A new credit assessment program could help millions of Americans instantly improve their credit scores, simply by adding data from their checking account.
Consumers who choose to use Experian Boost (an online platform set to launch early this year) give the company permission to access their online banking accounts to look at utility, cable TV and phone payments for the past 24 months. The entire process should take about five minutes and the updated FICO score is delivered to the potential lender instantly.
It looks like things haven't improved much for student loan borrowers: 99.5% of people who applied for public service loan forgiveness have been rejected.
Here's what you need to know and what to do about it.
Student Loan Forgiveness: Debt Statistics
The U.S. Department of Education released the latest statistics for public service loan forgiveness:
As of September 30, 2018, 41,221 student loan borrowers submitted 49,669 applications for public service loan forgiveness.
Of that total, approximately 44,700 applications have been processed.
Whether or not you believe the allegations, the jaw-dropping dossier of sins that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau accuses the nation’s largest student loan servicer of committing is useful for two crucial reasons.
Q. To assist our son in fulling his dream of becoming an Air Force pilot, we took out a Parent Plus loan to cover his tuition. We borrowed $90,000 over four years. Is there any write-off we can take? It's tough paying $1,200 per month and almost $1,100 goes to interest. It's killing my retirement.
-- Retirement-poor
A. You son is very lucky that you took out loans on his behalf.
Hopefully the day will come when he can help you with the payments.
College students from rural areas are moving to big cities for higher wages to help pay off their student loans, according to new research from the Federal Reserve.
Why it matters: A "rural brain drain" has been pulling college-educated people out of rural America and into urban areas, deepening an educational and political divide that is increasingly coming to define the country.
Americans older than 60 are saddled by student loan debt worth a whopping $86 billion — a figure that rose 161% between 2010 and 2017, the largest increase out of any age group, the WSJ reports.
Some student loan borrowers will get another chance to qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
Congress has set aside $350 million to help fix what lawmakers have called a "glitch" in the enrollment process.
Teachers, social workers, public defenders and others who work for the government or non-profits can qualify for student loan forgiveness after making 10 years of payments. But many who thought they were on track for forgiveness have since found out they were in a repayment plan that makes them ineligible for debt relief.
In October, I wrote a column about Jed Shafer, a teacher in Oregon who found himself on the wrong end of the student loan repayment bureaucracy.
Mr. Shafer thought he was following the rules to qualify for the public service loan forgiveness program, and spent years communicating carefully with the loan servicers who collected his payments on behalf of the federal government. But it turns out he hadn’t been doing it correctly after all.
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"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."
– Marie Curie
"Bankruptcy laws allow companies to smoothly reorganize, but not college graduates burdened by student loans."
– Robert Reich
"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going."
– Irwin "Professor" Corey
"There is scarcely anything that drags a person down like debt."
– P. T. Barnum
The road to success is always under construction
– Lily Tomlin
“This would be a much better world if more married couples were as deeply in love as they are in debt.”
– Earl Wilson
“What I would like to do... once I take care of all my kids' student loans, is buy a red 1965 Mustang and fully restore it.”
