Hate Sallie Mae and their Signature loans

I graduated about a year ago from an unaccredited college (didn't know this until recently) with a lovely $74,000+ in student loan debt. This was after the handful of grants I received; before the grants, my bachelor's degree in graphic design would have been $103,000. Holy crap.

Anyway, I enjoyed that little grace period post-graduation, but I have found that it is by pure luck that I can even manage to pay my bill each month to those soul-less cretins at Sallie Mae. I live in Nowheresville, USA, in a small town with zero art job opportunities and zero general job opportunities. All the retail jobs are snatched up by the bloody teenyboppers. The only way I get any semblance of money is from doing freelance work for pennies (freelance writing for between $2 and $8 per article) and selling stuff on eBay. Occasionally, my main client will have me do a large project and I will get about $1000 - that will last me a couple months as far as Sallie Mae.

Otherwise, I do not have an actual job. No one will hire me because they feel my freelancing rate of $6 an hour is too high. No job, no money to buy a car, no money for insurance, no money for a security deposit on an apartment...no money for anything. I am too broke to move somewhere where I could have better luck finding a job. I called Sallie Mae after receiving my first bill of around $389, and told the representative I could just not afford this every month since I was darn near unemployed, what with my annual income of about $2000. They told me several things, such as how consolidating my loans would result in a higher monthly bill and how what I've got is as low as my payments will go. Then they so kindly not only raised my monthly bill by $100, but they sold loans without telling me to the Department of Education and I was three months delinquent on those until I got a nice little note from the GRC telling me I was about to default.

So here I am, paying $557 a month on loans for an education that has gotten me absolutely nothing. I'm going to be attending grad school next week and I look forward to the forbearance on my current loans. I'm also hoping to get a whole bunch of financial aid...hoping. I never got one red cent after applying for countless scholarships during my undergrad studies. In addition, the education I got at my last school was absolute crap and not in any way worth $100,000+, but grad school is already driving me into the ground by asking for $4000 up-front. My mother sold what little stock she had to give me that money; she herself can barely live since she has her wages garnished from a couple of her own loans when her salary was already pitiful, so it's not like my family is rolling in the cash.

I've come up with a few ways I might be able to repay my loans a little more efficiently:

- Sue someone
- Hope a relative with lots of money dies and leaves me some cash
- Go on welfare, file for bankruptcy, and claim my loan bills caused an undue hardship
- Leave the country
- Win the lottery
- Become a test subject
- Rob a bank
- Kill myself

Those bloody private loans are the problem - one of them is for over $22,000. I hate that I cannot consolidate those loans...the private loan consolidation programs I've seen are all no longer taking applications. I wish I could just stick it to those pricks at Sallie Mae and not pay my loans, but if I do that, my credit goes down the toilet and my mother gets a lien on her house since she's my co-signer. I have no clue what I'll do about my debts, and since I'm not a parent, immigrant, or handicapped person, I don't get extra aid.