<prompt> Human: I am going to start with my side since it is a little less overwhelming. We are Americans living in Japan. We are teachers and, although we have the highest paid positions for what we do in the area we live in, we barely scape by financially every month. When I first got here 5 years ago, the yen to dollar exchange rate was amazing and I was planning on being able to pay off my student loans easily within a couple of years. I also stupidly allowed my now exboyfriend to make some expensive charges on my American credit card because the exchange rate was so good, it was cheaper to send home yen to make the payments. He later told me he had no intention of ever paying it back and I was left with the payments. About a year after I got here, the exchange rate went to hell and I was then losing money every time I sent yen to america to pay bills. Before that I was living comfortably and just expected the rate to stay stable so I didnt send as much money as I should back to pay my American bills. My student loan payment became too high to pay with the exchange rate the way it was, so I got on an income based repayment plan based on my adjusted gross income. Because I am abroad, my adjusted gross income is 0 so my monthly payments are 0. I really wanted to get on top of my American debt because I didnt think I would be here forever so I used not having a student loan payment to make larger payments on my credit cards but I would like advice on things I can do better to prepare to eventually go back to America. Currently my American debt is: Credit card: 1,396.01 Plane tickets for an upcoming trip that will be paid off by DecemberBank of America credit card: 5,031.83 interest rate is 9.49Student Loans: 30,226.33 0 monthly payment at the momentTotal: 36654.17My current plan is to take care of some expensive things coming up in Japan over the next few months, then transfer my BOA credit card balance to a new card with a 0 interest for balance transfers card I think you guys have said Chase is the best, right? and throw all my money at it to get that out of the way. Ill charge a small thing on each of my cards and pay it off every month to keep my American credit score up. Currently Credit Karma says my TransUnion score is 743 and my Equifax is 744. Am I doing ok for keeping my score up for when I eventually go back to America?Ok, now on to my fiance. Because I have been trying to fix my financial situation, I have been asking him for more info on his stuff. He went through a divorce last year and hadnt checked his credit score since before then, so yesterday I asked him to check it and was a little shocked. He was only able to get his TransUnion report from annualcreditreport.com and it didnt have a score on it. He tried to set up a credit karma account but they block registration from IPs in Japan so we will have to wait until we get a VPN to set that up. He sent the TU report to me and there is a joint credit card his ex wife made a lot of charges on then abandoned he is trying to fix right now that I knew about, but the real trouble is when I added up all his student loan accounts it was almost 300,000. He has been doing the same as me and has a 0 monthly payment on his federal student loans, but there is a 10,952 private student loan he wasnt able to make a deal with and hasnt been making payments on that I didnt know about. It is marked as In Collection and way past due. It says it will drop off his report in 072020. I dont think he knows who is servicing that loan now because not all his mail was forwarded here. Is there anything we can do to fix his student loan situation? My thoughts were he needs to try to work something out with the private student loan and we will just have to do whatever we can to make the payments to at least get that cleared up. Is there anything else we should do? I am afraid that we will have to stay here forever to avoid his student loan payments. He said that before he put the payments on hold they wanted over 2000 a month and I dont know how we would be able to make those payments if we go back. Obviously he made some questionable decisions and now they will affect me too. What can we do to start fixing this problem?  <response>: Holy mother of god, 300k to teach English in Japan. Though I guess he ran off to Japan to avoid having to pay the loans. 