Student loan debt is a huge problem across the country. Using our tax dollars to bail out that debt isn’t the solution. Nor is moving abroad to avoid paying one’s student loans. According to the New York Times, that’s a real and evidently acceptable choice.

Amanda Lynn Tully spent her teenage years as a ward of the State of Colorado and believed a college degree was her ticket to a better life.

So, when she graduated in 2017 with a master’s degree in historic preservation from the University of Oregon, $65,000 in federal student loans and no job offers in the conservation field, she felt misled.

“I was never financially stable because I was never taught to be financially stable,” Ms. Tully, 37, said.

Less than a year after graduating, Ms. Tully made a drastic decision: She moved to Prague, where she had completed an internship, and defaulted on her loans. She hasn’t made a payment in over seven years.

Stop and read that again. Never mind the issue of what her degree is in. She states that since she wasn’t taught to be financially stable, it was fine to decide to move to Prague and default on her loans. Any idea that she could take classes and TEACH herself to be financially stable has evidently never crossed her mind. 

How much were her monthly payments? 

Tully said she was on an income-based repayment plan, which would have allowed her to have the remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments.

Her repayment was just $60 a month, but she complained that even this amount was “psychologically burdensome,” the Times reported.

“The payments weren’t even paying off the interest, so it was frustrating,” Tully said.

SIXTY DOLLARS. And she claims it was “psychologically burdensome” to budget for those payments. Which also means the thought budgeting an amount to pay on the principal never even crossed her mind. 

These are the people Joe Biden wanted to bail out. He and his Administration did end runs around the Supreme Court so that leeches like this could skate on their debt, and gloat about it. 

Tully is 37 years old. DEFINITELY old enough to figure out how to manage her finances, or talk to and learn from someone versed in financial and debt management. Moreover, at 37 years old, she is capable of changing direction and learning to code. 

What she and the rest of those profiled are ignoring is that this debt will not go away, and defaulting is truly a stupid choice. 

“The psychological weight of carrying debt is a really widespread issue, even if it seems financially manageable,” she said. “It’s not necessarily ‘I can’t afford it.’ It’s sometimes ‘It feels like I had no other choice but to go to college and I had to take out loans to go, and now I’m going to be stuck with this,’ which can define people’s lives in a way that feels very unfair and harmful.”

She couldn't afford $60 a month but could afford Beats by Dre. pic.twitter.com/JJ6Wf4GtTn

— André Meyer's Ghost (@capitauxprives) April 4, 2026

Those run between $130 and $350, depending upon the version she bought. That’s 2-6 loan payments right there. But we are supposed to feel sorry for the mental burden their debt has placed upon them. And applaud a guy who specifically moved overseas and renounced his citizenship so he could default on his loans. 

“I thought about it one day and was like, ‘Am I really going to be doing this until I’m 50 or 60?’”

His primary concern was the parent PLUS loan. “If I left and didn’t pay it, they would be forced to,” he said of his family. After working for three years and making timely payments, he refinanced the loan into his name with a private lender. Within months, he moved to Southeast Asia to teach English and continued making minimum payments while applying for citizenship in his new country. He stopped paying when it was secured.

Mr. Cooper defaulted on his loans in 2019, changing his email and phone number, never alerting debtors to his new address.

OR, Cooper could’ve adjusted his budgeting and, if given a raise or moved into a higher paying logistics job, then budgeted his loan repayment plan accordingly. But no, let’s just skip the country, gain citizenship there, and quit paying. 

There are over 8 million borrowers, that we know of, who have defaulted on their student loan debt, to the tune of millions of dollars. As in $1.6 TRILLION in outstanding debt.

The outstanding federal student loan balance is $1.693 trillion; 42.8 million student borrowers have federal loan debt.
Federal student loan debt represents 90.9% of all student loan debt; 9.13% of student loan debt is private, including $29.7 billion in refinance loans.

The average federal student loan debt balance is $39,547, while the total average balance (including private loan debt) may be as high as $43,333.

10.0% of federal student loans dollars were delinquent as of 2025’s fourth financial quarter (2025 Q4); 1.62% of private student loans were in default as of 2025 Q3.

We taxpayers are bearing the burden of this debt, yet are supposed to feel sorry for those who made the very calculated decision to default on their loans by moving to another country. 

No. I am not playing their games. They signed a contract and should be held accountable no matter where they are.

Feature Photo Credit: student loan, money via iStock, cropped and modified