My partner and I have about 60k in student loans and haven’t been paying even though they started back in October. I’m waiting to see if maybe we just shouldn’t. I remember there being chatter about how Nelnet and other loan holders had like laid off a bunch of people during the pause and hadn’t hired them back, and the system is overloaded and fucked, and how are people suddenly going to pay a big monthly expense anyway, etc etc. But if people were to not pay them, I feel like the media would not want to perpetuate that narrative and build it into something real by spreading the word so to speak. So I don’t know if there’s a way to gauge is people are actually paying them? Does anyone know?
I used the pause to pay down what I could. Got rid of the super predatory private loans ASAP and then just paid down the principle as much as possible spending most of my paycheck for years on it. Went from like 140k in debt to 30k. Might be able to finally pay the rest of it off this year. Nursing sucks, but it at least pays the bills well enough.