A Student’s View, The “Unshakeable Burden” of Student Loans
“Americans stress over ‘unshakeable burden’ of student loan payments,” The Guardian, Michael Sainato, May 2020
The nation can alleviate one person of their debt multiple times; but, it can not do so for the younger contingent consisting of minorities and white former students who would add to the growth of the economy if freed. Much ofd this debt consists of usurious penalties, the interest on those penalties, forbearance interest and the interest on top of the interest. Forbearance interest and penalty interest must be paid first before payment is applied to principal. No commercial loan to citizens exists with these types of restrictions. Student loans were made as impossible to pay off as they could.
This is “mostly” a copy and paste article and an update to the issue of student loans. Alan Collinge and his followers (in this case Heather, Patrick, Michelle, Kim and Stephen) were interviewed by The Guardian’s Michael Sainato. Their stories and comments are told here.
Student Loan Justice Org. has also been blitzing the governors of each state.
___________
Michelle Kajikawa of Portland and her husband currently owe more than $150,000 in student loans from his law degree and her social work and teaching degrees, obtained between 1995 and 2003. She is an elementary school teacher, and her husband works as a public defender, while caring for two children.
Michelle: “The yoke of student debt has completely overshadowed every aspect of our finances. We have always lived paycheck to paycheck, even as our salaries grew.”
The couple relied on assistance from family to buy a home, because their debt-to-income ratio prevented them from qualifying for a mortgage. Their credit suffers regularly when hit with unexpected bills, mostly for medical care. Now the couple is starting to worry about putting their two children through college while wondering how they will be able to afford to eventually retire, especially when their federal student loan payments have to start being paid again after the Covid-19 pause on federal student loan payments expires on 30 September.
Michelle: “There is a psychological cost to this unshakable burden. We are facing having to put our own children through college, and eventually our own retirement, all with the burden of $1,500 to $2,000 payments every month, seemingly forever. We internalize a feeling of failure, even though we have accomplished a lot, personally and professionally. I am dreading the point at which we will start paying again.”
Student loan borrowers are awaiting relief from the Biden administration amid calls to cancel $50,000 in federal student loan debt from Democratic members of Congress, though Biden has only expressed support for $10,000 in student debt forgiveness.
His administration also omitted student debt cancellation from the annual White House budget while awaiting a report from the US Department of Justice and US Department of Education reviewing Biden’s legal authority to cancel student loans through executive action.
For many Americans hit by student debt the lack of immediate action from Biden has been a serious blow, especially as payments on those loans are set to start again for many people.
Alan Collinge: “It is a catastrophically failed lending system at this point by any rational metric you can come up with.”
Alan is the Founder and organizer with Student Loan Justice, which has circulated a petition with more than 1million signatures calling on Biden to cancel all federal student loans and grant bankruptcy rights for private student loans.
“This pandemic is the nail in the coffin, Almost nobody has been paying on their loans for the past year and whenever the repayment suspension is lifted, if you think many people are going to resume, you’re wrong. It’s not going to happen – people have gotten used to seeing the extra money in their bank account at the end of every month and they’re done.”
During the pandemic, student loan balances have continued to increase despite a federal loan payment pause. In the first quarter of 2021, student loan balances in the US increased by $29bn to $1.73tn. Around 43.2 million Americans owe an average of $39,351 each in student loan debt. (I have been informed the number of students owing money is ~45 million people in 2021).
Kim Schmitt of Easthampton, Massachusetts, originally owed $12,000 in student loans after attending three years of school, but defaulted because she couldn’t afford the repayment amount.
Kim: “When I was in default, the student loans started taking my tax refunds, even though I had kids, and was on food stamps and state health insurance. Over the years they took roughly $50,000 in tax refunds, but my balance only went up because of fees and interest.”
She was eventually able to enter an income-based repayment plan and loan forgiveness program because she works as an educator for elementary school students with autism. The high costs have deterred her from finishing her bachelor’s degree and obtaining a master’s degree to be able to make more money in her field. Schmitt still owes $31,000 in student loan debt, while caring for two children as a single mother since her husband died of cancer.
Kim: “I owe too much in student loans to qualify for more and the price of a year’s worth of classes is astronomical, so I’m just kind of stuck here.”
First generation college students are twice as likely to report falling behind on student loan payments. 3.3 million student loan borrowers under the age of 40 are behind on student loan payments. Student debt disproportionately impacts women and Black students: 58% of all student debt belongs to women while 30% of Black student loan borrowers default within the first 12 years of repayment.
Black college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loans than white college graduates. About 20 years after taking out student loans, the median Black borrower owes 95% of their debt, while the median white borrower has paid off 94% of their debt.
Stephen Jansen of Milwaukee graduated with over $100,000 in student debt from undergraduate and graduate school in 2016, and struggled to find work in his field of public administration. When he was able to find a job, the University of Wisconsin would not release his transcripts required for the job over student debt.
Stephen: “If a student gets to pay back their loans, they’re going to need to have a job. So why would you withhold transcripts to keep them from getting a job?”
He (Stephen Jensen) wrote a letter to his university and the board of regents requesting the transcripts, insisting the policy should be changed, and outlining the data of disproportionate burden of student debt on Black college graduates such as himself, to no avail until the university released the transcript after being contacted by the Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin’s office. He said the delay in resolving the issue cost him job opportunities.
Jensen is now concerned that once the pause on federal student loan payments is lifted, the impact on Americans who are struggling with debt accrued due to the coronavirus pandemic will be severe.
“You have people who are burdened by debt as a result of the pandemic. We’re now going to be double burdened by the student loans being allowed again,” he added.
As student debt has more than doubled over the past decade, public investment in higher education has declined despite increasing college tuition costs. State investment per student in higher education across the US has decreased by more than $2,000 between 1987 to 2018, with inflation taken into account, despite average tuition at public four-year institutions increasing by 213% during the same time period.
“ Patrick Casale: I have $160,000 and counting, and can’t pay it,”
Patrick, a clinical mental health therapist in Asheville, North Carolina. His monthly payments are $2,900, and has relied on applying for temporary income-based reduction, while worrying if his applications aren’t approved, his wages will be garnished.
“If the income-reduced plan runs out, I don’t see another alternative. Considering moving out of the country has certainly crossed my mind many times.”
Heather Taylor moved with her husband from Oregon to France, where they both work as teachers, and doesn’t see moving back to the US as a viable option – in part due to the high costs of her student loans.
Heather: “Since I live abroad, my income-driven repayments for my student loans will stay at zero unless I earn more than $100,000 a year, which as a teacher is highly unlikely. However, my student loans of $70,000 will continue to climb. That means that I can afford to live as long as I stay here, but that I’ll never be able to afford to live in the United States again.”
“These loans are designed to keep people in poverty.”
Author: Since the 1990s Representative, Senator, and Vice president Joe Biden has crusaded against student loan relief in the form of bankruptcy, loan relief, etc. Even today, now President Joe Biden hesitates to correct the issues he created over the years by not granting the right to bankruptcy which former President Trump availed himself of multiple times as a private citizen. Instead Joe Biden awaits for his Secretary of Education to inform him of the legalities. A move which is little more than political-pondering while he gets his other programs in place to support his popularity.
This needs to be solved by the FED with student loan QE. They buy all of the debt, reduce the rate to zero and increase the term to 100 years.
The stimulus from this QE would be multiple times previous QE purchases.
EM
Do you remember Robert’s post on 30-year bonds having a negative return?
did this couple secretly invest some of their student loan cash into Bitcoin? do you know that the intraday price of Bitcoin on the 13th of April was twice as much as intraday price of Bitcoin today? this means that the Decay half life a Bitcoin is 47 days. think of how many people are about to lose their money to the Cargo Cult that we know today as Bitcoin.
Conversely, if my two offspring had held on to all the funds that were invested for their college educations, they would be multi-millionaires today. As it turned out, they graduated debt-free, with substantial house-down-payments left over.
I had a 12% return last year. So what Fred? Most of these kids did not have fathers like you or I either.
Why is student loan debt treated differently from an auto loan, a home loan or a business loan? Is it because there is something physical that can be repossessed upon default? If so, then is the prohibition against discharging student loans through bankruptcy the only thing the prevents student loan money from drying up?
Joel:
90% of these loans are funded by the Federal Government. If your car is a lemon, there is an out. If you can not get a job based upon being sold an education by the schools claiming you will get a better job, there is no recourse for the student. If you go into forbearance, interest still accumulations and that must be paid back first before principle is touched. Forbearance did not used to be that way. If you roll your forbearance into the loan, you are penalized. What common loans do this except paycheck loans perhaps?
Forty percent of those holding student loans are going into retirement on Social Security. Oldsters carry more debt than the younger set. How much does Social Security pay out Joel? Not a hell of a lot and these people will have a portion of it garnished over a certain amount (>$750 monthly can be garnished). Where do you live on that amount? Are there no workhouses?
Back in the seventies when Biden was campaigning for this type on punishment, there were no people declaring bankruptcy. It was a bunch of lies and they (including Biden) created a solution to a nonexistent problem. If you can not pay the loan now, how do you expect to collect it later?
The loans are not going to dry up. Wall Street is tranching them just like they did MBS and selling layers of them in what is called SLABS. It is profitable.
Jobs are less plentiful now that pre-2008. Look at Participation Rate.
If there are serious problems with these loans I would think at the heart it is the pricing of the original purchase. Comparing them with lemon cars is not very useful as lemon cars have defects not at all associated with the person that buys them. Educations rarely do. The student builds most of the value of the education with their own efforts.
If this is that serious a problem that major debt writedowns are being considered then regardless of what gets done with current outstanding debt, a new approach should be found for future debt. Removing guarantees and allowing this debt in bankruptcy feels like the starting point of serious lending reforms. If access to debt starts to shrink in some areas, then educational institutes have a great incentive to either find more value or reprice.
Eric:
Everyone has a right to be sold a product or a service with the idea there is nothing faulty or fraudulently claimed with the product or service. Cars advertised as being the best for the money and the best in performance may not be true for that vehicle. The buyer is left with a product which will not function properly. The seller must be truthful in the sell of the product or service. An education can be either product or service and it has been advertised as the means to uplift a person’s economic stature. The data supports an education an education will result in making more money creating a better life. Schools hold college days where the colleges come in and talk to students.
At 18 years old, I doubt a person has the mentally to ascertain what is best for them to do over the next 48 years, what institute will provide the best education to maximize their salary, and whether that cost per year of education will result in value in the market place. It just does not happen that way. Like buying a lemon car, kids are sold by the presentation from colleges or the for-profits. they are often lied to by the for-profits and one year into the education, the cost of the tuition increases exponentially. So what do you do, quit or take the second year at a for-profit? If you are two years into an education at a college and come to the realization this path is not for you, you may be stuck with a year of education that has not value to you at $30,000. Even so, there is a need for more training and/or education.
Pricing has increased for an education. Much oof it is due to cutbacks in state support for state scools as well as for grade and high schools. Either you will soo a reduced service or increased fees. Salaries do not appear to have kept up with the rising costs. so, people borrow money at the going rate of up to 8%. And they are sold on the premise the education will result in a higher salary enabling you to pay off the debt incurred. This comes regardless of recessions, Wall Street blowing up the economy, business moving overseas, etc.
As I have repeatedly stated, there is the original loan. If something happens in the economy, you go into forbearance, you will still incur the interest and the interest on top of that interest and the interest on the principal. The loan does not stop growing and you end up paying the interest before touching principal. It is a loan that keeps on giving. If you are penalized, the penalty is paid first. If you consolidate the loans and fees, there is a charge, and that added to the loan.
The issue is to fix the problem before it grows into bankruptcy first and the have bankruptcy happen. Your credit is for sh*t when you go bankrupt so there is the penalty. trump did it 7 times and still he gets loans and milks the businesses.
Eric
i don’t think colleges do a very good job at all of directing student energy and work ethic into studies that will help them economically after they graduate. That’s okay if the student is getting good guidance from somewhere else, but it seems to me that most are not, and that colleges…even real colleges…leave it up to the kids to figure it out… to figure out even what the experts cannot predict.
If education in general is worthwhile to the country as a whole…and i think it is… the the country as a whole should pay for it..and takes steps to see that their money is not wasted….hopefully by positive guidance and not “punishing” students who get lost in the maze by expelling them or giving them a transcript they cannot shake even when they do figure it out.
meanwhile there seems to be a great deal of fraud and predatory practice both in college “admissions” and in loan servicing. beginning with eliminating the bankruptcy life saver.
I still think that it is an error to say “no other loans are run this way.” At least my experience with big name banks dealing with real estate loans suggests to me that predatory practice is the standard business model. And I Still have not heard of an “ordinary” loan that does not charge interest on interest.
Something needs to be done for sure. But blaming the victim does not help. And neither does making statements that don’t match the experience of other people in other cases… at least without explaining very clearly why they differ.
Fred
IF “ if my two offspring had held on to all the funds that were invested for their college educations, they would be multi-millionaires today. As it turned out, they graduated debt-free, with substantial house-down-payments left over.”
No doubt. And IF everyone’s offspring had all the funds that were invested in college.. they would all be rich.
Now, where are they going to get all these funds?
On the other hand, even the rich think college is a good investment. Why is that?
Coberly,
The FIRE sector would never have been such a great advocate of credentialism had they expected that one day they would have to eat large quantities of debt issued without collateral. Securitization of debt only dubiously makes debt an asset when it is done without the use of collateral to offset risk of repayment. So, the absence of bankruptcy rights for debtors was a feature rather than a bug in the student loan system. The combination of rising costs for higher education and credentialism in the hiring for decent jobs were the icing on the FIRE sectors cake. If higher education is that important then we should keep the bankers and their bonds entirely out of it. Put it on the socialized cost tab for equal access.
When the FIRE sector offers unrated life insurance with no requirements for physical exams, then the risk pool is large while the individual risk is small and not greatly differentiated among lives – only a few thousand dollars each. The student loan risk pool is large, but so is the individual risk in many cases rather than a large pool of similar sized individual risk. So the problem is the student loan portfolio rather than the bankruptcy exception per se. There would not be a bankruptcy exception if student loans were many and small.
Ron
i think you are agreeing with me. or I am agreeing with you. Or maybe you are just adding information/insight to the pot. But it still leaves us with the questions: what do we do now? and “how were we so stupid that we let this happen?”
interesting [to me] that Social Security seems to operate on the principle that the risk pool is huge, and we never really can know what sort of risk will do us in…however smart we think we are…so it makes sense to put everyone in the same pool. This is a concept that very many people can’t seem to understand. they view their own risk of poverty in old age, or due to death or disability at a young age, as very small and resent paying for the insurance for all the losers out there. related to this is the folk who think they are cheated if they die before they can collect all the benefits they are entitled to. i wish i knew how to explain to them exactly what “insurance” is.
related to that is the “idea” that the young have a low risk of needing health insurance so their premiums should be less than the old. the idea that over a lifetime of paying a moderate premium they will “pay for” their eventual medical costs [when they are older] at an affordable rate so they won’t have to pay for it at an unaffordable rate when they get old… is something they can’t wrap their brains around. and, for some reason, neither can the insurance companies or the congress.
Run
re your reply to Eric.
I think a big part of the problem is that you CAN’T “go into bankruptcy.” and…(again “I think”…) the bankruptcy rules have changed to where now it is harder for poor(ISH) people to get meaningful relief.
As for “interest on interest,” you still need to explain to me (if you choose to do so) how this is different from any other loan. i have rethought what i thought I knew about this, and it is possible I have been wrong…but I have never been in arrears on a loan so I don’t know exactly how the banks account for unpaid interest. it is possible they could keep the “principle” column where it was the last time you paid principle, and just keep adding non-compound interest in the interest column…though that seems unlikely to me. and even more unlikely that they would not charge interest on the effectively new loan of the unpaid interest. but where they really hurt people is in the fees and penalties… including, as i found out, a huge “lawyers fee” if your dad pays off your loan entirely. [I was the dad in that scenario, and WellsFargo added twenty five percent to the outstanding balance when I paid off my daughters real estate loan.] If I am right about this, your argument that student loans are “different” will damage your credibility with people who know.
The real crime in student loans (I think) comes from the “no bankruptcy” rule and the fraudulent “origination” of the loan, as well as the many tiny frauds they get away with in “servicing” the loans (nothing they say can be he’d against them in court if it’s not in writing). none of this matters very much here as no one gives a damn what we say anyway [which is another REAL problem with “loans in America”] but it would be nice if we could get our own facts straight.
meanwhile watch what happens with “loan forbearance” when the covid loan holiday is lifted. where is Portia when we need her?
[there were better ways to help people with their rents and house payments during Covid than the “holiday” but unrealistic to think politicians would think of them. guess who is going to benefit when the holiday is over (hint: Koch is buying up a lot of real estate.}
Coberly,
“…what do we do now? and “how were we so stupid that we let this happen?”…”
[For “now,” then EMike said at the top of this comments thread –
“This needs to be solved by the FED with student loan QE. They buy all of the debt, reduce the rate to zero and increase the term to 100 years.
The stimulus from this QE would be multiple times previous QE purchases.”
I must sincerely agree with EMike on this.
OTOH, the “stupid” question is just a stupid question. Have you looked around? Seriously though, establishment liberals ran with credentialism since it was a Wall Street liberal wet dream. You could hardly expect reactionaries to balk at increasing the debt burden on the wage class. That just meant a bigger pie for the asset owning class, similar to replacing corporate pension funds with 401K accounts. Since FDR the two party system has been gang-banging the wage class. At least liberals start with a kiss.]
Some reading for you:
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), a key Judiciary Committee member who hails from the home base of credit card issuers MBNA Corp. and First USA, opposes the liberal faction’s bill.
“I’m not the senator from MBNA,” he said, noting that he had threatened to filibuster the creditor-backed version last year. But stressing that Democrats should jettison liberal economic policies of the past, he added, “I’m not the senator from 1979, either.”
Joe Biden Backed Bills to Make It Harder for Americans to Reduce their Student Debt | Consumer Bankers Association
And then there is Robert Waldmann’s commentary on 30 year bonds. Debt and Taxes I
Ron
it is possible that Mike has made a brilliant suggestion, but i’d probably have to ask a few more stupid questions before i was satisfied about unintended consequences.
meanwhile i don’t think “how did we let it happen” is a stupid question. can you explain it to me?
Run
i sort of knew all that. i hope Biden was like everyone else back than and just going along with conventional wisdom. I was hoping that he might have learned something since then.
Coberly
Read Waldman’s post on 30 year Fed bonds
Run
i did. even commented on it. it’s way over my head. i’d add to my comment” you borrow money when you need to. And whatever you buy with the borrowed money should have more value, considering time, than the money you repay the loan with, also considering time.
and i guess that includes believing that whatever “we” buy with the money we (as a country) borrow….will have more value to our children than the money they pay back to whoever lent it to us.
i don’t think these questions can be fully addressed by any “financial” analysis, however clever.
was the cost of winning WW2 a burden to our children? how about the cost of feeding the poor during a depression?
or, as i like to point out: Michael Faraday’s family received government assistance when he was young, and he himself worked for a government salary his entire life. Was the invention of the science of electricity worth the cost of feeding him to the generations making use of his discoveries?
“
This is not a quibble. The condition for a binding intertemporal budget constraint is that r>n that the interest rate the Treasury must pay is greater than the trend growth of GDP. if rOr, to put it another way
if you buy an ice cream cone, you don’t get any “return on your money.”
So IF your “return on your Social Security “tax” WAS less than the present value of your tax money, would that make SS a “bad investment.”
not if you value having the certainty of “enough” to live on when you can no longer work.
“money” is not quite as real as you think. never was.
lot’s of people won’t understand this.
Run
I never thought it was a quibble. I said it was over my head. Generally i can’t understand anything until I know all the facts.
Then I added a couple of other things I thought worth considering when thinking about adding to the debt.
There is nothing particularly unusual about a person owing more than his yearly income. It’s true it’s easer to pay off if his income is rising faster than the interest rate. That might be important for a national economy, i wouldn’t know, bu after the Rogoff kerfuffle I wouldn’t take an economists word for it.
And suppose youjust default: bankruptcy for a nation just like for student loans. who gets hurt? maybe for a short time the economy suffers from the unwillingness of lenders, especially foreign lenders, to “invest.” but that goes away quickly enough if the advantages to trade outweigh the risk of further losses. meanwhile who has lost anything? The people have whatever the government bought for them with the borrowed money. The lenders won’t get their money back, but they weren’t using it anyway. Maybe people who were counting on their savings bonds helping their retirement?
these are questions, not quibbles.
coberly:
That is Robert’s comment.
meanwhile that borrowed money is spent and the people who got paid are cirulating it around the economy and creating jobs.
Run
went back to look at Rob’ts comment. had another question: does taxing the same present value in the future mean “adjusted for inflation” or “adjusted for inflation plus growth in the economy,” or “what you can get in the magic present value bank?
cause it it’s growth, we need to ask “what caused that growth?” and if it was the borrowed money, maybe borrowing it wasn’t such a bad idea. i really have no idea how these things work out in practice, but i more than half suspect neither do the politicians. reading a book that explains how Wilson lost the war. seems he had no real grasp of the idea that people need (or at least want) to eat. seems we haven’t learn much since then.
Coberly:
Go back and read Robert’s latest post. Think of what would happen to the segment of the population if their debt was mitigated especially when a large portion of it is just paper adjustments to the value of the loan in the manner of penalties, interest, interest on interest and the penalties, consolidation costs, etc. The original loan is far smaller than what exists today (side comment).
Do you think releasing people from the student loan debt which will never be paid off would stimulate the economy?
And who is this well-known Bob Carter?
@Coberly,
“…meanwhile i don’t think “how did we let it happen” is a stupid question. can you explain it to me?…”
[I really thought that I had explained it. Since I cannot think of any better explanation, then I am stuck explaining my prior explanation. So then, here goes.]
“…OTOH, the ‘stupid’ question is just a stupid question. Have you looked around?…”
[This was the obvious response to your question “how were we so stupid that we let this happen?” When I look around then I see stupid people everywhere, loads of them. Somehow the wisdom of crowds is supposed to fix this, but I am not buying it. OTOH, my following segue implies that this was not a serious answer, which it was not since it was a cheap and easy shot, albeit superficial and unspecific. ]
[So, then I opened with a segue dismissing the cheap shot given as a joke and following on with what I thought was an honest answer to your question. I repeat that answer before some minor elaboration.]
“…Seriously though, establishment liberals ran with credentialism since it was a Wall Street liberal wet dream. You could hardly expect reactionaries to balk at increasing the debt burden on the wage class. That just meant a bigger pie for the asset owning class, similar to replacing corporate pension funds with 401K accounts. Since FDR the two party system has been gang-banging the wage class. At least liberals start with a kiss…”
[This is to say that liberals promised blacks especially, but also the working class in general, that they would get a pony, but then all we got instead was dog food. Now in a manner of speaking then that is really the same thing, but it was not what people expected. However, that still leaves room for some to be satisfied with the dog food since that was more than they had before and way more than Republicans wanted them to have.
To be more specific then the path to equal economic opportunity was deemed to pass through higher education. After all, establishment liberals are well educated and are they not wonderful? In establishing equal access to student loan credit, then the children of less that filthy rich parents also acquired equal access to debt peonage. So what was not to love? Establishment liberals live by credentialism and fealty to the FIRE sector despite their affection for pesky regulations. The threat of regulatory compliance is the basis for low budget political quid pro quo.
Peddling credentialism as the stairway to heaven and bankers as friends of the working class and poor is one of the few things that liberals pander with that Republicans would never block. See how well the two party system works for us? Or is that on us? I get confused.]
Run
I have no objection to what Robert says here. What worries me is that you think I do have an objection to doing something about student debt…including complere forgiveness and an apology from the government for enacting a stupid, harmful measure in the first place.
My only objection to what I have been hearing from the Left is that I think their language is inaccurate, and that may harm their cause.
Then, I would suggest a follow up “cure” would be to look very seriously at both the “education” policies in general, and at the predatory practices of lenders in general (hint Wells Fargo) and to a lesser extent the nearly fraudulent over-selling of goods and services that is standard business practice in America.
do you think I am asking for too much?
Ron
thank you for this explanation. it seems you were agreeing with me after all. but mine was not so much as “stupid question” as the answer was “stupid people: us.”
sometimes we do get misunderstood. good reason to ask questions.
i think your longer answer should be taught in schools.
Coberly,
Glad that we are still on the same track.
Where in this beautiful country do you live?
Central VA is no paradise, but it is close to jobs and not far from the Chesapeake Bay and the NC Outer Banks, which we will take great advantage of in four years after my wife can reasonably retire.
Ron
i hope your wife loves her job. I decided a long time ago that time was more important than money. or maybe i just got lucky.
as for the outer banks…always existed in my mind as a place i would like to see before it is gone.
meanwhile we appear to have the country surrounded.
i hope we may find it safe to disagree from time to time.
Coberly,
Until my wife is 65 YO then we cannot afford the health insurance and still be able to travel away from home to anywhere that we would want to go. Actually though, my wife (Kellie) likes her job and her coworkers, just not the firm or its executives, especially since the WellPoint merger. After the Anthem merger things changed, but only got half-bad. The WellPoint merger screwed up everything that the Anthem merger missed. Back when she went to work for Trigon then it was all bliss. WellPoint brought such a bad reputation to the firm, that they took the name of Anthem, their takeover target after that merger in a failed attempt to rid themselves of the stench.
I gather that you must live out west somewhere. Then Padre Island would be closer to you and is similar and maybe better than NC OBX. OTOH, take your passport south to Baja CA and see the Sea of Cortez. That is way better than NC OBX or Padre Is.
Few people that have lived as long as me have been disagreed with more than me. It is a wonder that I was not shot long ago. At any rate my wife disagrees with me every day and she seems safe enough.
Fun thought. My being right all of the time is for my own benefit and apparently not for anyone else’s benefit.
Also, laugh as much as you can, especially at yourself. After life’s end then there will be plenty of time for being solemn.
I was going to say “that’s what you get for marrying a younger woman.” But the fact that she hasn’t shot you says maybe she likes you even if you are right all of the time.
trying to break the “being right only benefits me” barrier.
your wife’s workplace sounds like what happened to mine. it’s why i retired so early. turned out to be the best thing i ever did, but i may have used up the “early” part.
i hope there will be plenty of time for me to learn to play the fiddle.
Anthem Inc. Layoffs – TheLayoff.com
…About Anthem Inc.:
Anthem Inc. is a large health insurance company founded in the 1940s, prior to 2014 it was known as WellPoint, Inc. It is the largest for-profit managed health care company in the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association’s family of companies. It was formed when Anthem Insurance Company acquired WellPoint Health Networks, Inc., with the newly formed company adopting the name WellPoint, Inc.; trading on the NYSE for the combined company began under the WLP symbol on December 1, 2004. On December 3, 2014, WellPoint changed its corporate name to Anthem Inc., and its NYSE ticker changed from WLP to ANTM…
Coberly,
The excerpt with the link above was just to corroborate the part of my story about how WellPoint changed its name to Anthem after a bit. However, the comments from employees at the link is why I posted the link. People with student loan debt get screwed by corporate executives along with lenders. I guess if people grow to hate work enough then they will not mind being kept like cattle, but I really do fail to understand the point of it all.
Run
sorry to hear all that, but I think it’s pretty much standard operating procedures in big business today.
one thing i noticed in my former place of employment: people would work until “early retirement”, retire, and be dead in a year. don’t really know why or if, but i’d guess the stress killed them [stress does harm that does not go away just because you escaped]. the stress of working for idiots. unpleasant idiots.
that said, i am not at all sure “idiot” is not the default condition of humanity. just shows up more with power…or whatever it is that middle managers and assistant middle managers have.
I observed in my prior firm that getting a degree from a for profit school was considered an anit-credential almost and this was enforced very strongly at the HR department. The HR team had a long spiel about how carefully they looked at all candidates before making offers. But they made it a rule not to hire from for profits. Managers so often came back with good things in interviews of many applicants that they decided to simply stop including them in candidate slates. I get it that many for profits don’t provide a lot of value, but it felt as if influential people with “respectable” credentials were at work to undermine the potential value for those that actually came out with decent educational value from the experience.