Can My Boyfriend Get a Passport With Student Loans in Default?

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Dear Penny,

My boyfriend has old student loans from like 1990. At some point he quit paying them and was a 1099 worker, so we know they were never garnished from his pay.

They do not show up on his credit reports at all. He has been working on his credit but is still haunted that they are not on his report. Maybe his dad or family paid them (deceased now).

We want to travel to London to see my daughter perform with an orchestra. I have a passport, but his has expired. He is afraid if he applies, the student loan thing will come up and he will be denied. I thought this only applied to deadbeat child support people. Can he get a passport?

-H.

Dear H.,

Your boyfriend should go ahead and apply for a passport. He’s still eligible to receive one, even though he’s defaulted on his student loans.

You’re correct that you can be denied for a passport if you owe child support. Parents who owe more than $2,500 can’t get a passport until they’ve paid off their obligation. The US State Department can also deny your application or revoke your existing passport if the IRS reports that you owe more than $55,000 in delinquent taxes.

But unpaid student loans, whether they’re federal or private, won’t stop you from getting a passport.

Now for the bad news: Your boyfriend probably still owes those loans, even if they’re not showing up on his credit reports.

I suppose it’s possible that his father or a family member could have paid them off if they’d had access to his account. But it seems pretty unlikely. Why wouldn’t they have told your boyfriend that they were paying them off?

Another long-shot possibility is that your boyfriend is among the hundreds of thousands of borrowers who have qualified for automatic student loan forgiveness. But keep in mind that those borrowers make up a tiny fraction of the more than 40 million people with student loan debt. Unless very specific circumstances apply — for instance, if your…

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