<p>
</p>
<p>I believe the lender has the right to pursue a judgement and garnishment of wages in this situation. So they may not be able to just walk away with a credit rating hit like you can in some situations with a collateralized loan (like a mortgage, where they just take the house).</p>
<p>So, did she and the parents KNOW she had liver cancer when they took out these loans? If so, that would seem really crazy because of the risks that even if she “beat it”, she wouldnt have been able to always work enough to make the payments. </p>
<p>I am guessing that the liver cancer was discovered quite late, was quite agressive, and she didnt live long after the dx. </p>
<p>Anything else really makes no sense. </p>
<p><<<
Lots of nurses on the forum I referenced go to expensive private schools because getting into nursing schools at public CCs and 4 year public universities is so competitive. Perhaps this girl had been rejected at the public options in her area/state.
<<<<</p>
<p>This is VERY true, especially in Calif where they live. All the CC and CSU programs are highly impacted. </p>
<p>But for a single mom of 3 (and her parents) to choose to take out HUGE loans to become a nurse is simply insane (even if they didn’t know yet of her cancer). </p>
<p>If she was unwilling to consider another career, she should have dealt with the impacted system and waited to get in like others who do. </p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Sounds like they are kind of “self-employed”…dont think you can garnish in such cases.</p>
<p>@mcat2 </p>
<br>
<br>
<p>???</p>
<p>Your son is in med school. Why did YOU have to cosign his loans? Med students can rather easily get their own loans…no need for parents to cosign. There are fed loans…both Stafford and Grad Plus that med students can take out w/o parent signatures. </p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Was there later info that says that the loans doubled while she was living? How long had she been out of school before she died?</p>
<p><<<
Can one <em>really</em> become an RN with only an AA degree, btw?</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Very common in Calif. Many, if not most, of the CCs offer an AA in Nursing to get become a RN. </p>
<p>Dont know if any privates offer AA’s to become a RN…if so, maybe she did that route?</p>
<p>If she went to an instate CC to get this RN degree (which was mentioned upthread), then how did she end up with the first $100k in debt? The only thing I can think of is that she went very part-time over a period of a few years and her parents were co-signing each time. </p>
<p>If you are only taking 6 credits at a time, would your calculated COA still include about $10k+ in room, board, and living expenses? If so, then taking several years to get a RN degree at a CC could run up that kind of debt. </p>
<p>I wonder if these lenders were allowing some kind of exaggerated COA??</p>
<p>@Vladenschlutte, society “gets in between the lender and the borrower” all the time – that’s what it is any time there are regulations on lending, as when lenders have to provide certain disclosures or include boilerplate language in the loan contract. This is nothing new. </p>
<p>Re the liver cancer, I’m not an expert but I believe that liver cancer tends to be pretty aggressive, so I doubt she knew about it when she took out the loans. </p>
<p>My daughter accepted a job/ internship in the Okanagan, knowing that she would not be earning much & planning to use the food bank.
But she couldn’t have anticipated that the area would soon incur the most destructive fire in Washington state history.
I doubt the food bank is able to keep up with need.</p>
<p>We can try to anticipate the worst, but our imagination doesn’t go that far.</p>
<p>@mom2ck, One kind of student loans DS gets needs to be cosigned by us. It is called the school’s alumni loan. No interests is accrued while still being a student and it could be deferred in residency years (maybe not all years if there are too many years for some specialty.)</p>
<p>I did remember that at many other med schools, unlike his current school, the student could sign all the loans. So each school is different. Heck, in one year (or two years?), DS told us that he even needed to write some “progress report”-style appreciation letter to some med school alumni who “helped” him fund his education as that alumnus (a doctor himself) contributed to it. (but that was for the need-based scholarship, not for the alumni’s loan.)</p>
<p>Roughly speaking, I think the COA is divided equally into 3 parts: the first part is paid by student’s loan, the second part is paid by the parent (guess the school thinks we have not completely dried out after having paid for 7 - 8 years yet), and the last part is taken care of by the the school’s FA (which is need based, so the amount of the last part may be varied depending on the financial need of the parents/family - similar to the FA at the UG level here.) I think the idea here is that every student on loans is expected to roughly have the same amount of loans at graduation.</p>
<p>Another strange thing at his school is that the school would ask for quite sizable parent’s contribution here (and no student’s contribution.) It is quite similar to UG’s financial award letter (except that there is some unit loan component every student will have to take.) I also have not seen such things at other med schools (of course, we have seen their first-year FA award letter only, as DS could only attend one school.)</p>
<p>So we are on hook for some of his debt. </p>
<p>NFN, does anyone know what school it is and why the cost seemed so high?</p>
<p>And is it possible, if she was not working beforehand and did not have income, they could have done a little research to get her to go to school for free? Perhaps not at the same place, but the case sounds like a welfare-to-training-to-work situation where the state could give her aid.</p>
<p>It is easy to blame the parents as well as her (especially if she was ill when she started college, and one has to wonder about risk factors that may or may not have been her choice with the incidence of liver cancer in people under 45 less than 5% of total liver cancer cases), but it seems like predatory practices by the college and the lender had a role in this.</p>
<p>What does it take to “be a college”? Was it a college or a nursing school that called itself a college? Was it accredited?</p>
<p>There are six accredited bachelor degree programs for nursing in NM. Three are initial or conditional (as of today, yes she passed away end of 2009 so things may have been different then). One of the remaining programs is for someone already with a bachelor’s degree, which we’ll assume she does not have. That only leaves UNM and NMSU. I ran some numbers for NMSU, and the NPC gave me $12,326 before federal loans and work-study, so about $8,000 after work study. I am agreeing with the other poster who said maybe she took out extra loans, more than she had to, either because the college (quote unquote) didn’t help her get the maximum grant and loan allowance, or she needed the extra money (possible with a private lender likely not possible with a federal loan).</p>
<p>The way the numbers $200,000 and $100,000 are thrown around in the articles is alarming. It looks like they owe less than $50,000 now that they don’t have to pay interest any more.</p>
<p>(Might they be better served going after the kids’ father(s) for child support? Or do they not want him/them in their grandchildren’s lives?)</p>
<p>There is a NBC TODAY Show article on this topic
<a href=“After daughter’s death, parents plead for forgiveness of her $200K student-loan debt”>http://t.today.com/parents/after-daughters-death-parents-plead-forgiveness-her-200k-student-loan-1D79996678</a>
that states:</p>
<p>“In 2007, Lisa graduated from San Bernardino Valley College and began her career as a critical-care nurse. Just two years later, the single mother died suddenly, due to liver failure, at age 27, leaving behind three children between the ages of 4 and 9.”</p>
<p>If I read and understood correctly, SBVC offers an A.S. Degree that prepares students to take the licensing exam to become an RN. Their web site states the COA (includes room and board costs) is $17,500. The site states the nursing program costs $4,400 for the 4 semester program (this does not include the cost of the ten prerequisite classes required to gain admittance to the nursing program). </p>
<p>The family set up a GoFundMe page and have received $16,173/188k. I believe one loan company forgave a $12k loan which reduced the debt to 188k from 200k.</p>
<p>The article has a quote from the father:</p>
<p>“Most people don’t think about a 25-year-old dying,” Steve said. “I co-signed in the event she didn’t make her payments. I wasn’t thinking it would be a situation in which she couldn’t make her payments, because of her death…”</p>
<p>OK, then something is really strange in this story. Did she go to a private school before attending and graduating from SBVC, maybe?</p>
<p>“And the borrower and lender themselves are much better judges of such than the government.”</p>
<p>This is where we differ. A lot of borrowers are terrible judges. They take all the “free money” they can get without much consideration of whether they can pay it back or not…or even whether it’s going to benefit them in the long run if they DO pay it back. A lot of people just think about the here and now and let the future fall where it may. I don’t think it’s a good thing for the rest of us to let these folks ruin themselves. We want people to be able to have children and buy houses, cars, and furniture in the future, not just spend their adult lives in their parents’ basements paying down their student loans. That’s true even if that result is hugely profitable for the bank.</p>
<p>This happened in our family… anyone co-signing should require life insurance as a condition of them signing. And if you sign you should be expected to repay it.</p>
<p>It should be noted that it isn’t entirely true that student loans can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. You just have to prove that you can never pay and your condition will never improve. This is easier to do as a cosigner after a death than it is as a living college grad.</p>
<p>From reading other articles, it seems a lot is missing - a lawsuit involving her doctor, etc. </p>
<p>Just saw this. Love Elizabeth Warren.</p>
<p><a href=“Elizabeth Warren slams banks for cruel treatment of parents of deceased daughter with student loan”>Elizabeth Warren slams banks for cruel treatment of parents of deceased daughter with student loan;
<p>Cap is right. From reading other articles, it’s quite apparent the parents aren’t telling the whole story and that’s all I’m going to say.</p>
<p>QLM</p>
<p>It’s cruel to want repayment ? Really? I don’t actually understand what the death has to do with this mess apart from making it a more sympathetic story somehow. It’s not as though the daughter had the money either.</p>
<p>The point is that the bank can easily absorb the loss of that loan repayment, and that it’s the honorable and ethical thing to do. If corporations are people now, hopefully they have hearts as well.</p>
<p>Well, I have some debts they can probably afford to absorb too while they’re at it. lol.</p>
<p>When people die , their outstanding bills still need to be paid. That is nothing new. It’s painful to still have medical bills or credit card bills or loan repayment bills still coming in for someone that has died . But are businesses just supposed to forget about what they are owed just because someone has died? The estate is responsible and in terms of these loans, the parents cosigned and are now responsible for repayment. </p>
<p>Our government bails out corporations all the time. What’s the difference?</p>
<p>If I were the bank holding the loan for the young woman who died, I would forgive the debt ON PRINCIPLE, because it’s the right thing to do. </p>
<p>Well, I doubt she’s the only person with outstanding loans who has passed away and she has co-signers. Interesting policy.</p>