tech hires shills to give them positive rep on forums.
Please note that this probably wont apply to you unless your from the United States.
When I graduated from school I was bombarded with two options. Either I go into the military or collage. I had counsellors and teachers acting like these where the only two choices and excessively so. The idea of going out and getting a job and real life experience before making a choice wasn't even hinted at.
I decided that I wasn't willing to fight on behave of another countries bottom line; Afghanistan at the time. When I had seen the over seas videos of people celebrating the fall of the twin towers, the people that were celebrating were not the terrorist but rather the average citizens, men, women, and children. As far as I was concerned, those where the real enemy. Why go over there when the mission wasn't complete extermination of all the worlds enemies? In fact, we were helping them and also using it as an excuse to finish Bush's war with Iraq, anther country that should already had been destroyed. Peace... A lie. I wasn't the only one that felt that way. We knew that there would be other hate groups forming terrorist cells, and now we have ISIS. Termination was the solution and our leaders would get us killed 'saving' those people.
Ironically, my chances for a better future would have been better had I gone to the Middle East. I chose what at the time was presented as my only other option. College.
Here's where the story starts. When I went into the school, I made a bad choice right from the start. I chose ITT Tech, which is a for-profit school. These schools wouldn't exist if the system wasn't corrupt. They are terrible and the degree is useless; two things no one bothered to tell me and didn't show up on the front page of Google. I signed two pieces of paper in less than ten minutes that would doom me from that point on.
In the USA you can bankrupt on just about anything. The exception is school loans. School loans come in two types. Federal and Private. Federal loans are fair and easy to pay off. Forms are easy to submit and the loan stays with the government. Private loans are simply evil. They can sell them from one company to another and even break them up without ever telling you the loanee. If you can't make a payment due to job termination, you can't use Deferment. You have to use Forbearance. You have to pay between $60 to $80 a month that doesn't go on the loans for the privilege on not paying on the loans, but the interest will still compound. A deferment is free but only exists for federal loans.
I had $49,000 in school loans. I paid $36,000 back in the first year doing warehouse labour. After that I owed $32,000. I owed $10,000 in federal loans and $22,000 in Private loans. I had started with $24,000 in private loans, and $25,000 in federal loans.
My monthly payment was:
~$900 to the private loans and $60 to the federal loan. I over paid both as much as possible. In hindsight, I should have banked the extra instead of lump sum paying the loan. I didn't know better.
If that math looks confusing to you, imagine that to me at 21. I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. Honestly, I still don't. What I do know is that I was laid off when the warehouse decided to shed half it's staff to improve Warren Buffett's bottom line. I submitted the deferment without trouble. The forbearance was an absolute nightmare. The loan companies kept loosing it, challenging it, or flat out refusing it on the grounds that being terminated from a job wasn't a good enough reason to stop paying ~$900 a month and that I should take out a bank loan to make the monthly payments (They also suggested hitting up friends and family). It took me nearly a year (This was near Christmas when everyone fires their staff for tax purposes) to get employed at another job barely making minimum wage ($6.85/h) at Walmart. I started to pay my loans again, and got a big surprise. My federal loans were fine. My private loans had ballooned to $75,000. No shit, that's $75K. They had a list of reasons, two claimed that I didn't submit a forbearance, and when I showed my copy they claimed it was forged. I called the bar associate and tried to get an attorney only to be told to give up. The loan companies could do what ever they wanted.
To case in point, I'm screwed. I've since paid my federal loans off. I can't make the monthly payment of $1,400 a month to my private loans even now with a better job and when I tried to negotiate a lower payment the people I talked to just laughed. They can too. I have no way out what so ever. Proving hardship is near impossible.
The reason for this post?
I have kept my sisters from taking out loans. The counsellor and teacher pressure onslaught to take out loans was immense. They even denounced me and tried to discredit me to my own siblings. I had one make the mistake of putting a finger in my face to tell me how things were going to be. I knew him from when we were classmates. He backed down when I mentioned my groups name and that we still meet on the weekends. We're not above petty violence, is how I put it. He knew that much.
I had them take a year off after graduation and see the United States for what it was. They got jobs and are easily making collage payments directly without a problem in combination with grants and scholarships, options I originally didn't know about until later but learned about in time for them.
Recently my sister has started the process of buying a house.
She's been in the process of buying the house since August 10th, 2015. We still haven't closed the deal here on September 25th, 2015. The seller is cool, we're cool, but the bank is delaying due to established full time job history being less than a year due to one pay stub being less than 38 hours. Not only that, they did two appraisals, and we had to pay for an investigation. She's signed hundreds of documents, and when I gave her some money (since I'm moving in with her) I had to fill out two forms called gift letters. I can't cosign or buy my own house since Salliemae (Navient now) made sure my credit score drifts at 500 forever. All this for a subsidized FHA loan. Meaning they can take the house when ever they like. All they have to do is have the insurance company drop us, write a report barring us from getting it from elsewhere, and the house is theirs along with what ever we pay.
Getting a school loan should be this difficult.
I mentioned it before, a school loan is undischargeable in bankruptcy. The reason for this is that rich people used to get a Harvard degree and then bankrupt the loan. Instead of focusing the loans toward community collage, they instead screwed everyone who wasn't rich. The crazy part is that those same rich people who used to use bankruptcy for a free degree are the chief lenders for the private loans.
Fun right?
So, who here got screwed?
Who is going to side with the banks?
Who is going to compare their education systems with the United States forgetting that in the U.S. the average class room size is less than 20 while theirs are done in massive halls?
I feel better venting a bit. I know now that I should NEVER had given into my elders. They were wrong. Hindsight is 20/20. It's my perpetual hope that student loans become bankrupt-able. Poor people like I was need to work into a better position. It makes us better. Getting loans and not working through the hard part just makes a society of liberals who want to make decisions that only effect others. A useless, ungrateful, broken society.
Please note that this probably wont apply to you unless your from the United States.
When I graduated from school I was bombarded with two options. Either I go into the military or collage. I had counsellors and teachers acting like these where the only two choices and excessively so. The idea of going out and getting a job and real life experience before making a choice wasn't even hinted at.
I decided that I wasn't willing to fight on behave of another countries bottom line; Afghanistan at the time. When I had seen the over seas videos of people celebrating the fall of the twin towers, the people that were celebrating were not the terrorist but rather the average citizens, men, women, and children. As far as I was concerned, those where the real enemy. Why go over there when the mission wasn't complete extermination of all the worlds enemies? In fact, we were helping them and also using it as an excuse to finish Bush's war with Iraq, anther country that should already had been destroyed. Peace... A lie. I wasn't the only one that felt that way. We knew that there would be other hate groups forming terrorist cells, and now we have ISIS. Termination was the solution and our leaders would get us killed 'saving' those people.
Ironically, my chances for a better future would have been better had I gone to the Middle East. I chose what at the time was presented as my only other option. College.
Here's where the story starts. When I went into the school, I made a bad choice right from the start. I chose ITT Tech, which is a for-profit school. These schools wouldn't exist if the system wasn't corrupt. They are terrible and the degree is useless; two things no one bothered to tell me and didn't show up on the front page of Google. I signed two pieces of paper in less than ten minutes that would doom me from that point on.
In the USA you can bankrupt on just about anything. The exception is school loans. School loans come in two types. Federal and Private. Federal loans are fair and easy to pay off. Forms are easy to submit and the loan stays with the government. Private loans are simply evil. They can sell them from one company to another and even break them up without ever telling you the loanee. If you can't make a payment due to job termination, you can't use Deferment. You have to use Forbearance. You have to pay between $60 to $80 a month that doesn't go on the loans for the privilege on not paying on the loans, but the interest will still compound. A deferment is free but only exists for federal loans.
I had $49,000 in school loans. I paid $36,000 back in the first year doing warehouse labour. After that I owed $32,000. I owed $10,000 in federal loans and $22,000 in Private loans. I had started with $24,000 in private loans, and $25,000 in federal loans.
My monthly payment was:
~$900 to the private loans and $60 to the federal loan. I over paid both as much as possible. In hindsight, I should have banked the extra instead of lump sum paying the loan. I didn't know better.
If that math looks confusing to you, imagine that to me at 21. I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. Honestly, I still don't. What I do know is that I was laid off when the warehouse decided to shed half it's staff to improve Warren Buffett's bottom line. I submitted the deferment without trouble. The forbearance was an absolute nightmare. The loan companies kept loosing it, challenging it, or flat out refusing it on the grounds that being terminated from a job wasn't a good enough reason to stop paying ~$900 a month and that I should take out a bank loan to make the monthly payments (They also suggested hitting up friends and family). It took me nearly a year (This was near Christmas when everyone fires their staff for tax purposes) to get employed at another job barely making minimum wage ($6.85/h) at Walmart. I started to pay my loans again, and got a big surprise. My federal loans were fine. My private loans had ballooned to $75,000. No shit, that's $75K. They had a list of reasons, two claimed that I didn't submit a forbearance, and when I showed my copy they claimed it was forged. I called the bar associate and tried to get an attorney only to be told to give up. The loan companies could do what ever they wanted.
To case in point, I'm screwed. I've since paid my federal loans off. I can't make the monthly payment of $1,400 a month to my private loans even now with a better job and when I tried to negotiate a lower payment the people I talked to just laughed. They can too. I have no way out what so ever. Proving hardship is near impossible.
The reason for this post?
I have kept my sisters from taking out loans. The counsellor and teacher pressure onslaught to take out loans was immense. They even denounced me and tried to discredit me to my own siblings. I had one make the mistake of putting a finger in my face to tell me how things were going to be. I knew him from when we were classmates. He backed down when I mentioned my groups name and that we still meet on the weekends. We're not above petty violence, is how I put it. He knew that much.
I had them take a year off after graduation and see the United States for what it was. They got jobs and are easily making collage payments directly without a problem in combination with grants and scholarships, options I originally didn't know about until later but learned about in time for them.
Recently my sister has started the process of buying a house.
She's been in the process of buying the house since August 10th, 2015. We still haven't closed the deal here on September 25th, 2015. The seller is cool, we're cool, but the bank is delaying due to established full time job history being less than a year due to one pay stub being less than 38 hours. Not only that, they did two appraisals, and we had to pay for an investigation. She's signed hundreds of documents, and when I gave her some money (since I'm moving in with her) I had to fill out two forms called gift letters. I can't cosign or buy my own house since Salliemae (Navient now) made sure my credit score drifts at 500 forever. All this for a subsidized FHA loan. Meaning they can take the house when ever they like. All they have to do is have the insurance company drop us, write a report barring us from getting it from elsewhere, and the house is theirs along with what ever we pay.
Getting a school loan should be this difficult.
I mentioned it before, a school loan is undischargeable in bankruptcy. The reason for this is that rich people used to get a Harvard degree and then bankrupt the loan. Instead of focusing the loans toward community collage, they instead screwed everyone who wasn't rich. The crazy part is that those same rich people who used to use bankruptcy for a free degree are the chief lenders for the private loans.
Fun right?
So, who here got screwed?
Who is going to side with the banks?
Who is going to compare their education systems with the United States forgetting that in the U.S. the average class room size is less than 20 while theirs are done in massive halls?
I feel better venting a bit. I know now that I should NEVER had given into my elders. They were wrong. Hindsight is 20/20. It's my perpetual hope that student loans become bankrupt-able. Poor people like I was need to work into a better position. It makes us better. Getting loans and not working through the hard part just makes a society of liberals who want to make decisions that only effect others. A useless, ungrateful, broken society.
