Sanders Fabares felt that something wasn’t working.
Even after years of paying $1,000 a month toward his student loans and his wife’s, their balance hadn’t decreased by much. They still owed around $80,000, down from the $90,000 they’d originally borrowed.
“I started trying to understand what we were doing wrong,” Fabares, 41, said.
His research quickly moved away from his own loan statements and to the larger student debt system. The Lakeside, California, resident read about the millions of borrowers in default, and how many people’s monthly payments were only going to the interest on their debt, meaning their balances weren’t lowering either.
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“I remember thinking, it’s unsustainable,” Fabares said. “We need to re-think this system and try for something else.”
Fabares has now joined the Biden Jubilee 100, a group of 100 student loan borrowers who have stopped paying their debt. The Debt Collective, which calls itself “a union for debtors,” has organized the strike, hoping to pressure President Joe Biden to cancel the country’s entire outstanding student loan balance of $1.7 trillion.
“We’re going to win what we organize for,” said Thomas Gokey, co-founder of The Debt Collective.
On the campaign trail, President Biden said he supported $10,000 in student loan forgiveness, but he is under mounting pressure from members of his own party, advocates and borrowers to go further by cancelling $50,000 per person and to do so through executive action.
Although Biden in the past has expressed hesitation about canceling student debt without Congress, White House press secretary Jen Psaki suggested this month that the administration hadn’t ruled out the possibility. On his first day in office, Biden extended a pause on payments for federal student loan borrowers that has been in effect since March until this coming September.
