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Students Are Using Their Loan Money To Buy Cryptocurrency, Study Says (fastcompany.com)
Student loans aren't just for buying textbooks, No. 2 pencils, and apples for bribing teachers anymore. According to a recent survey, as many as one in five college kids may be using their student loans to cash in on the cryptocurrency craze. From a report: The Student Loan Report surveyed 1,000 current college students with student loan debt about whether they were asked whether they used their student loan money to invest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and found that 21.2% of them have Sallie Mae to thank for their cryptocurrency investment. Many students borrow a little more money than is necessary to pay for tuition and books, according to Student Loan Report. The leftover cash is typically used for college living expenses, but some wily students think that investing in Ethereum or Ripple may be a better investment than a bachelor's degree in comparative English literature.
College debt is the hardest debt to discharge in bankruptcy. If you're taking a highly speculative position at that point in your life, you're better off running up credit card debt. Either you can pay it off with interest, or you have a bankruptcy before you graduate. Neither will result in 30-year-old you screwed cause of a bad bet.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I hope these aren't the same students asking for debt forgiveness.
For certain degrees it could be true that you're more likely to cash out on a lucky bet than the degree itself. [Aggrieved group] Studies type degrees probably aren't too marketable.
No, they surveyed student loan recipients:
"we found that 21.2 percent of current college students with student loan debt have used financial aid money to fund a cryptocurrency investment."
https://studentloans.net/financial-aid-funding-cryptocurrency-investments/
Perhaps they opened a wallet and funded it so they could buy something with Bitcoin.
That's an 'investment', yes, but not so simple as an Investment...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
What does that chart even show? The Y axis is just labelled "percent".
Anyway, if you're studying art in college because you're looking for a financial ROI, you're probably going to be disappointed, but I'm not sure that's why people study those things.
If the "financial value" of your education drops to zero, at least you still have the education. If the price of bitcoin drops to zero (which is far from unthinkable), you've got jack squat.
If it goes down, they'll get a financial education!
The only way to get out of paying a student loan is to die.
This is not true. Emigrating usually works too.
Banks in general are risk-averse, and student loans are pulling at all the red flags that any lender would use to signal a risky loan.
Things like:
* No credit history (they're coming out of high school and few probably got a credit card to build up a credit history)
* A big loan (6 figure sum!)
* No assets to speak of (teens, again)
* No assets to speak of even after purchase (i.e., you're not buying an asset with the loan)
* No steady employment
* Delayed payback
Knowing all that, would you loan someone $100,000+? Even a mortgage means the bank has something to secure the loan.
It's why the government has to tilt things so it isn't so risky on banks - such as non-dischargable, guarantees on repayment, etc.
Banks aren't stupid. Student loans are structured the way they are because no financial institution is stupid enough to make such loans unassisted.
I don't know about cryptocurrency, though.
What I do know is that I felt very proud to not take the full cost of attendance out as loans when I was doing my degree. I thought (and the "adults" told me) that I was very smart to minimize my borrowing.
I know two separate people who took out the full cost of attendance loan (max they could get) every semester they were in school, and used that money as down payments on their first rental buildings. Years later, they both now have small real estate empires, the loans are paid off, and one retired in his '30s, all started by student loans. Both leveraged their student loan debt into investments that paid off.
Meanwhile, I was under the debt thumb for years and years and am still working for a salary 50+ hours a week. Someone was smart, and it wasn't me (despite what the older generation applauded me for).
On the other hand, I'm not sure that cryptocurrency is quite the same deal. Seems like it would be smarter to invest and rent-seek as the people that I know did.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Why should I pay for the roads you use? Why should I pay for the military to protect you? Why should anyone pay more for a product than what it cost to make? Why should a dime of money go to someone's profit just for owning a share of stock and having nothing to do with the products?
All these are questions that you will be better equipped to answer when you get out of middle school.
You are welcome on my lawn.