St Casimirs Mortgage Minute

Nothing to do but pay until we die’ – student loan debts soar among the over-60 crowd

 

by Bob Sullivan

  It’s an old joke that’s quickly becoming reality for many student loan borrowers: “I’ll be paying off my student loans until I die.”

During the past decade, there’s been a stunning rise in student loan debt owed by older Americans. The number of Americans aged 60 or older with one or more student loans quadrupled from 2005 to 2015, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau revealed last week. The average debt load on that group has swelled from $12,000 to $23,500. And there has been a near five-fold increase in the number of retired Americans who see their Social Security checks auto-deducted to pay off federal student loans in default.  
Ken Stumpf, a 70-year-old borrower from Colorado, lays out the stark reality he and his wife face.
“We are both buried from our own student debt. Nothing to do but pay until we die,” he said.
(This story first appeared on Credit.com. Read it there.)
Stumpf spent 15 years in the Air Force and U.S. Army, mostly working as an information technology specialist; then another 18 years as a civilian IT specialist for the Army. His mixture of federal and private student loans are current, but there’s no chance he’ll ever pay them off. In the mid-1990s, he went to graduate school to earn a master’s in Recreation and Park Administration. He borrowed $70,749 to pay for that degree. After a combination of deferrals and minimum payments, today his monthly student loan bill is a fairly reasonable $227. But his outstanding balance is $81,000 — more than he initially borrowed.

Read more here.