As you’ve learned from my last post,
I ignored my student loan for years, many years.
Nothing much happened.

Yea, one day years later, they found my bank account
and froze it. Cost me a few hundred dollars.
I’ll survive.

All right, they started taking my income tax return
money. Damn, that hurt. But Life goes on.

Life is still good, all is well.
But then one day, years later.
Big Brother (your Uncle Sam) Returns!

He blind sided me…

I had learned not to keep too much money in
the bank (didn’t have much anyway).
And I learned not to expect any money back
from income taxes. I was OK with that.

But I was totally unprepared for what HE did next.
One day I go to cash my paycheck, and I noticed
“Hey, my check is mighty light this week”
What happened?

I look closely at my pay stub.
The number of hours are correct, the rate is correct.
Hey, what’s this…

Wage Attachment. 10% of the gross.
10% OF THE GROSS, not net.

10% of the freakin’ gross!
Shit!
10% of the gross taken off the top.
Before you get your check.

10% of the gross gone… Every Week…
No explaination, no one to complain to.
No supervisor to override. Your money is gone.

10% GONE. It doesn’t matter that you were
barely scrapping by every week, living check to check.
Now you live with 10% less. Every week. It sucks!

PLUS, they still take your income tax refund.

No wonder they call it a re fund becaues they are
Re Funding their own pockets with your money.

There’s nothing you can do about it.

So I learned to live on 10% less for many years.
One day I finally had the good fortune to get a
better paying job. Better job, better pay and…

Best of all - the wage attachment stopped. Hurray!

Or so I thought…
Life is good. Life goes on. I pay my bills.
Years later, on Friday the 13th, it happened.

“Big Brother Returned Again”.

One miserable deja vu day the check was light.
I check the paystub. Number of hours are correct,
the rate is correct…

There it was on the pay stub again…
Wage attachment. 10% of the gross.
‘Son of a bitch’ found me again.
Damn it, damn it, damn it!

You can’t win!

Big Brother will find you.
It might take weeks. It might take months.
In my case it took many, many years… Decades!

But Big Brother will hunt you down and find you.
You can’t hide forever! And guess what?

I just received a letter informing me that
Big Brother is now approved to Increase the
wage attachment withholdings to 15% of the gross.

How much does that hurt?

As an example, let’s say you were grossing $1,000 per
week. You would pay about $350 in taxes leaving you
with $650.

They will take 15% of the $1,000 which is $150
leaving you with only $500.
HALF of your paycheck is GONE!

You just took a $150 a week pay cut.
And if you make less than $1,000 it hurts even more.

AND they still take your income tax return!

Trust me on this.
You DON’T want this to happen to YOU!

Next time… How to avoid this:
Student Loan Debt Consolidation

This entry was posted on Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Debt Consolidation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.