Parent Plus Loan information and experiences

Alqbamine32
Sat, 22 Jul 2023 04:30:52 +0000

blossom:

Simply put- there are some people who you cannot save. You just cannot. They revel in their financial illiteracy. And no amount of regulation, transparency, guardrails, limits, etc. will change that.

To be honest, I have no idea how Parent Plus Loans work and I am just grateful not to have to take one out. From what I’m gathering on this thread, parents can borrow extraordinary sums of money to pay their child’s tuition even if the parent doesn’t have realistic means to pay the loan back. And that unlike the credit checks required for other types of loans, there are none required for these educational loans? If that’s true, I do think that such lending should require counseling or perhaps parent plus loans should be more tightly regulated .

While I am sure that financial illiteracy is part of the problem for some families, I don’t think most people in over their heads in debt are reveling in their financial illiteracy. Nor do I think that the main problem is parents who can’t be saved from themselves because they willfully overspend and splurge thoughtlessly. Perhaps some do. Still I bet that at least sometimes, what appears to outsiders to be merely foolish borrowing stems from overworked parents with no previous borrowing experience and even less bandwidth or time to research how the loans work. It also seems likely that some parents are just desperate to help their kids attend college and unaware of their other options so they take the only option that seems viable (borrowing).

In my experience, for some parents, day to day survival takes all their bandwidth and time. Particularly in single parent households, it can be really difficult to juggle tasks that professional households take for granted or think are obvious/simple. Heck I just spent a crazy number of hours this week on the phone trying to figure out why our insurance wasn’t covering some diagnostic tests, more hours on hold with the bank over a problem with one of my children’s student checking account plus a good amount of time dealing with an unexpected charge on another kid’s tuition bill. Luckily I have a flexible enough job that I can take time during business hours to 1) research what went wrong, 2) self advocate with the institutions, and 3) begin to straighten out these financial issues before my checking account went into a death spiral. But it is incredibly easy for me to imagine why someone would sign a loan offered by a college without being able to investigate the terms fully. And given I am quite well-educated, it doesn’t seem at all shocking to me that some parents are overwhelmed when faced with trying to figure out how to help their children pay their tuition.