‘A Lifetime In Debt’: Older Americans Are Facing A Student-Loan Crisis
Francesco Abbruzzino, The Uncensored Report, LLC
With the moratorium on student loan payments set to end with the summer, the American media is once again reckoning with the fact that the US has a hidden crisis with older borrowers weighed down by student debt. In many cases, these borrowers have been paying off student loans for decades.
At the very least, it’s a depressing image of what might lie in store for millions of millennials, as individual student debt burdens have only grown more unmanageable as the cost of college accelerated beyond all control.
But with President Biden considering forgiving $10K per borrower, and the aggregate sum of delinquent student loan debt surpassing $435 billion (roughly one-third of the $1.7 trillion total), it’s important to remember that repaying debt doesn’t get any easier once borrowers pass their prime employment years. In fact, it gets much more difficult once you start living on a fixed income.
There are now about 8.7 million Americans aged over 50 who are still paying off college loans, and their debt has increased by about half since 2017. Since then, they’ve represented the fastest growing group of borrowers as more older workers have gone back to school to try and change careers.