Nearly 90% Of Student Loan Borrowers Say They Aren't Financially Ready To Resume Payments

The student loan debt crisis has not gone away, and payments are set to resume in just two months. According to new polls, 89% of student loan debt holders with full time jobs say that they are not financially ready to restart payments, and they will have to adjust their spending habits when the bills come due. This could all be ended by the Biden administration and it would give them an easy victory if they were to cancel this debt. But more importantly, it would help millions of struggling borrowers. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

On February 1st next year, student loan payments are going to resume after being suspended for nearly two years, by that point, and a new poll out this week says that 89% of borrowers who have full-time jobs are not financially prepared to be able to resume making those payments. Let me read you some findings from this new poll. 88% of respondents said the pandemic payment freeze was critical to their financial wellbeing during the pandemic. 87% said the relief allowed them to make payments on other bills during the pandemic. 44% of fully employed borrowers said they're in default on their debt or cannot afford to make any payments. And 45% of respondents said their financial wellness is currently poor to very poor. Now the Biden administration could easily just come out and say, okay, you know what, we're going to extend the payment moratorium even further and that would be a band-aid on a bullet wound, but it would help.

But what the Biden administration should do, especially considering the fact that his polling numbers are in the low forties to high thirties, Democrats are set to get walloped in the 2022 midterms. So what Biden should do is just say, screw it, it's gone. Your debt is gone. I'm wiping it out. I am ordering the US department of education to wipe out every single federal student loan that we hold. Now, here's the thing. There's currently $1.7 trillion held in student loan debt across the country. I think there's like some 43 million borrowers. Maybe I'm wrong on that. I know the number is correct. Not sure if the number of people I'm naming is correct, but anyway, roughly 43 million, at least 43 million, hold 1.7 trillion in debt. Not all of that is held in federal student loans. Some of that is held by private institutions and that's where there is this disconnect of no Biden cannot forgive all the student loan debt.

And yes, he can. He can forgive all of the federal student loan debt without Congress acting, you know, basically through an executive order telling the department of education, wipe it out. He cannot via executive order, as far as I know what I've been told by the people working on this issue, he cannot wipe out that privately held student loan debt, which is also unfortunate because those are much, much higher interest rates. You know, much more strict rules about repayment versus the federal loan debt. But the federal loan debt is the majority of it. So that would help the most people and again, he could do it like that. He could secure a massive win for this administration, for the Democrats, help boost their poll numbers while he's at it. But more importantly, allow millions of people in this country to not have to worry about that ever again.

Because as this poll shows, it's not like they're out there living the high life because they don't have to pay their student loan debts back. They're not out there drinking champagne, eating at Ruth's Chris saying, look at these poor fools. No. They're paying their other bills. They're doing things that they weren't previously able to do because they were not financially there yet. And again, most of it is paying down other debts, becoming more financially secure so they can do other things in the future, buy a car, buy a house.