People in The Netherlands have done this. They go to S/E Asian countries to skip out on a €30,000 debt. After a while your passport becomes invalid which makes travel very difficult. And with the outstanding debt you are not able to get a new passport.<p>Which is dumb, because you only have to pay off the debt if you are able to, interest rate is very low, you can pause it for a few years and after 35 years the loan is automatically forgiven. It's not a big deal. Completely uprooting your life to skip out on a €50/month payment is insanity but people see that €30,000 number in their portal and freak out about it.<p>Approximately 25,000 emigrated debtors are currently untraceable by the student debt collector.

No need to leave, use the Sam Hyde method. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD2gXY4piF4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD2gXY4piF4</a>

> Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome.<p>$60 a month for 20 years, and then the debt is forgiven doesn’t sound burdensome at all. Perhaps if she doesn’t return to the US it won’t matter, but it seems a small price to pay monthly to make returning to your home one day a whole lot less stressful.

The most frustrating part of the student loan question is that you can still GET THESE LOANS! The schools will sell you into indentured servitude today! They'll take the money and don't care at all! They take ZERO responsibility for the student loan crisis.

Paying your debts is a business decision, not a moral decision. There is nothing moral about paying your debt to a bank and nothing immoral about not paying your debt to a bank.<p>Businesses do this ALL THE TIME. Businesses can do this, and will walk away from debt the second when the math makes sense. If it's okay for businesses, then the exact same behavior should be okay for us humans to do. I walked away from my house at the height of the financial crisis. It was a business decision, because the mortgage was far larger than the value of my house.<p>Student loans are the only reason why tuition has gone up 10x in 30 years. Every financial entity from banks to schools feel like it's okay to hang students out to dry with large debts because they will have to pay for it for the rest of their lives. I hope a large portion of the debt disappears because the students simply walk away from the US.

I'm Canadian, but I know someone from the US who did this. She's living in Paris, moderately successful in academia and as far as I can tell, completely happy to never return to the US. Her family goes to visit her in Europe once in a while.<p>Perplexing.

She's from Colorado and decided to go to an out of state university (Oregon) and pay full out of state tuition for a degree in "historic preservation"?<p>Yeah no shit you just signed up for a lifetime of debt.<p>Reminds me of another story of some lady that got saddled with a couple hundred thousand in debt because she really wanted to go to Duke for a theater management degree. And then fled with her Russian fiance to Moscow so she wouldn't have to pay it.<p>We all agree that higher education is too expensive in the US. But these are not good examples of that.

"Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. <i>But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome."</i><p>Say what? $60 per month is not that much!

Make universities pay for this.

Who wouldn't want to rack up a bunch of debt and just not pay when the bill came due?

I'm considering doing this.<p>I'm eligible for dual citizenship and am in the process of acquiring my second citizenship.<p>My reasons are two-fold:<p>1.) I've fallen through the cracks and ended up in a situation the system did not account for. I had a medical incident during my last semester of graduate school that turned out to be a presenting relapse of Multiple Sclerosis. Obviously I couldn't have anticipated this when I went to undergraduate and graduate school. The problem comes in in that the system treats disability as completely binary: Either you can't work at all/can work so little you can't earn more than 1600/mo, or they assume you're fine and can pay everything off. I can work, but I can't work in the field or to the level that I planned for before I got ill. In addition, I have expenses working full time that an able bodied person doesn't just to allow me to <i>do</i> that full time work and that aren't considered in the income based payment calculations. So I fall in the hole of 'make too much to be considered disabled, but not enough to actually pay' due to a condition that is incurable. Also, I have a special Medicaid exemption that allows me to earn more without losing healthcare, but not enough to actually pay back my loans. So even if I could get and maintain a job that would pay a salary that would let me pay, I'd then lose my healthcare and I'd hit the out of pocket maximum <i>every year</i> on any private plan, resulting in a substantial decrease in actual salary.<p>There's functionally no way for me to pay my loans: If I give up the supports I pay for to pay my loans, I can't work full time anymore and can't pay my loans. the jobs that would pay over 100k in this state (what I would need at minimum to cover supports, healthcare I'd lose, and loan payments) won't hire someone who needs frequent time off, a bunch of employment flexibility, who can't work overtime, and can't be subjected to too much stress. I can barely work one full time job, so additional jobs or hustling isn't an option. I'm just stuck.<p>2.) I don't consider the US government to be a trustworthy contract partner at this point. I was one of the people who consolidated my loans to take advantage of the SAVE program under Biden's administration. They've struck down SAVE, but haven't done a thing for those of us who consolidated our loans and added to the principal <i>because we trusted what we were told by the government</i>. If I can be told by the government that doing something will help me, and then 2 years later they reverse that with no recourse offered, that tells me none of the terms can be depended on. If our own government's answer to this is 'you shouldn't have listened to the government, sucker', then well... I don't trust them to fulfill their end of the contract, and I don't particularly like the idea of owing money to an institution with both an extreme amount of power over my life and no intent on sticking to agreements or dealing fairly with me. It makes me <i>nervous</i>, especially for 10-20 years down the road.

Debt is a social construct that the dying olds keep ramming down the next generations throats.<p>It's ageism and exploitation of youth.<p>The ledger is never getting paid off because it doesn't exist as anything more than allegory.<p>We can pay it off with allegory too if we must walk through such incantations for the semantics police.<p>What a joke of a culture to validate the ramblings of Abe Simpson.<p>Good in these students. Live anywhere else until America becomes less of a shit hole country. Even if that means dying never stepping foot in the US again.