Many people do not know much about the statute of limitations on the student loans. An average student prior to graduation is too much interested in completing his school, getting his degree, finding the best job and getting on with his life. Along with all the activities going on in his life, he is responsible to pay his bills which include student loans.
Sometimes, life gets so busier and many people are strapped with paying mortgages, rent, car notes, credit card bills, insurance, medical bills, utilities and other expenses in this shaking economy.
Due to some unexpected emergencies, you start missing your monthly payments towards your debts and thus it starts falling behind. Slowly and slowly, these debts get seriously delinquent adding up with highest interests and fees.
Since the creditors are not able to collect the outstanding balance including student loans, they will send the file to some collection agency who will use all kinds of collection tactics to recover the amount. As an educated customer, you should know about the statute of limitations on these student loans. If you have taken a student loan from some private lender, then it will come under the SOL period. Federal loans are never past the statute of limitations.
You might be asking what a statute of limitation is. It defines the deadlines by which a creditor or a lender can take legal actions against the borrower in order to collect a debt. Once the statute of limitations has expired, the creditor, lender or the debt collection agency cannot take you to the court and sue you.
Statute of limitations is an absolute debt relief and no creditor or debt collector can against it and win the case in the court. Every state has its own SOL laws. If you have not been making any payments on your student loans for the past three to four years, there is a very good chance your student loan will be past the SOL period, but you must double check the state laws.
If you have not made any payment on your private student loans and it is very close to the expiry of the SOL period, the creditor or the collection agency will try every possible means to collect the debt. Make sure that you are aware of the laws and any latest payment activity will renew the SOL period after the loan gets current. You need to stand as an educated consumer when dealing with the scary debt collectors.
More about Statute of Limitations: www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/epch1102.pdf
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Statute of Limitations, Student Loan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
This is exactly my position except that the attorney I hired doesn’t seem to know this and let a summary judgement come against me and my daughter, without bring this into question or action. I now need to appeal this judgement.
As of 2005, there is no stat. limits on private or federal student loans regardless of what state you live in. You also cannot discharge them in bankruptcy court. either. The best thing that anyone can do is take a second job to get rid of the private ones. Private student loans are a nasty form of debt and balloon in principal very quickly if they were in forbearance while in school. Mine went from 8,000 to 29,000 very quickly. I tell people to stay far away from these if you can.. if you can’t then work a part time job and make payments on them while in school to prevent the principal from growing.
I have a school loan that has been in garnishment since 1996. I heard that in 2012 any loan after 20 years would be forgiven, or is this for current school loans?