My partner and I have about 60k in student loans and haven’t been paying even though they started back in October. I’m waiting to see if maybe we just shouldn’t. I remember there being chatter about how Nelnet and other loan holders had like laid off a bunch of people during the pause and hadn’t hired them back, and the system is overloaded and fucked, and how are people suddenly going to pay a big monthly expense anyway, etc etc. But if people were to not pay them, I feel like the media would not want to perpetuate that narrative and build it into something real by spreading the word so to speak. So I don’t know if there’s a way to gauge is people are actually paying them? Does anyone know?
I think my wife’s student loan has like 1,75% interest on it, so it’s not a huge amount, but it does represent another debt that we need to get rid of. We also just got an interest rate increase on our car, which means that any available income we have is going towards paying that off as soon as possible. I think so far this past year we have paid an additional 3-4 months off of our loan, and later this month we’ll pay another 3.