I co-signed my daughter's student loans in 2014 and I will be seventy-one when they're finished and she doesn't know that number.

I'm fifty-eight. She's twenty-nine. She's a physical therapist, she's good at it, she's not irresponsible, and none of this is a story about a kid who wasted money.

The numbers, because the numbers are the post.

She went to a private program. Four years undergrad plus the doctorate, which in her field is required. Total borrowed, across federal and private: one hundred and ninety-four thousand dollars.

Of that, the federal portion — about ninety-six thousand — is hers alone, in her name, and she pays it on an income-driven plan.

The private portion is ninety-eight thousand, in both our names, and I am equally liable for every dollar. Rate between 6.8 and 8.1 across four separate notes. Standard term was fifteen years from 2019, but she consolidated and refinanced in 2021 into a twenty-year to get the monthly payment down to something she could live on in a job that pays eighty-one thousand in a city that costs what it costs.

Twenty years from 2021 is 2041. I was born in 1967.

I will be seventy-four, not seventy-one. I wrote seventy-one at the top because that's the number I tell myself, and I've just corrected it while typing, and that's probably the most honest thing in this post.

What she knows: that I co-signed. That I'm on the loans. That it's a lot.

What she does not know: that in 2021, when she refinanced, the lender required a hard credit pull on me and I was at a point where a mortgage refi I was planning would have gone better without it, and I didn't do the refi, and that decision has cost me roughly four hundred a month since in interest I didn't have to pay.

Over four years that's about nineteen thousand dollars that nobody will ever write down anywhere.

And what she really doesn't know: that my own retirement plan assumed a paid-off house by sixty-five, and it is no longer going to be paid off by sixty-five, and I have moved my own retirement from sixty-six to somewhere around seventy, and I did that arithmetic in a spreadsheet in February and then closed the spreadsheet.

I'm not angry at her. I want to be very clear because this is the part that gets misread. She was eighteen in 2014. She was eighteen, and she had gotten into the program, and she sat at my kitchen table with a financial aid letter that she did not understand and that I also did not understand, and I signed because the alternative was to tell a child who had done everything right that she couldn't go.

Nobody in that kitchen in 2014 could read that letter. That's the thing I want on the record somewhere. Two intelligent adults — I have a degree, I've run a department — could not work out from the paperwork in front of us what eight percent on ninety-eight thousand over twenty years actually does.

I could tell you now to the dollar. In 2014 I could not, and nobody involved in the transaction had any reason to explain it to me.

What I actually want to know, which is why I'm posting instead of just sitting here:

Has anybody gotten a co-signer release? Her loans are with a servicer that advertises one after thirty-six consecutive on-time payments plus a credit check. She's made fifty-one. I asked in 2023 and was told she didn't meet the income-to-debt threshold. Has anyone actually gotten through that, and what did it take?

And the second question, which I'd rather not have to ask: if I don't get released and something happens to me, what happens to her? There's a clause about death of a co-signer and I have read it nine times and I cannot tell whether it accelerates.