America Shocked After Learning Debt Must Be Paid Back
Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
Stop the presses: Americans have just learned that borrowing money means eventually paying it back. Who could have guessed?
According to CNBC, nearly 1 in 5 student loan borrowers aged 50 and older are “seriously delinquent”—meaning at least 90 days late—on their student loans.
50 and older. Student loans. Back in 2019, the delinquency rate for this age group hovered around 10%. Now, in a surefire sign that the economy is in great shape and stocks should always trade at 40x earnings even if the world is ending, that rate has almost doubled.
And delinquencies are not confined to the “I should be retired by now” crowd. Among 30-somethings, 11% are seriously behind, and nearly 8% of borrowers under 30 have fallen into the same hole.
Remember, these numbers are after years of federally sanctioned payment freezes, forbearances, and political promises that loan forgiveness would be handed out like Presidential Autopen pardons.
The moment the Trump administration flipped the switch and resumed collections, suddenly reality set in: the bills are real, the interest is real, and the consequences are—wait for it—real.
There’s something both hilarious and tragic about this situation. Americans spent the last five years being told that loans were more like Netflix subscriptions—cancel anytime, and nobody gets hurt. But the basic laws of economics and reality both have a way of breaking through the socialistic cosplay. If you take out tens of thousands of dollars to send Junior to college or to “reinvent yourself” with a master’s in Nepalese yoga studies, someday, someone will expect repayment. Wild concept, right?
Here’s the dirty little secret nobody wants to say out loud: if you can’t afford the loan, or if the education isn’t enough of an investment to return what you need to pay it back, you shouldn’t have taken it in the first place. If you chose to, you’re on the hook.
That’s how debt works. When you finance a car, the repo guy doesn’t care that you got...(READ THIS FULL COLUMN, 100% FREE, HERE).
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