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Comment by tempsy | Hacker News Reader

No its not

Literally says "Subsidized and Unsubsidized Aggregate Loan Limit $31,000-No more than $23,000 of this amount may be in subsidized loan"

Just confirms most people have no clue how small the limits actually are.

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I am afraid you are woefully confused. A good friend had $150k in debt from undergrad and $200k in additional debt from law school, and this was 10 years ago.

Your friend spent the cost of a new house on education, lol. There's only one country where I hear of things like this...

South Africa: now you've heard of two.

Looked up the prices just now. Undergrad + postgrad can come up to the price of small town houses.

That would have likely been a mixture of direct loans (which have the current 31k limit for undergrad) and private loans.

Again - the rules about student loans during bankruptcy apply to all student loans, including from private lenders.

That is not as clear cut as you make it. There have been rulings in the last several years that have allowed some private loans to be discharged in bankruptcy proceedings.

> In January 2020, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York discharged over $200,000 of student loan debt for one borrower. Then, in August 2020, a ruling by the 10th circuit federal appeals court based in Denver, Colorado eliminated $200,000 for a Colorado couple who held 11 private student loan accounts. And in September 2020, a judge for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York ruled to enforce a prior bankruptcy discharge of a borrower’s $400,000 of federal student loans that a servicer had failed to carry out.

> These decisions could serve as a precedent for future bankruptcy cases involving student loans, says John Rao, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center.

> "A lot of people, even some of the lawyers who represent consumers, thought for years that you really shouldn’t even try because there's not a chance you’ll win, but I think everyone is looking at it now with sort of a fresh look," Rao says.[0]

[0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/stude...

Granted, this is getting very close to "the exceptions prove the rule." :D And this rule is spelled out fairly directly to be as hard as possible to discharge.

Those don't include private loans which can be co-signed by parents if needed, nor do they include PLUS loans where parents also take out loans. Colleges are also quite helpful in what you need to do to be declared independent for financial aide purposes, which almost doubles that limit.

Graduate students are where it gets wild though.

Private loans aren’t backed by the government though.

They do have protections in bankruptcy as student loans though so it isn't a normal unsecured risk for lenders. They're also not hard to get, which goes back to the point of easy money inflates tuition.

That’s the limit directly from the government. Depending on what you’re studying for, that might end up being lower than what you actually need.

For instance, when I was in college (undergrad) I took the maximum, but it wasn’t enough for me to pay tuition, rent, etc. Also those loans don’t pay during the summer, so you’ve to budget for that as well. My part time job tended to cut hours because there’s a high influx of kids who also want summer jobs, which meant less money overall for me. I ended up taking some more loans from Wells Fargo to make ends meet.

In hindsight, I should have got a better job instead of retail - some sort of office job. But I didn’t have a car, so I was limited in how far I could go.

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