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$12 Billion In Private Student Loan Debt May Be Wiped Away By Missing Paperwork (nytimes.com)
New submitter cdreimer shares a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternate source): Tens of thousands of people who took out private loans to pay for college but have not been able to keep up payments may get their debts wiped away because critical paperwork is missing. The troubled loans, which total at least $5 billion, are at the center of a protracted legal dispute between the student borrowers and a group of creditors who have aggressively pursued them in court after they fell behind on payments. Judges have already dismissed dozens of lawsuits against former students, essentially wiping out their debt, because documents proving who owns the loans are missing. A review of court records by The New York Times shows that many other collection cases are deeply flawed, with incomplete ownership records and mass-produced documentation. Some of the problems playing out now in the $108 billion private student loan market are reminiscent of those that arose from the subprime mortgage crisis a decade ago, when billions of dollars in subprime mortgage loans were ruled uncollectable by courts because of missing or fake documentation. And like those troubled mortgages, private student loans -- which come with higher interest rates and fewer consumer protections than federal loans -- are often targeted at the most vulnerable borrowers, like those attending for-profit schools.
At the center of the storm is one of the nation's largest owners of private student loans, the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts. It is struggling to prove in court that it has the legal paperwork showing ownership of its loans, which were originally made by banks and then sold to investors. National Collegiate is an umbrella name for 15 trusts that hold 800,000 private student loans, totaling $12 billion. More than $5 billion of that debt is in default, according to court filings.
At the center of the storm is one of the nation's largest owners of private student loans, the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts. It is struggling to prove in court that it has the legal paperwork showing ownership of its loans, which were originally made by banks and then sold to investors. National Collegiate is an umbrella name for 15 trusts that hold 800,000 private student loans, totaling $12 billion. More than $5 billion of that debt is in default, according to court filings.
paper in 2017?
This is exactly the scenario that countless spams and clickbait ads have promised,:that if you challenge the bank's record keeping, you can completely free yourself from your mortgage (and here's your $49 kit to help you do it). Except in this case, it's apparently not total bullshit.
Even better for everyone with a PhD in Social Justice that is now cleaning storage closets and being an twitter hero.
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Maybe we can thank them for taking such good care of the loan documentation in the storage closets.
Nullius in verba
And why should education put people in debt? Educating young people is what ensures the future of a country.
I love how we always talk about personal responsibility and corporate responsibility, but it's always the little guy that gets hit by it. Why is it the borrowers ethical responsibility to pay the loan back, but not the owner of the loan's responsibility to actually track what people owe them? Seems to me that ethically, if you can't prove someone owes you something, then they don't owe you jack.
"deeply flawed" documentation.
I really wonder about that. I had difficulty getting a job after college, and like a lot of others my student loan went into collection. Two years after graduation, in another state, I landed a well paying job, contacted the collection agency through an old notice and made payments, eventually paying it off.
And then, about a year later, I got contacted by a collection agency (the same or a different, I don't know -- didn't keep track) that I still owed $500-something on my student loan. I was doing well at the time, so I paid it off again just to make it all go away.
Three years later, I moved to a different state and got a new job, and a collection agency *again* contacted me about my student loan, saying I still owed a little over $200. I argued vehemently that I had already paid off the damn thing twice. They got really rude over the next few weeks, called work and home at all hours, and being nasty to whomever answered. I swallowed my pride and paid it off for a third time.
That was a couple decades ago, and I haven't gotten any calls since. But here's the punchline. My most recent job required that I provide evidence of my degree. I'd never been asked this before, and looking through all my decades-old paperwork, some never opened through moves from one state to another to another, I couldn't find my diploma.
No problem, right? Contact the school, get a copy of the diploma, send it to HR.
The school had no record that I had ever attended.
Let that sink in for a moment.
So I went backwards from the student loan docs, which showed that I attended the school from year1 to year2. The school eventually had to admit that I had been a student there, but they had lost all records of that time. I got them to put that in a letter, which my work grudgingly accepted. Next time I'm not putting my education on my resume.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
cap student loans / income based pay back with say an max interest rate of 2-3% and max pay back time 20 years. And you are under X income then you pay 0.
or just have cheaper 11 or 7 come back for them as how meany banks would give someone 150K to get that PHD in medieval studies?
At the same time, odds are at least some are being hit up for more than they owe, perhaps being double billed. There may even be some that actually don't owe any money. We can't tell how many because the paperwork is too screwed up to show that the loans even exist.
Since these loans were bought, it is safe to say that none of the debtors agreed to owe the current holder of the loan.
It's more interesting to pull back a level. There we see a financial industry so high on itself that it figured it didn't NEED proof of anything. Just point and say "He owes me money" and the courts would oblige. Sadly, they weren't wrong at the time. But after screwing around for 10 years soiling their own reputation at every turn, it is no longer true. Now judges want to see proof (like they should have all along).
The issue is that the holder of the loans have been passing it around like crabs in a frat house and no one knows whose faul... errr owns the loans.
Chances are the borrowers weren't informed at every step, and even if they did communication claiming to own a loan and to pay someone else now is a classic scam.
It's the responsibility of both. I'm a fiscal conservative and all for personal responsibility, but I have no sympathy for the lenders here. These were private loans. It was the personal responsibility of the lender to make sure the paperwork was in order and properly recorded before they loaned out the money (or paid to acquire the loan). If they fail to do that, well I guess their money wasn't really important to them in the first place.
Congrats to the borrowers - they got the equivalent to finding thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on the ground because the lender wasn't careful to make sure their pocket didn't have a hole in it.
Yes, the ethical thing for the borrower to do is to pay back the loan. But if there's no clear documentation for the loan, the borrower can't be sure they're paying back the right person. They could pay someone $10,000, then next day some other collector calls saying they're the actual owner of the loan and the borrower needs to come up with another $10,000 to pay them. Faced with this possibility, the most ethical thing a borrower can do is "pay back" the loan by putting it into a savings account. And when someone can prove that they're really the actual one who is owed the money, the borrower can transfer the account over to them (minus interest).
well I think that's the problem. They don't have the paper.
It's also not simply people lying to get out of loans, it's courts fed up with high pressure tactics to get payment on loans that were never made! Then when they are contested the loan companies dont' show up in court. It's the courts that are invaldating the loans for their own purposes not just because people are trying to weasle out
from the article:
“I tried to be honest,” Ms. Watson said of her court appearance. “I said, ‘Some of these loans I took out, and I’ll be responsible for them, but some I didn’t take.’”
In her defense, Ms. Watson’s lawyer seized upon what he saw as the flaws in National Collegiate’s paperwork. Judge Eddie McShan of New York City’s Civil Court in the Bronx agreed and dismissed four lawsuits against Ms. Watson. The trusts “failed to establish the chain of title” on Ms. Watson’s loans, he wrote in one ruling.
When the judge’s rulings wiped out $31,000 in debt, “it was such a relief,” Ms. Watson said. “You just feel this whole weight lifted. My mom started to cry.”
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Really, the borrower has no responsibility to track the loan, it's all on the lender?
Yes, it is all on the lender.
I make an agreement with you to pay you $1000 a month until my $100,000 debt is repaid. You sell that debt to someone else. You are responsible for making sure they have all the appropriate paperwork to take over that debt. If they sell it to someone else, they are responsible. And so on and so on and so on.
If whoever ends up with it can't prove that they are the person who is supposed to be receiving my payments, that's their fault or whoever sold them the debt--not mine. I'm not just going to pay someone who walks up and says, "Hey, you owe me money!" Once someone can prove that they are the person who is supposed to be receiving my payments, I will gladly make them.
I can answer that. It's because the media conglomerates that push the narrative of personal responsibility are owned by billionaires using that narrative to lower their tax burdens and claim a larger piece of the economic pie. Do I get a gold star?
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.... the magic words are "Show me the paperwork indicating that I owe you this debt.". Most collection agencies have ZERO paperwork showing that they are entitled to collect, but rely on intimidation to get people to comply. Fight back! Make them at least show the paperwork! Chances are, they don't have it.
Really, the borrower has no responsibility to track the loan, it's all on the lender?
Yep. Otherwise, I as the supposed lender can demand that you start repaying that 500k loan I claim that you took out and according to you, the onus is on you to prove that there never was a loan.
SJW n. One who posts facts.