Boston Student Loan Lawyer

I’m excited to announce several upcoming events where I’ll be presenting on student loan law topics. Check it out:

• September 15, 2016, “Student Loans: Debt and Forgiveness 101,” Association for Behavioral Healthcare, Natick, MA.
• September 18, 2016, “Student Loan Intensive: A full-day workshop for financial advisors,” 2016 Conference, XY Planning Network, San Diego, CA.
• October 5, 2016, Student Loan Management for Attorneys and Law Students webinar, North Carolina Bar Association Center for Practice Management.
• October 6, 2016, Student Loan Management for AmeriCorps Members webinar, AmeriCorps Legal Advocates of Massachusetts.
• October 7, 2016, Student Loan Management for Financial Planners, Financial Planning Association of Massachusetts, Quincy, MA.
• October 21, 2016, “Developing a Student Loan Practice,” Consumer Rights Litigation Conference, National Consumer Law Center and National Association of Consumer Advocates, Anaheim, CA.

Are you interested in a student loan training or workshop for your organization? Find out more, and let me know.

If you’re a recent graduate from college or graduate school, you probably have a lot on your mind – employment, housing, bills, maybe even professional licensing examinations (I’m still traumatized from the bar exam). If you took out student loan debt to finance your education, you should be thinking about your student loans, too, even if you don’t want to.

A lot of people have advice and suggestions for what recent graduates should do with their student loans immediately after graduating. However, I have the unfortunate position of seeing what happens when borrowers don’t do the right thing – they may make a seemingly innocuous error or oversight, which can come back to bite them later in a very big and damaging way. The system shouldn’t be so tricky to navigate and so riddled with land mines, but unfortunately, that’s the student loan landscape that we currently have to work with.

Here’s what you should be doing and thinking about as a recent graduate with student loans:Read More

It’s no surprise that student loan scam operations have been cropping up all over the country. Given the exponential increase in student loan debt burdens, the complete disaster that is our student loan servicing system, and insufficient oversight by the federal government, it’s no wonder that people are looking for help anywhere they can get it. And whenever there are people in need, there are others who are looking to take advantage.

Luckily, we’re beginning to see law enforcement crack down. Just last week, the Massachusetts Attorney General announced a settlement with several major student debt “assistance” companies that charged excessive fees and engaged in overly aggressive and deceptive marketing practices.

I’ve already written several articles about predatory tactics that these scammers have been employing. These approaches include direct mail that uses official-looking letterhead (making it seem like it’s coming from the government); anonymous, non-credentialed staff selling services that borrowers can obtain for free; and advertising that references the Obama administration to make the services seem more “official.” Once a borrower makes contact and engages with the company, they are often charged excessive fees for services that can otherwise be done completely for free – and in the process, the companies sometimes mess up, make misrepresentations, fail to deliver, or they provide inadequate counseling, leaving borrowers in an even worse position than they otherwise would have been.

I’ve continued to monitor the operations of these companies, and lately I’ve been seeing some new marketing tactics that I wanted to share with you all:Read More

There’s somewhere around $1.3 trillion in student loan debt out there, and millions of individual student loan borrowers. Those numbers are only going to continue rising, as evidenced by statistics from the Classes of 2015, 2014, and 2013.

Given these figures, student loan borrowers are being increasingly targeted by scammers and other entities that are looking to take advantage of people or steal sensitive personal data. What can you do to protect yourself?Read More

Many people want to better manage their student loans and optimize how they repay them. There are a variety of ways to achieve this, but (as is the case throughout many aspects of the student loan world) understanding the confusing array of options can be challenging.

In my next several articles, I’m going to give you a crash course in student loan “consolidation,” “modification,” and “refinancing.” People often casually use these terms interchangeably, but they actually can mean very different things, and it’s important to understand their definitions.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have discussed student loan consolidation, where you take out a new student loan to combine several different student loans, and student loan modification, where you change the terms and conditions of an existing loan. Today, the topic is student loan refinancing.

Student Loan Refinancing

Refinancing a student loan specifically means changing the loan’s interest rate, usually by taking out a new student loan with a lower interest rate to pay off and replace the loan with the higher rate. Refinancing can also act as a consolidation if you are including multiple student loans in a single refinancing program. If you lower your interest rate, you can potentially lower your monthly payments and pay less money in total over the course of the loan’s repayment term.Read More