{"id":928,"date":"2020-10-06T06:26:31","date_gmt":"2020-10-06T06:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clevelandsbankruptcyattorney.com\/?page_id=928"},"modified":"2020-11-20T17:57:33","modified_gmt":"2020-11-20T17:57:33","slug":"student-loan-debt","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.clevelandsbankruptcyattorney.com\/student-loan-debt\/","title":{"rendered":"Student Loan Debt"},"content":{"rendered":"
Student loan lenders have lobbied for, and received, a lot of power from Congress and the legislators. This has resulted in these loans being essentially non-dischargeable in a bankruptcy context.<\/p>\n
Presently, the controlling case on student loan dischargeability is In re Brunner<\/em><\/a>, decided in the Southern District of New York in 1985. Here, a test was formulated that is still relied upon by most Federal Bankruptcy courts today. <\/p>\n The Brunner court ruled that a three-part showing is required to discharge student loan debt: 1) the debtor could not, based on current income and expenses, maintain a \u201cminimal\u201d standard of living for himself or herself and his or her dependents if forced to repay the loans, 2) this state of affairs was likely to persist for a significant portion of the repayment period of the student loan, and 3) the debtor had made good faith efforts to repay the loans.<\/p>\n All three elements of the above test must be met. This has been done in the Northern District of Ohio, but only a handful of times. The case of In re Lamento, prosecuted by a good friend and colleague of mine, is a good example of the type of fact pattern that can yield a student loan discharge. Feel free to google it.<\/p>\n Where does this leave most student loan borrowers facing bankruptcy? Streamlining your debts to where you have the available funds to make a $300-$500 student loan payment monthly is currently the function of Chapter 7 bankruptcy<\/a> for most filers. <\/p>\n