Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans

When I left this site this morning, this thread had two pages.

It's now at 17. What the hell happened?

Looks like I have a lot of reading to get caught up on.

 

Numero uno on this list is the aggressive re-defining of the word "intent."

 

Followed closely by the redefining of the word "fraud."

 

I have two debts I will never pay back.

One is from an Amazon.com credit card charge of about $100. I paid most of it, but somehow stopped receiving bills then forgot about it. A few months later I am notified by a creditor I owe like $200. The fees and interest made it double what I owed on the original principal.

Another is from an electric bill I forgot about when I moved a few years ago. By the time they caught up with me it was defaulted and I owed $600. Since I was already in a new place with a new electric provider, I had no reason to pay it.

Every once in awhile I'll be bored and answer the call from the debt collectors and tell them I'm never going to pay it. My credit already sucks, so it's not going to do any more damage there. Paying it won't help out enough to make it worth it. I just try to see how long they'll stay on the phone with me while I say no, I'm not paying.

I am making payments on my student loans, which will be paid off in about 50 years.

 

Might I remind you that this is the society that you and your fellow libertarians desire, free of a framework of government incentives and disincentives. So keep on with the moral scolding. I'm sure it'll take eventually.

 

Why don't you just acknowledge that this is a failure of a marketplace without enough government involvement?

 

It's not a semantic game. You accused him of committing a criminal act and I disagree with that characterization. I disagree with your assertion about him entering the contract under false pretenses and I disagree with your statement that because he did not pay back the loan, it means he never intended to pay it back. I think they're all absurd statements.

His decision to default is much more akin to a business decision than it is to a criminal act.

For the record, I don't agree with his decision to default. I'd love to stop paying off my student loan and there have been times in the past where it was burdensome to the point I received a forbearance so I could get my finances in order. But I will pay it off eventually because that means something to me.

But this guy made a decision that makes fiscal sense for him and he's decided that the benefits of defaulting on the loan (gaining more financial stability) outweigh the consequences (bad credit, limited ability to borrow money in the future).

 

And seriously, dude, you were throwing All-Star Games and "mound presence" at me when comparing Jack Morris and Mark Buehrle. Someone's irrational here. It's not me.

 

Not really ... His government made some people underwrite the investments made by other people. Further, his government prevented those latter people from doing the kind of due diligence a lender would generally engage in. Without Uncle Sam back there virtually co-signing the note(s), he probably doesn't get this money.

This story absolutely DOES NOT involve transactions "free of a framework of government incentives and disincentives." The heavy hand of the state is there every step of the way.

Maybe because this is failure of government?