Dear Bankers and UK Regulators
I think I owe you blokes a pint.
It has come to my attention that I am an unintended beneficiary of the
conspiracy to artificially lower the LIBOR over the last several years.
I would like to thank you for saving me several thousand dollars in interest. Please feel free to continue manipulating the banking system in my favor. At least it will partially balance out your colleagues, who are manipulating the system to work against me and the rest of the 99%, especially my fellow Millennials.
I graduated in 2007 with about $27000 of student loan debt of which about $17,000 was in a Sallie Mae private loan at a variable rate linked to the US prime rate that then stood at 10.7%. It was originally a $14000 loan, and in just 2 years while I was in school, it had swelled to just under $17000. I definitely had a serious case of what-the-fuck when I was helpfully reminded of that fact about a month after graduation. I probably could have saved money by putting tuition on a credit card instead and playing the balance transfer game for 2 years.
In October 2007, I found another private lender willing to refinance that loan (aka consolidation). They offered me 3-Month LIBOR plus 2.5%, which at the time was (5.22%) for a variable rate of 7.7%, a savings of 3-points over Sallie Mae. Don't let the name fool you kids, Sallie is a loan shark of the worst sort and it continues to have most of Congress in its pocket.
I was still not happy with 7.7% but then about a year later, due to seven years of the Bush administration's incompetence and depraved indifference to good government, we had the financial crash in the fall of 2008. No one has been adequately punished for this, despite untold suffering of billions of working people but it was not without a silver lining.
Two wonderful things happened:
OBAMA WON!!!!
&
The LIBOR rate started falling off a cliff and hitting every rock on the way down so that by the time I was freezing my ass off at Obama's inauguration in January 2009, it was just 1.42% (my loan's interest rate at 3.9%) and starting in October 2009, it was hovering around 0.24 to 0.5% and it has remained that low for nearly 3 years.
So here I am 5 years after graduation, I have been fortunate enough to hold steady jobs since college and I have managed to pay off about 80% of my loan balances. My original loan which had interest rates of nearly 11% while I was in school and after graduation has largely been extracting only 3-4% from me the last few years.
So the $14000 loan that cost me $2653 in interest when it was owned by Sallie Mae during a period of just 2 years (plus 2 weeks) at 10.7% from 2005-2007 , has only cost me $2154 in interest in the last 4 years and 9 months. It's hard to figure exactly what I saved without scraping out the details of dozens of seperate pages from Sallie Mae and my current lender, but I would figure it must be around $3000-5000 in interest that I avoided thanks to you.
So, while in the spirit of Capitalism, which I am sure you can appreciate, I have no plans to pay you guys back for all the money I saved, next time you are on this side of the pond, I will buy you a pint of PBR on 50 cent can night. Also in the spirit of Capitalism, I will call the FBI to come pick you up... for the reward money of course.
Cheers mate and have a good time in prison.
-Thatgeekinit
