While You Pay Back Your Student Loans, Sallie May Execs Are On A Vacation In Hawaii

The student cash advance industrial intricate is a burden, and perhaps even a virus: an estimated 43 million folks are carrying a collective $1.6 trillion in student cash advance debt, as well as a vast majority of these people took out such cash advances before they were even old enough to legally drink or rent a vehicle, and often with a vague pretense that such an investment will result in a job lucrative enough to pay it off. (While plenty of college graduates make more money than high school graduates in the long run, that isn't routinely the case.) And the horror stories of people saddled with such debt are everywhere — several put off accepting dream jobs, getting married, and starting their own businesses due to the cash they owe.


Although one person's living nightmare can also be another person's livelihood, and that gig can come with some serious perks. (Are those advantages justified or monstrous? Well, that likely depends on whether you're the one deriving them.)


On Thursday (October 17), NBC News reported that the cash advance giant Sallie Mae purchased at least 100 of its staff to travel to Maui, Hawaii, in August; they stayed at the Fairmont Kea Lani, where rooms start at $500 a night, and then some staff brought their families, though the agency says they only purchased direct employees.


Ray Quinlan, the company's CEO, told NBC News the summit was "a sales get-together for all of our salesperson. ... We do it every year."


He added that it was being contained in "recognition of the hard work" of its sales force, which resulted in $5 billion in student cash advance debts brokered to 374,000 borrowers in the past year. That's ostensibly on top of the $20.4 billion in outstanding student cash advances total the company noted in its fourth-quarter 2018 report, up 18 percent from 2017. (For context, that sum could purchase you ownership of 20 NBA teams, with about $1.4 billion left over, so yeah, it's a lot of money.)


That "hard work" comes at a cost for the millions of Residents of the
U.S. Who default on their student cash advances, or whose excellent class of life suffers due to the payments they make every month. On average, it takes anywhere from 10 to 30 years for most borrowers to pay off their cash advances, and there really are also plenty of risks involved with private loans, which are the only kinds of cash advances Sallie Mae currently offers. (In 2014 the firm created an offshoot called Navient in light of 2010 legislation signed by President Barack Obama that revamped the student cash advance industry and specifically blocked private banks from obtaining government funds and and for that reason benefitting from federal loans.)


What's more, several people have alleged that they signed onto such cash advances without being totally aware or informed of the distinction, and that has impacted everything from their interest rates to their ability to defer or forbear on loans in hard times. As Newsweek reported, 40 percent of people with student cash advance debt are expected to default on their payments by 2023. Meanwhile, none of the four Presidential primary debates have featured a sustained conversation about student cash advances, even though the third and fourth debates were contained at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas, and Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, respectively.