$100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college

"Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.

Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she's been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.

She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. After taxes, she takes home about $2,300 a month. Rent runs $750, and the full monthly payments on her student loans would be about $700 if they weren't being deferred, which would not leave a lot left over.

She may finally be earning enough to barely scrape by while still making the payments for the first time since she graduated, at least until interest rates rise and the payments on her loans with variable rates spiral up. And while her job requires her to work nights and weekends sometimes, she probably should find a flexible second job to try to bring in a few extra hundred dollars a month.

Ms. Munna understands this tough love, buck up, buckle-down advice. But she also badly wants to call a do-over on the last decade. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said. "It feels wrong to me."

Read the full story in the New York Times by Ron Lieber

Degrees That Get You Hired Find out which 6 degrees rank highest in terms of employment

Student loans turn into crushing burden for students

Natalie Hickey picked up $140k in student debt, some of it at interest rates as high as 18%. Her monthly payments are roughly $1,700, more than her rent and car payment combined. Caught in an increasingly common trap in the nation's $85-billion student loan market, Hickey borrowed heavily, presuming that all her debt was part of the federal loans

Hickey knew she would need loans to complete her degree, so she went to the campus financial aid office as a freshman. After she filled out paperwork, Brooks Institute set her up in a loan program administered by Sallie Mae, the nation's biggest student lender.

Sallie Mae was chartered by the federal government in 1972, and most of its business is in issuing federally insured student loans. But while it may appear to be a quasi-government agency, it is in fact a for-profit company whose stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange.

Hickey ended up with $20,000 in low-interest federally guaranteed loans issued by Sallie Mae, and $120,000 in higher-interest private loans issued by Sallie Mae.

Hickey said no one explained the difference to her.

read more | digg story

California foreclosures spike 228%

A new law mandating delays in foreclosure actions may create a fleeting lull, but observers wonder whether it will lead to widespread mortgage workouts.

Reporting from Sacramento and Washington -- The number of people losing their homes in California hit a record high of nearly 80,000 in the last three months, but a new state law appears to be dramatically slowing the foreclosure process -- at least for now.

Loan default notices, the first step toward foreclosure, fell to 94,240 for the three months that ended Sept. 30. That's down sharply from the record 121,673 for the previous quarter, according to research firm MDA DataQuick.

read more | digg story