Category Archives: Student loans

In October 2023, the Department of education has come out with a new wrinkle that may help a few borrowers who have been waiting for Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) for their student loans. Broadly, PSLF wipes out student loan balances for borrowers who have done full time work for a non-profit employer for a […]

Student loans are impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, right? So goes a lot of street wisdom, but take a look at what actually happened in court in Massachusetts in January, 2014. A disbarred lawyer with criminal convictions stemming from some wild incidents in his law practice (he was tossed from the bar after a mere […]

Getting out from under a load of privately held student loans is no easy trick, even in bankruptcy court. Debtors may have a new weapon soon, however, as the idea of re-financing these loans at lower rates is just getting started. According to Sheryl Harris in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Charter One Bank in Ohio […]

Over the Easter weekend, a lot was written about the massive growing problem of student loan defaults — which some commentators think might soon approach the problems associated with the recent real estate crash. In an Associated Press article, William Brewer, president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, “This could very well be […]

Recently I published an article over on AVVO about how debtors trying to get themselves out of student loans through a bankruptcy filing soon find themselves caught in a Catch-22 situation. You can read it here. It wasn’t always this way; up to the mid 1990’s, student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy seven years after […]

If you have been looking into bankruptcy, and have a lot of student loan debt, you probably have discovered that it isn’t easy to wipe out these loans in bankruptcy court. Eliminating a student loan requires filing an adversary proceeding (a fancy name for a lawsuit) in addition to the basic bankruptcy case, and then […]

When it comes to student loans and bankruptcy, the news is typically grim all around. Student loans can’t be discharged through a typical Chapter 7 case, unless the debtor can prove they are an “undue hardship.” The procedure for claiming undue hardship involves filing suit against the lender and litigating with them; this will typically […]

Imagine waking up one day and finding that your student loan bills were more than half a million dollars. That is what has happened to Columbus, Ohio family practitioner Michelle Bisutti, according to the Wall Street Journal. She signed on for about half of that bill; when she graduated from medical school in 2003, she […]

Recent changes to the bankruptcy laws make the elimination of student loans through filing bankruptcy very difficult. In particular, once the debtor has filed her case, she must then file a separate lawsuit in the bankruptcy court against the lender, and then prove to the court that the student loans are causing an “undue hardship,” preventing financial […]