{"id":207595,"date":"2022-01-17T12:15:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-17T12:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/news\/an-accountant-got-20-000-in-student-debt-wiped-out-5-months-later-he-quit-his-job-and-ran-for-office"},"modified":"2022-01-17T12:15:00","modified_gmt":"2022-01-17T12:15:00","slug":"an-accountant-got-20-000-in-student-debt-wiped-out-5-months-later-he-quit-his-job-and-ran-for-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/news\/an-accountant-got-20-000-in-student-debt-wiped-out-5-months-later-he-quit-his-job-and-ran-for-office","title":{"rendered":"An accountant got $20,000 in student debt wiped out. 5 months later, he quit his job and ran for office."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Getty Images In August, David O&#8217;Keefe, 36, got his remaining $20,000 student debt load forgiven. That gave him the financial security to quit his job and run for office five months later. He told Insider that without student-loan forgiveness, there&#8217;s no way he could&#8217;ve pursued his passion. When Insider spoke to David O&#8217;Keefe in August, it was just days after his $20,000 student-debt balance turned to $0. Now, free of that financial burden, the 36-year-old is quitting accounting and running for office as a county commissioner in his hometown of Tallahassee, Florida. &#8220;Running for office absolutely would not have been a possibility if PSLF didn&#8217;t process my application,&#8221; O&#8217;Keefe said, referring to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, a federal program that forgave his debt after 10 years of working in the public interest and making payments. &#8220;If you look at why we don&#8217;t have young people running for office or even people in their late 30s running for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s a whole generation of people saddled with student loan debt that can&#8217;t participate in this important part of civic life,&#8221; David O&#8217;Keefe said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[27,31],"class_list":["post-207595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-economy","tag-personal-finance"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}