Student starts website to plead for help in paying overwhelming student loan debt: $200,000
Northeastern University grad Kelli Space, 23, owes $200,000. The New Jersey resident has set up a website entitled TwoHundredThou.com on which she tells her story and asks visitors to make a payment, any payment, to help bail her out.
"Monthly payments just for the private loans are currently $891 until Nov 2011 when they increase to $1600 per month for the following 20 years," she wrote in an effort to elicit funds.
But the response has been lukewarm, to say the least.
To date, she's received $1,811.28 in donations and still owes $198,188.72, according to her website.
Hers is a story familiar to millions of debt-laden college grads.
"I was 18 and the first person in my family (including extended family) to attend college," she says on the FAQ page of her website. "Therefore, not only was excitement consuming me, but my parents didn't exactly know how college would or wouldn't affect my salary in the future."
She didn't get any of the scholarships she applied to during her senior year of high school, so she decided to go for broke and borrow the money to finance her education.
Did Space have any other options?
If her loans are federal, said Anya Kamenetz, author of "Generation Debt" and "DIY U," she could take advantage of some relatively new federal programs to make it easier on those repaying student loans.
"The number one way to make federal student loan payments more manageable are programs like the income based repayments," she says. "You apply for the program, consolidate your loans and then your payments are a percentage of your income. It's not a walk in the park, but after 25 years they forgive the rest of the loan."
The other new federal program, which involves public service loan forgiveness, permits those working in nonprofit or government jobs to pay a portion of their income each month, and then the loan is forgiven after 10 years.
If Space has private loans, she's "in a much bigger pickle," said Kamenetz. "You can't walk away from them but she could go back to the bank and tell what she's doing to pay back the federal loans, and see if they can help set up a plan to pay the private ones."
The idea for a website came to Space when she read up on savekaryn.com (shopaholic Karyn Bosnak's website on which she asks for donations to free her from credit card debt) and milliondollarhomepage.com (Alex Tew's website on which he tries to sell pixels for $1 each.)
"Both were soliciting donations - one for credit card debt and one in exchange for small advertisements online," Space says. "And I figured mine could be considered a worthy enough cause."
Even though the response hasn't been what she hoped, she said she's gotten some satisfaction for bringing attention to the daunting debt some college grads are facing.
"The response has been seemingly negative so far and I'm doing my best not to focus on that," she told the News.
Unlike a lot of recent college grads, though, she's lucky enough to have a fulltime job. She is office manager for an Internet company in Manhattan, and lives in New Jersey with her parents.
"I want these issues out there because they are honestly plaguing a great deal of college graduates who are laden with debt," Space says. "This is much less about me and more about the bigger picture."
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