I have an old Govt student loan from back in '91 (and it defaulted in '92).

I just received a letter of Wage Garnishment, basically saying that they are going to start taking 15% of my wages.

I can get the money to pay this off (less than $2500), but I'm worried about my Credit Reports.

Currently, I have no negs on my reports, and a number of CC's with balances.

How can I (or is it even possible) prevent this (going to be) paid off Student Loan from showing up on my CR?

If it shows up, I expect all my CC's to go to max interest rate, which I can not handle right now. This will cause a snowball effect.

Thanks

I don't *think* it should show up on your reports since your DOLA was so long ago. Are you sure of the amount (I'm assuming $2,500 is the amount that's on the garnishment notice or is that the total amount that you originally borrowed)? Fees, penalties, interest, principal, etc. can REALLY add up on these, so you might want to make sure that the notice includes everything you'll have to pay off. I think there was someone else here who had said that they were in garnishment but that they were shocked by the total that their employer had told them they had been told to deduct.

Unfortunately, since SLs have no SOL and extremely strong collection abilities (as you already know with the garnishment notice!!), they're not under a lot of incentive to work with you, but you may want to try a settlement offer. I know when they first contacted me about my defaulted loan, they did offer some amount as a settlement amount (still WAY, WAY more than I could afford) that was less than the total. I'm assuming that at 15%/mo, you'll probably have this paid off pretty quickly if the total is $2500. If you're at all concerned about your CRs, you could talk to them about rehab, but you'll need to be careful on that. Rehab required 12 on-time, voluntary payments, so, your garnishment payments won't count. Rehab payments would need to be above and beyond the garnishment payments. At the end of the 12 months, your loans are sold back and the default notations are removed from your CRs -- the DOE (Direct Loans) removes all negatives and they have encouraged all lenders to do this, but they are only legally required to remove the default notation, although many (most?) do remove everything. I've heard many different numbers, but you may have to have some minimum amount left after the 12 payments in order to be eligible to have the loan sold.

In the end, though, since this is so old, I'm not sure that you'll have to worry about it. Hopefully someone with more experience in older loans will be able to help (they started talking "other arrangements" with me only 1 year after I defaulted!!).

Good luck!! Hope this helps!!

Thanks for the info.

I looked over the details, and the total is with all the intrest and "recovery" fees.

It's a long story, but basicly the school screwed me over. Learned my leason of signing a document without everything being filled in.

Thanks