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Personal Bankruptcy, Student Loans And You

mrscott21 — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s college graduates have to face financial reality more quickly than just a few decades ago. You are given only six months grace from your graduation date until you have to start repaying your student loans. Don’t have a job yet? Too bad, kid. Welcome to the real world. In the 1970’s, college students figured out that by declaring personal bankruptcy, student loans could be forgiven or pushed back a few years. Unfortunately for future generations of American college graduates, in 1998 the law was changed to make student loans non-dischargeable.

Make Student Loans What?

“Non-dischargeable” is our vocabulary word of the day, class. Translating it into American English, this means that if you declare personal bankruptcy, student loans still need to be paid. You cannot get out of it, unless you suddenly drop dead, but that kinda defeats the purpose of getting a college degree in the first place. The Federal Student Aid Ombudsman (FSAO) says there are only three extremely hard to fulfill criteria for exemption of this non-dischargeable rule. You must fulfill all three. They are:

If the loan repayments force you to a “lower than minimum standard of living”. If the loan repayments will force you into poverty most of the time you need to repay the student loans. You have to make some sort of effort to repay the loan before filing for personal bankruptcy. Student loans will usually be dischargeable only if you have been able to make payments for five years.

Your Options

You really don”t have many options left if you need to declare personal bankruptcy. Student loans can sometimes be consolidated, which can often make paying them back a lot easier, but you will still need to pay them back. If your college closed permanently before you graduated, then you have an excellent shot of contesting the loans. But what about for the other 99.9% of college graduates?

If you’ve consolidated and stretched your student loans for years, at this point it can be next to impossible to disentangle who is owed what, and you can challenge the enforceability of the loans. Since it is the creditor’s job to provide proof of claim about what you owe, this legal loophole might be your only chance. Otherwise in declaring personal bankruptcy, student loans will still be staring at you in the face. Creditors are only allowed to take 10% of your paycheck in order to repay a

You can find many more Bankruptcy related articles at Bankruptcy Marketing

For all your Bankruptcy needs, please visit http://www.need-bankruptcy-info.com

Seeking Financial Aid With The Help Of FAFSA

nbisea — Thu, 22 May 2008 07:00:00 +0000

If you are a high school student entering into college for the first time or a non-traditional student joining the academic world for the first time, then you are faced with the problem of having enough money to pay for your college education. How do you pay for college? Financial aid for students is the number one academic concern that can keep a lot of people out of school when in reality it does not need to be this way. There are ways to go to school and get the money you need to do so. But first you will need to become familiar with the FAFSA.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is a form used by the Department of Education to determine your eligibility for federal grant programs such as the Pell Grant. The information you provide lets them know your income and your demographic information. Without filling out the paperwork you may not be eligible to receive some student loans and most certainly will not receive any grant money for your educational expenses.

When filling out the application, you will need some information about yourself. Obviously, you will need to supply very important personal information, such as your name, address, school of choice (up to three that will receive your report), social security number and your previous year’s tax information. The tax information is used to determine how much you make and how much money in Pell Grants you will be able to receive.

Pell Grants are free grant money from the United States government that you do not have to pay back. It is awarded based on your financial need.

This is the best way to help pay for school since you do not have to worry about accumulating student loan debt. Granted, you will probably still need to take out student loans to help finish paying for your expenses but the Pell Grant can lessen the debt load.

After filling out the FAFSA, you will receive a SAR, or Student Aid Report, that will detail how much money you are eligible to receive. It will also inform you of your disbursement dates. This allows you to plan on when your money will be arriving.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid is an invaluable tool used to help determine eligibility and helps students to go to school, who otherwise may not be able to attend. You need to fill out one of these applications even if you know you are not eligible for a Pell Grant because even student loans use this information. Good luck in school!

Mike Selvon’s government grants portal has some more useful information on fafsa. Visit his web site and leave a comment at his cash grants blog.

Buying College Text Books on the Cheap

Mark — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:42:46 +0000

As if tuition wasn’t already enough, college textbooks can be a huge financial hardship for students. With books averaging about $115 apiece, it is not unusual for students to have textbook fees of $400 or more per semester. That is the hardship on the front-end. On the back-end, insult is added to injury when students, trying to resell their used textbooks to the campus bookstore, only get a fraction of what they paid for them (usually 30% of their original price) even if the book is in pristine condition. Smart students know that for substantial textbook savings, one has to bypass the bookstore and shop online. With a little comparison searching, students can find the books that they need for class at up to a 95% savings - that’s right, I said 95%.

As a full-time student, I have purchased my books this way for years and it really does work, you just need a strategy. Here are some of the tricks I use to get the books that I need at the prices I can actually afford to pay:

1. Find Out if You Can Use an Older Edition: On the first day of class, when most instructors review the syllabus and course requirements, ask if it is allowable to use a previous edition of the textbook. Having tried this for many classes, the answer is surprisingly yes far more often than it is no. Furthermore, the difference in price between the current edition of a book and even just one edition ago can be $100. From there, you just look for the older edition online. Don’t be surprised if you find the book for $1 while your poor classmates have to put out $135.

2. Shop Early: Once you have gotten a class syllabus and the names of the books you will need, go online immediately to purchase them. Even if that means you use a computer on campus or at a nearby coffee shop or even your web-enabled cell phone. However you do it, do not let too much time pass before getting on the computer and doing your searching. The reason is obvious: other clever students are doing the same thing and as used books come at different prices, the early birds will get the lower-priced books leaving the higher-priced ones for all of those who put off looking until tomorrow.

3. Search by the ISBN Number: One of the risks that come along with buying your textbook online is that you could potentially buy the wrong book. The best way to avoid that is to do your searches by the book’s ISBN number which is located on the back in the barcode area or on the inside cover with the publisher’s information. The reason for this is that many times the cover shots of books may be generic or submitted by sellers so they may or may not ‘appear’ like the book you are ‘looking’ for, but the ISBN speaks to what is inside the book, how the pages are numbered, etc. In other words, who cares if the cover of the book matches, as long as the content is the same, you have the right book.

4. Comparison Shop: There are many, many different bookstore shingles hanging out online, most of which are oriented towards the needs of students. In other words, most of them accurately represent the textbooks, have reliable sellers and offer student-critical services such as expedited shipping. While there are others, here is a list of booksellers that I have had great success with in finding my used books

5. When You Find It, Buy It!: This is very important. If you find your $175 anatomy book for $25 with the right ISBN and coming from a reputable seller, just buy it! Some people can take comparison shopping to the extreme and in so doing, lose out on a sweet deal that was right in the palms of their hands. Again, there are many other students looking around for the same book and not just other students from your class, but from similar classes all around the world so, the competition is stiffer that it would appear on the surface.

More than anyone, students especially need to be concerned with managing their finances and proactively thinking about the amounts they will have to repay in student loan debt down the line. With this in mind, the ability to buy really cheap college textbooks over the course of two, five, ten, even fifteen years, makes a lot of sense if this ultimately lowers the loan amounts that students borrow each semester.

Happy hunting and if you have any tips to add to this list, please leave comments because for all of the students who know this strategy, there are five out there who do not.

P.S. If you are wondering ‘where can I sell my textbooks?’, almost all of these online sellers buy back textbooks too!