When student debt started to become an issue about five years ago, it inspired Ravi Sawhney, owner of product design firm RKS Design in Thousand Oaks. His idea has now become LoanGifting.com, a new company with a website that launched last month so students can leverage their social networks to help pay off school loans. “Every month they have to dish out a big check,” Sawhney said. “It is impacting consumer spending.” According to a 2016 report from Statistic Brain Research Institute in Los Angeles, there is more than $1 trillion in outstanding student debt in the United States with the average debt at about $30,000. More than 1,000 people have so far signed up and as many as 200 visitors look at the website each day. Sawhney said he is tweaking the site to get those visitors to sign up. But he realizes students cannot hope to simply sign up and see money flowing in. “You have to work the system,” he explained. “It is like Facebook. If you want your family to know what you are doing, you have to upload and do some work to get that gratification.” At the site, users upload information about their loans, create a profile page and easily transfer contact information for potential donors from Outlook, Facebook or Gmail. The user then sends an introductory message to their contacts. That is followed up by messages requesting gifts to reduce debt. “The money comes in to us and bypasses the students and we pay the loan principal down directly,” Sawhney said. LoanGifting takes a 3 percent fee. Payments are made with a credit card. But Nate Matherson, co-founder and chief executive of LendEdu, a Hoboken, N.J.-based website for comparing student loan refinancing deals, said that while on first impression LoanGifting.com seems like an interesting idea, he doesn’t think that it would necessarily work and that individuals would not give money to help friends pay off their student debt. “I don’t see why any parent would use LoanGifting versus just making a payment directly to the student’s account when you factor in that 3 percent fee,” Matherson said. – Mark R. Madler