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Borrowed Future
Ep 6: Don’t Bank on Student Loan Forgiveness
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Less than 1% of applicants get their college debt forgiven, so the current student loan forgiveness program is an epic failure. Politicians are making big promises on how they will forgive student loans, but where will that 2 trillion dollars come from?
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So how much student loans did you leave school with? I would say around $20,000. Yeah. And that was how many years ago that you graduated now? About five. So five years ago you left with 20 grand. Where are you at now with your student loans? What's the total? Somewhere around 15? Yeah, because I kind of put them in deferment for a little while. So do you think the government should forgive student loan debt? Absolutely. Absolutely. Especially if you're paying your taxes like you should. You're a law abiding citizen and you're helping society out. You know, I feel like student loans should be forgiven. How much do you think a college degree should cost? Nothing. If a student decides that they want to go to college, that should be their personal choice. How long would it take if you made these payments? Roughly about 20 years. And then my loans should be forgiven at that point. Is that part of the program, is that in 20 years they'll be forgiven? So you kind of plan on making the minimum payments for 20 years? Correct, that's my plan. And hopefully they'll be forgiven at that point. What happens if a policy changes or something like that and they go, nope, we're not forgiving loans anymore. You're out of luck. Honestly, I feel stuck. I feel like I've wasted a lot of money, you know, because I put all this time and invested all this money into this program that I thought will be of a benefit for me, but turns out it wasn't. Good luck in paying off the loans. From Ramsey Network, I'm George Camel and this is Borrowed Future, a podcast series exploring the $1.6 trillion student loan debt crisis and the impact it's having on real people. In this episode, we'll talk about the current student loan forgiveness program, what politicians are promising, and what the future will look like if a student loan crisis doesn't end. Here's Anthony o', Neill, author of the best selling book Debt Free Degree. We need to stop waiting for someone else to fix our issues. We signed that paperwork. You signed that paperwork. It is your responsibility to get yourself into college debt free. And let me be real with you. If you signed that student loan paperwork and you already have student loans, it is not the government's responsibility to pay off your student loans because that means taxpayers are paying off your student loans. No, you got to get a job and you have to aggressively go after it. I took out student loans. I didn't wait for the government. I didn't even complain about the government. I made that decision and I paid them off. But if you right now are saying, you know what? I'm going to take out this student loan, I'm going to get into education, and I'm going to go work for a rural area, and they're going to forgive all my student loans 10 years later. Well, let me tell you this. Right now, it's not looking positive. If you're waiting for the government to sit here and forgive all your student loans, stop it. Stop it. With 1 in 4Americans saddled with student loans, lots of people are trying to find relief for borrowers and figure out a solution to this crisis, including the government. In 2007, Congress created the Public Service Student Loan Forgiveness Program. The pitch? Spend 10 years working in public service, make payments every month for those 10 years, and then the government will magically forgive your federal loans. Fast forward 10 years later to 2017. 30,000 borrowers applied for forgiveness, and 96 people were forgiven. 96. That's less than 1%. Statistically, you're more likely to get your tax return audited than you are to get your loans forgiven. As you can imagine, people were outraged. So the government created the Tempor Expanded Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program to try to help. This one had fewer rules and regulations. So this time, over 54,000 people applied, and they had incredible results. 661 people had their loans forgiven. They finally hit 1%. The worst part of waiting on forgiveness is that while you're making minimum payments, interest is still accruing over 10 years. So if you're a part of that 99% who applied and didn't make the cut, you're now on the hook for an even larger balance. I talked to Rhonda. She trusted the government to help her out with college tuition. Here's our conversation. Tell me about this TEACH Grant and what you thought it was going to do. So the TEACH Grant was designed for individuals going into education who were going to give four years back to education. And as a result of that, The Department of Ed would forgive about 17,500 total of this grant. And that number is different per person. Depending on how much you borrowed, you could borrow up to 4,000 per year. So you had this loan that you thought was going to be forgiven, and then what happened? So you had to recertify every year. And in that certification process, we had to turn paperwork into the Department of Ed, and we were never given a yes, we got it, or no, we didn't get it. It was basically trust us. And so many people trusted. I was one of those individuals that trusted and this grant that I was given actually was converted into a loan because they had decertified us all. And so I've spent the last two years trying to fix this problem. But it wasn't until February when the Department of Ed actually was forced to open up all of these TEACH grants and allow teachers to recertify, or most of us. When you say forced, what do you mean they were forced? There were some teachers that took the Department of Ed to court and it was during that litigious process where the Department of Ed agreed that they would go back and open up these loans and give teachers an opportunity to come back and recertify grants that had previously been turned into loans. So how much faith do you now have in student loan forgiveness programs? I don't have a whole lot of faith in them because I've been assured since February that I have turned in all of the paperwork that I needed to do in order to have my loan converted back to this TEACH grant. And yet last week I received a letter in the mail stating that I needed to continue the recertification process. Even though I was only supposed to certify for four years, I turned in paperwork for five and I'm told I'm still not done. So I feel like I'm going through the process all over again. Despite the odds not being in your favor, people are still banking on the solution to wipe out their student loans. The current program is broken and many 2020 presidential hopefuls have their own opinions on how to fix the problem. There are literally tens of millions of Americans who are being crushed by outstanding student loan debt. Our plan will cancel a substantial amount of student debt and in some ways probably go further than Senator Warren's. My bill cancels all of 1.6 trillion student loan debt. No exceptions, no questions asked, full cancellation. We should have free tuition at public colleges and universities. That should be a right of all Americans, regardless of the income of their families. It was federal action on the whole that has foisted debt upon a generation. It is unconscionable that Congress would do that. We have to fix the law. Student loan debt. I'm going to work to fix it because it's outrageous. What's happening, what we tell 17 year olds all the time is that you are not old enough or responsible enough to drink. You are not old enough or responsible enough to vote. You are not old enough or responsible enough to serve in our military, but you are old enough and responsible enough to take on a quarter million dollars worth of debt. And that is wrong. It is not right. It all sounds really great, doesn't it? Who doesn't want their student loans cancelled in exchange for a vote? Dave Ramsey has some concerns that forgiveness programs are going to hurt the economy and everyone in it more than it's going to solve anything. We have $1.6 trillion in student loan debt and we have candidates talking about forgiving these student loans. We need to keep in mind these are federally insured student loans. Forgiving the student loan means the student doesn't have to pay it, but it does mean the government will. And guess where the government's going to get that money? Taxes. Guess what taxes do. They pull money from the economy and produce nothing. And so it would be a tremendous drain on the economy to suck almost $2 trillion out of the economy to fund this. Oh, and if you don't raise taxes by that much, you will raise the debt that the government has by that much. And so, well, I mean, what's another trillion or two, right, with the government? But again, that debt is money sucked out of the economy. And so instead of producers producing the money to clear the debt, we're going to suck the money out of the economy. This is going to be a huge drain on the economy. And there's an issue of fairness. What about all the people that paid their student loans? What about those of us as taxpayers really don't want to pay extra taxes to pay off someone else's debt that we didn't sign up for? How is this moral? It's not moral. It's a way to get votes from desperate, scared people. And it's not well thought through. Socialism never is. I would be okay discussing some kind of relief in certain situations for some of the people with the $1.6 trillion in debt only after the program is ended. If it's so bad that we need to forgive the loans, why are we continuing to make them? Congress needs to stop the federally insured student loan program now. Now that will cause college prices to come down because they will no longer have this continuous flow of money towards them that will cause people to realize, oh, I have to pay for school. Now I'm going to do a value judgment on the school. I want to know what I get for what I pay. And I'm going to compare prices between the two because I'm not dealing with monopoly money. Wiser decisions will be made, prices will come down. Then we can discuss the 1.6 trillion and we can say, okay, who's really caught? Who really got taken advantage of, under what circumstances can we do some matching type forgiveness where if you work and you pay off 50,000, maybe we the taxpayer do eat 50,000, but it has to be only one time. It can't be in perpetuation because you continue to make the stupid loans. That is illogical. It's bad critical thinking that we're going to go over here and we're going to fix the. That's like saying, I want to pay off my credit card while I'm still using the other one. You know, I'm going in debt with this one, but I'm going to pay this one off. I mean, what are you going to. Why would you not take out a whole bunch of student loans if you're a person sitting there today if you think they're all going to be forgiven by the government, this really becomes illogical, it really becomes ludicrous. So the only way we can discuss the forgiveness idea is to first stop the program and admit Congress needs to admit they're hurting their citizenry. They're bringing harm to the people they're called to serve with the student loan program, originally it was well intentioned. So what? It's not anymore. It's out of control. It should be stopped. Forgiveness programs are like a band aid that can't stop the bleeding. And the folks in Washington D.C. can't ignore this any longer. Here's Marsha Blackburn, U.S. senator for Tennessee. We hear from students every day that say, look, I got a degree but now I can't get a job. And what I want to do is go to a trade school so I can get a skill to go work and get myself on a path to earning an income. And they've got this burden of this debt around them. So one of the things that is being discussed is do you want to send this back to the community bank the way it used to be? And that helps get the interest rate down and get the federal government out of it. You know, it's very typical when you look at the federal government's participation in just about anything, whether it is health care or economic development or student loans, the list goes on and on. Federal government intervention is going to drive up the cost. Driving up the cost of already skyrocketing college tuition sounds like a step in the wrong direction. Brad Barnett, financial aid director at James Madison University, agrees. So there's this perception versus reality of what student loan debt does to people, right? There's all these different methodologies out there. You know, for example, make sure that your student loan borrowing is not equal to more than one year of your projected salary, and then you're okay. And there's all these different methodologies that are out there. I personally have never subscribed to that. And the reason is the future is really not guaranteed. I mean, you don't know what's going to happen when you get out of school. There's also this idea of, well, I can borrow and then some of my loans will be forgiven when I get out. If I go into a certain field, teaching or whatever the public loan service are giving us, there's all these different things. I've been doing this for two plus decades, and I can tell you Congress gives and Congress takes away. You know, I never advise anyone to borrow based on the law today about what will happen to their loans in six or seven years, because the next Congress could come in and completely negate it. So there's a lot of risk involved in looking to the future to justify some of your borrowing today. Okay, now, with that said, years ago, I had a friend of mine who's a lawyer, and we were kind of hanging out at the house and we were having a conversation. He looked kind of little down in the dumps. And I asked him, I said, what's going on? And he said, well, I'm a lawyer. You know, I've got a wife, I got a couple kids, I got a mortgage. When I went to law school, I took out all the loans I could get because I knew I was going to be a lawyer and I was going to be making all this money. He goes, now my student loan payments are bigger than my mortgage. Life didn't quite work out exactly the way he thought it was going to work out. When he finished, you know, when I'm meeting with some of my clients and they're in their 40s and they're making $300,000 a year and they're still paying off student loans and they're still living paycheck to paycheck. I would say life probably hasn't worked out the way they thought it was going to work out. I ask people if they think the student loan forgiveness program is a viable option to give borrowers some relief. What are your thoughts about the government student loan forgiveness program that all of these candidates are talking about? Yeah, the forgiveness program. I have a lot of feelings on those, and I haven't quite come down just to settle on one feeling. Initially, when I heard it, I was angered. You know, I struggled so hard for so long now to get to where we are that we've been able to Pay off my student loan debt. And so there's a little bit of anger that no one stepped in and bailed me out. A lot of these candidates out there, they're promising student loan forgiveness programs. What do you think of those ideas? No, I'm not doing that. I don't think it's realistic. I mean, for Pete's sakes, promising everything. It's gonna take years for that to happen. A, I'm not waiting until that happens. B, just take control of your own life. Stop worrying about someone promising you something. I took all the loans. I'm gonna pay the loans back. That is that. I mean, if there's some wonderful forgiveness program coming down the way, don't just go to school because you think that's going to happen. Because then when you get out and it doesn't happen, you're going to be like, oh, my gosh, I actually have to pay them back. Yes, just pay for them. Just do it. You'll get it over with faster. There's no confusion when you're making the payment. We have all these candidates that are promising things around the student loan forgiveness program, government forgiveness. What do you think of those ideas? Don't fall for it. If the government really knew this was a problem, they'd stop giving the loans. It's admitting that, hey, maybe this isn't working. It's them knowing, like, okay, this is. This is not going to be the solution. And yet here we are. They're still giving student loans out to anybody who has a pulse. Well, in my case, some people don't have pulses, and they're still giving it out. But it's just the fact that they are just giving that money out because we're just trying to give the American dream. We're trying to make sure these people can live. Well. They're actually. They're not looking out for you and I. They're looking out for, know the status quo, Making sure that everything is kind of staying the same. Well, now is the time for change, not for things to stay the same. Had, you know, $50,000 forgiveness been offered to me, would I have taken it? I don't know. Back then, you know, 20 years ago, when I first started falling into student loans or jumping into student loans, absolutely. I would have. And I would have never looked back, but I would have continued to make bad decisions. And so I think the struggle that I went through has caused me to be mature and to make better decisions. And I think the struggle that Dylan went through caused him to be more mature as well. And so I think that bailing out college kids is just another way to let people continue to make bad decisions. So if you had to go back in time and point a finger for the student loan stuff, where would it go? Who do you think is responsible? It's my fault. I didn't do any research. I'm just flitting around doing whatever I wanted. It's 100% my fault. I mean, you couldn't tell me anything at that age. Even if my parents had sat me down and been like, listen, you need to pay for school. This is what you need to do. I would have been like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. I'm completely responsible for this. Sadly, there are no easy solutions for helping students with the burden of student loan debt. But for many waiting on the government to come up with a program that actually helps them, they may be delaying their future even longer. Anthony recently talked about this issue on his YouTube channel. If you signed that student loan paper, I'm so sorry that you made a bad decision. Real talk. What you need to do is make the right decision right now and start paying off your debt. You have to start going at it aggressively. I am so sorry that you were misled. I'm so sorry that your hopes are kind of dead right now. But I want to give you hope for your future. I get it. It's going to require some hard work. I know you're going to have to maybe work some extra hours, get a part time job, get a part time gig and work your butt off. But you know what? I want you to go aggressively at your student loans. Get Sallie Mae out of your life so you can get your life back. You want to pay off your student loans? You have to determine in your mind that you are going to pay off your student loans. You're not waiting for someone else to pay off your stud loans. Why wait for the government when they've proven to us that they really do not have our best interests? You have your best interest. Get to work and aggressively go at it right now. The history of how we got here and the decades of failed policies and bad decisions since have led us to a current reality of $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. That number, while hard to comprehend, has real implications for the economy and even worse implications for the people it's affecting. Seth Frotman explains. He's the executive director of the Student Borrower Protection center in Washington, D.C. he's also the former ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a government Agency designed to protect students. We've seen public school teachers ripped off from getting critical loan forgiveness. We've seen disabled borrowers try to access their right to discharge their loans, have their credit information furnished in a way that makes them look like a subprime borrower. We've seen countless examples of people across the country who've just done everything they've tried to do right get ripped off by their student loan company. And actions like this, regardless of why, just have real ramifications for people's lives. And I think that's what we need to focus on. In one of our lawsuits at the bureau, we talked about how a student loan company engaged in illegal practices from the day you got your first bill until the day you paid off your debt. And that is what we have seen just constantly is that this is not just some one off company or one bad apple. You see players across the student loan spectrum who just view this as their chance to get rich. And one of the things that's really important based on my time at the cfpb, is that for whatever reason, people who've been ripped off in the higher education context often, like, don't speak out or the fact that they're even getting ripped off is like, underappreciated. So I guess the best way to explain this, when we first started working at the bureau and we started working on a lot of the student loan servicing issues, so people were like, reaching out to try to get into benefits, like public service loan forgiveness, were like, simply trying to make payments, and they were getting all of this bad information, and it was like dramatically impacting their loan balances. People just didn't understand the issue. It was almost like, isn't this like calling the cable company? Which is like super annoying and it takes like 90 minutes out of your day, but at the end of the day, no one is worse for the wear. And we're like, no, no. Student loan breakdowns we are seeing are nothing like that. Where often a mistake, not through anything you did, but just a lost payment or a misapplied payment could cause all of your interest to capitalize. Which means that all of a sudden now you're paying interest on interest and could be the $10,000 mistake that you just can't fix. Remember Terry? She's the woman whose life has been destroyed by student loans and suicidal thoughts. In our conversation, she described how getting help from lenders to lower her payments was hardly a favor. In hindsight, did you ever feel like you could catch up on the student loans and finally start to make progress. So I called the student loan companies in 2011 and I'm like, okay, let me try to get this under control. I was on a regular payments and I was making $330 payments every month and it was going down. And then they called me and said, oh, we got a new program. It's an income based program program. After you make 10 years of regular payments without missing, we will forgive your debt. My heart soared. I was like, okay, at least I'll be out of this before I hit retirement age, you know, I'm like, okay, let's do that. Fill out whatever paperwork you want. It was Sallie Mae that called me and told me, filled out everything. I was approved. They sent me my income based payment which was significantly lower. And I continued on that program. So in 2021 it'll be forgiven all these people. In 2017, I received a letter from, at that point, Navient. Somewhere along the line, Sallie Mae sold to Navient. All of a sudden it was Navient that I was paying and not Sallie Mate. And they sent me a letter saying my loan would be forgiven at the 2039. And I called and I said, what is this? Because it's supposed to be 2021. We're in 2017. I got four years until this is forgiven. And they explained that I didn't qualify and that is not applicable to me that I'm in a 25 year forgiveness program. And I went to the Department of Education, I realized they're in cahoots with these student loan companies. They're like, nope, you need to do whatever Navient says. I contacted Navient back and I told them this is all not right. How about a settlement? You know something, help me out here, something. Because by the time all that interest accrues at 8.25% in 2039, who knows what program they're going to even change or if they're even going to honor their word. I contacted the consumer protection agency and they're like, we can't help you. So here I am today in 2019. I make my payments like it says and it goes nowhere. The balance never decreases. It continues to increase because I just watched the money go nowhere. So I want to talk about this debt forgiveness thing. How did that make you feel when you thought this 10 year forgiveness plan was going to happen and it turned into a 25 year forgiveness plan because you thought this forgiveness stuff was gonna be all over, It'd be over in 2021 and all of a sudden they tack on another 18 years to that. And you had no, no proof. I had no proof because all the correspondences prior were all electronic and that was with Sallie Mae. And I was dumb and I didn't print it out. And I should have printed it out, but I trusted them. And when they switched over there, we have no record of that. The first really important piece of this is knowing that the mistakes can happen, are just not mere annoyances and in many instances can actually rise up to a level of illegal practices where you should be talking to your state attorney general or your state bank regulator or talking to someone to be like, hey, is this right? The second issue that we see, unfortunately a lot of times is people who go to a predatory school and then just don't know when to stop. So we see people take on a ton of debt and then they're like looking around, where can I transfer? And no one's willing to take the credits and they kind of just keep digging and digging and digging. And this is one that's just like really hard to have an answer for because you understand people's sentiment being like, I want to at least just finish what I started. But then there's like really tough trade offs, which is, is that worth it for $80,000 or so in debt or more? So that's like one that's just really hard to have an answer. But on the question of when do people realize their problems, I think the number one is these problems aren't your fault. They're not mere annoyances. They're not just like friction in the system that you need to solve. If you think you did the right thing and the company responsible screwed up, file a complaint, ask for help, tell someone. Just know that there are people out there who might be trying to rip you off and it's okay to ask for help. So what happens in the future if we don't stop this cycle of student loan debt? Thought leader and best selling author Seth Godin believes that the world we work in is going to change. So the future of our economy is either super clear or really fuzzy. I'm not sure which one. Here's what we know. When they invented the steam shovel, a lot of people who dug ditches for a living were out of work. But soon thereafter, a whole bunch of new jobs were created because machines needed people to control them. But now we've invented the computer. So if you're a radiologist, which means you're a million dollars in debt, which means you've gone to medical school longer than almost anybody. I have a machine that can read a leg X ray better than you can. It used to be I could just send the digital image to a country cheaper than this one, but now I don't even need to do that because this computer, this AI, can read it better than you. Now, you may say you worked really hard to be this kind of radiologist. And I said, I don't care, because the computer is better at it than you. So not only are we replacing the mail clerk or the person who works in the warehouse, we're replacing the radiologist. And in my lifetime, we're going to replace the truck driver. Because if I can write down what the system needs to do, I can get a computer to do it. So what's going to be left? What's going to be left are jobs where we make hard decisions, decisions that have never been made before, because once we make them, a bunch of times in a row, I can teach the computer to do it. But first, we're going to need people to make hard decisions. So the question is, where did you learn how to do that? And if no one has ever taught you how to do that, and my guess is no one has, what are you going to do about it? It turns out the answer is only one, is to practice. That if you practice these skills, you get better at them. So if you're 19, congratulations. I'm really jealous. You probably have hair and you have plenty of time to start practicing, to practice these crafts. Making difficult decisions, learning to lead, solving interesting problems. I don't care whether you can do fractions or not. I don't need you to do fractions. The way we learn and work is rapidly changing, and that affects jobs, which of course affects higher education. Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban has some thoughts about where our economy is headed. It's so easy for students to borrow money for tuition, housing, room and board, etc. That it keeps young kids from. From being able to be entrepreneurs because they're saddled with this debt. It keeps them in jobs that they don't like. It keeps them from buying houses. It keeps them from investing in themselves to follow their dreams. I mean, look, I had student debt. I thought it was a lot back then. It's nothing compared to what some people have right now. But, you know, even then, I couldn't get my car right. I had to get the rattiest that I could find because literally when I moved to Dallas, I had a hole in my floorboard. And I see the white lions go by, if I didn't have student debt, I could have done something better. I could have invested in myself sooner. You know, as we go forward with the way technology is, you have to always be learning. You have to always be investing in yourself. You have to always think of, how are you going to learn more so that as technology changes, you're better prepared to deal with it. Back in the day, people would get careers. You go work for AT&T your entire life. You know, friends of mine, their dads worked at these big companies for 50 years. That doesn't happen anymore. You're a free agent. The day you graduate from college, you are a free agent. And in order to move your way to better and better jobs, you have to always keep investing in yourself. And when you're saddled with debt, it makes it more difficult. Investing in yourself the right way is just one part of fixing the crisis. Seth Frotman believes there's a bigger conversation that we need to have as a society. Whenever you kind of see, until recently, an elected official of either party ask, hey, what are you going to do about student debt? They always kind of revert to, like, we're going to focus on college affordability. And 45 million Americans are like, what about. What about us? Right? Like, solving this for the next person essentially sacrifices an entire generation that has been asked to deal with this historic burden. So we just can't forget about all of these folks when we think about policy. But I think the first real thing is just making sure that we have the systems, accountability, metrics and protections to make sure these folks aren't getting ripped off. Right. At the very least, we need to be able to say, you took on historic debt. We understand that you did this to chase the American dream that we all cherish, and we are at least going to make sure that you are not getting ripped off as you try to repay those loans. And I think that work needs to happen at the federal level. I think that work needs to happen at the state level. We're even working with some cities to try to think through what they could do to stand up for their own borrowers. But I think we need to have a broader discussion, right, about college affordability, how to help borrowers with student loan debt. And I think nearly every person I met without a fault is like, trying to pay back their loans. You know, there's not just the, like, I want to be a deadbeat and I don't want to pay this back. But I think the second piece is the conversations are getting too stilted in terms of what is the individual impact on this. And I think what we need to think about larger, and I think this is what changed a lot of minds around the mortgage crisis was the impact doesn't end at your driveway, right? Like someone who is really struggling under the weight of student debt, especially those who've been ripped off by their company, this is impacting your community, right? Like this person might be like struggling to get a job because their student loan company failed them or they would start a thriving small business, but you know, just based on how much debt they have, or people who just, you know, want to buy their first house can't do so, or even worse, you know, people can't fill public sector jobs because they have a ton of debt. So, you know, you can't get a teacher to teach in your school. And I think we saw a ton of this work at the bureau. You know, we saw veterinarians talking about how they can't go back and work in rural areas doing the work because they have $200,000 in debt. So in many ways, I think when we think about student debt, we think about the people who should be working on this and focused on this are like folks like me who just think about student loans, right? But if you are focusing on economic development, if you're focusing on improving your community, if you're focused on income inequality or rural development, if you're not thinking about student debt, you're kind of missing the boat here because all of these issues are having the trickle down effect of what you're trying to work on. And I think that is the conversation I think not only the borrowers deserve to have, but that's like the conversation that we need as a country, which is, all right, we made these decisions and the like back and forth. Like every student loan borrower is a deadbeat, just like getting us nowhere. It's also like under appreciating how I think a lot of our common goals together aren't happening because people did what we asked them to do. If everyone sleepwalks through life doing what they were told to do because it was the next step, they're going to wake up down the road to a harsh reality. It's time to take personal responsibility for your own future. Anthony o' Neal explains. Recently I had the opportunity to sit down and talk to a young couple, 26 years old, married. Both of them combined have $343,000 in student loan debt. They are not even thinking about having a child. They're not even thinking about Launching a business idea because their payments alone is about $2,300 a month more than their rent, a mortgage. They're not even thinking about a house right now. They're only thinking about their debt. You see, when people sign that student loan paper, they're signing away 20, 30, 40 years of their future. They're signing away some of their dreams and some of their goals because they're thinking, I'm going to get this education. When I get this education, I will have the means to pay for it. But that's not true. It's robbing you of your future. There are so many dreams inside of people's hearts, inside of people's minds, inside of people's souls. But it can't come to flourish because they have to go take on this job, that job, just to pay the bills, just to get by. It's keeping people from buying a house. It's keeping people from starting a family and having kids. It's keeping people from starting their businesses. It's keeping people from investing into their future and investing into their retirement. It's keeping people from getting out of debt. It's keeping people from setting aside an emergency fund. It's keeping people from going on their dream vacations. It's keeping people in bondage. If you really want to take control of your future, if we really want our young people to take control of their future, it's time for them to stop taking the kids approach and start making an adult decision. Because an adult decision is thinking about their 40, 50, 60, 70 year old self. An adult decision is thinking about their future wife, their future husband, their future kids, their future family, their future legacy. But a kid's approach is all about today. How do I feel today? I'm going to the coolest school. I'm going to this real nice school. I'm going to get a good job. No, an adult decision makes an adult decision that is best for their adult future. It's time for our young people to grow up. It's time for our parents to help our young people grow up and make better decisions. Because the caliber of their future will be determined by the decision, the choice they make right now. Understanding where we are and where we came from is a crucial part of fixing the future. Writer and philosopher George Santayana once said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And when it comes to the student loan debt crisis, it's not a cycle we want to keep repeating for generations. The rest of this series is going to cover exactly how to end the cycle of debt and inspire future generations to cancel this crisis. We started researching scholarships and trying to figure out a strategy for how I could stand out in the process. And thankfully I was able to win over half a million dollars in scholarships and go to my dream school completely debt free. Join me. You've been listening to Borrowed Future. You've been listening to Borrowed Future. If you like what you've heard, do us a favor and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps. You can find more information about this and other Ramsey network podcasts@borrowedfuture.com or on your favorite podcast app. Tell us about your student loan experience by emailing storyborrowedfuture.com Our show is produced by Chris Wright, Eric Cieslevich, Eva Daniel, and Kevin Weimer. Music has been curated by James Childs. Will Rutter is our engineer. Our editor is Tim Hull. Blake Thompson is our executive producer. I'm George Camel. And Remember, there's a 1% chance your loans will be forgiven and a 99% chance that they won't. Isn't math fun.