Education costs linger into your working world

Having worked on student loan issues since the early ’90s, Deanne Loonin has seen the problem escalate exponentially over the last 15 years. “When I started there was a lot of fraud in the proprietary school sector [for-profit training and education schools],” she says. “But the problem of student debt has really ballooned, so now people who go to legitimate schools wind up buried in debt.”
Now Loonin is the director of the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project at the nonprofit National Consumer Law Center, and a leading expert on the issue. She says it’s important to familiarize yourself with the basics, before you look into things like flexible repayment, loan forgiveness, cancellation and consolidation. The first step: Is your loan a federal or private loan?
“The good news about federal loans is there is a long period before you go into default, so it’s important to communicate with them to work something out, such as deferment and flexible repayment,” says Loonin. “The bad news is that if you fail to do something, the government can come after you in ways that private creditors can’t, and there’s no time limit for what they can do — such as garnishing wages, taking social security benefits and taking stimulus checks.”


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