Student debt in our country is somewhere around $1.5 trillion. It is a crisis, terrorizing millions of Americans of all ages, while shrinking their future opportunities. A growing demographic in the student loan debt world are Americans over the age of 60. According to the Wall Street Journal reported in February that the number of seniors having their Social Security benefits garnished by the federal government for student loan debt, rose 362% since the last decade.
Student debt is one of the biggest contributors to the overall increasing debt burden held by seniors. U.S. consumers who are 60 or older owed around $615 billion in credit cards, auto loans, personal loans and student loans as of 2017. That is up 84% since 2010—the biggest increase of any age group, according to the TransUnion data.
CBS Evening News spoke with 76-year-old social worker Seraphina Galante about her $40,000 student loan debt, a debt that she continues to spend $176 every month paying, with zero chance of settling. "I don't see the justice or even the logic. It's not gonna reduce, ever. And the emotional part of it that it's there. That it's always gonna be there." Galante is considered lucky in this demographic as forty percent of seniors with student debt are in default.
At the beginning of our journeys, crippling student loan debt usually means we have to limit our adventurous behaviors, maybe live at home longer than expected, unable to save for a rainy day or a more solid future. As we approach the later decades of our lives, crippling student debt can mean skipping medicines, losing homes, electricity, heat. It is something most everyone can understand. It is why a majority of Americans support Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s plans for student debt relief—even if they themselves have no student debt.