Contingency Plans for Your Student Loan Plan | PSLF Buyback Program and More

Introduction [Music] what's up everybody and welcome to the student loan planner podcast today we have SIM and myself Megan Maguire and we are going to be chatting about some repayment plan tips tricks kind of things that we can deal with right now while we're in this uh feels like we're in a waiting period right Sim what a mess is all I can say I feel like that's the tldr what a mess what have they done so we're gonna chat through exactly how we're advising clients right now for what to do how to think about their game plan once we know the result of this fight over the save plan so let's chat let's first jump into some recent changes to the student aid.gov website where we saw that they they started and and this is something to know like they make changes to that student aid.gov website and there's a a page specific to the save plan it's like right on the homepage it takes you right there but they've been making updates to this pretty frequently so I would suggest like checking that every so often if you're trying to get a pulse on what's going on because they do make adjustments and one of the most recent adjustments we saw I think on the 30th of August was they changed the language to say hey you can only really apply for two IDR plans right now right you remember seeing that Sim this is such a big deal because we used to have so many more options for folks and now we're down to two and it's like well what do you do yep so some backstory back in uh so July 1 was the last or or basically that was when we would no longer be able to apply for the pay plan they were sunsetting pay because the save plan came about repay has been long gone because save replaced repay um but with all this madness with the save plan being uh contested and argued over the department of Ed came out and said hey you could still actually apply for pay and icr which icr is one of the other income driven plans we rarely recommend um but that was a plan that also sunset uh July 1 as well but they came out and said hey you could still go ahead and apply for these plans because we know that stuff is up in the air with the save plan basically they were saying go ahead and apply submit a paper application for one of these two if you'd prefer these months to count towards your forgiveness timeline because as we know right now the save forbearance is not counting towards uh towards the Forgiveness timeline and so people we were telling folks hey go ahead and do that and then we found out from a lot of Representatives at at the servicers that they were being instructed not to process those IDR applications and so uh maybe they're sitting on a desk somewhere I don't know what do you think they're doing with them Sim I think they're lighting them on fire to keep themselves warm oh my gosh yeah so that was frustrating to learn that basically they were saying hey yeah go do this but then to hear from the people actually like collecting those documents and processing them or supposed to be processing them like they've been told to sit on them well you can't even like do it online now like if you try to log online to do like hey I want to switch plans I don't want to deal with this whole save nonsense like you can't even do that so I've been telling folks like just send it by certified mail at least so they'll have it they'll have it hold on to it and maybe when all of this you know stuff gets resolved they'll process it right and then later like more recently like a you know a couple weeks ago I was starting to tell folks like hey it may actually make more sense just to wait let's just wait this out let's not submit anything just in Casa because you know if the save plan is saved then we don't want to actually have that application on file anymore and there's no way to retract it once it's just you know sitting out there on a paper you know form so um been a lot of confusion there right a lot of like trying to figure out what is the best thing to do trying to think about you know what the next steps would be like thinking a couple steps ahead which is almost impossible to do right with all of these things changing so fast uh but back to the the language so the language on the website changed where now it says you can only apply for IB income base repayment so that's the old or new ibr eligibility depends on when your first loan was borrowed um or the save plan so they say you can still apply for the save plan but now we don't have it it's says uh we don't have the option to apply for pay or icr um they had some dates on there basically it said if you had applied for pay and icr between July 18th and August 9th which is a very random period of time I guess July 18th may have been when they come out when they came out and said hey you could still apply go ahead and submit an application and then August 9th I'm not sure what the rationale behind August 9th is but basically they're saying like if you had submitted an app between that time frame they'll still process it um but and of course if you submitted a pay application before the like June 30th July 1 deadline like they'll still process that but isn't that weird like those gaps of time between like how are they deciding if somebody got an application submitted by you know July 7th right I tell people certified mail is so important because it gives you a record Parent PLUS loan borrowers need a plan B and plan C of when you sent it I'm always like prep pring my clients for a fight I think I'm always just ready for a good fight but you have to save your records and show hey I did this on this date and I can see that you got it on such and such date so I'm good I'm in between the dates you got to honor this Megan I was going to ask you how does this impact Parent PLUS borrowers yeah so icr income contingent repayment is still available for parent plus borrowers uh it is specifically carved out to where you could still apply if you have Parent Plus loans and and you've Consolidated your Parent Plus Loans you can still apply for IC R the double consolidation however um we still have the ability to do that as of right now until July of next year 2025 um but it seems like at this point with double consolidations we can only really be applying on that last consolidation for either ibr or save at this point and who knows what's going to happen with save so we're starting to talk through like Plan B is going to be ibr income based repayment either New or Old ibr which is not a bad plan B um ibr if it's a new ibr like we don't have loans prior to 2014 which a lot of newer Parent PLUS borrowers don't like their kids went to school in the past four years that's good that means the the new ibr calculation is based on 10% of discretionary income so it's not too far away from what the save plan was going to be at the 10% calculation um so it does make for a good like backup plan and it's a 20-year timeline to forgiveness but this is a lot of what we're doing right now right like talking through plan a plan B and plan C because we don't know what's going to happen so it's good to have an idea of what's like the kind of the best to the the worst case scenario yeah and sort of the good news if you can call it good news is that it does take a while to go through the double consolidation process you're doing two sets of of consolidations you know back to back and so it can make sense to start that process and maybe by the time you're done with that process we'll have some more clarity on the safe plan right that's literally what been telling my double consolidation people like hey we we're going to be in processing anyways for the next like 60 days 90 days so hopefully we get some new information by the time we're doing our final consolidation yeah so people are seeing payments due this month people who um are seeing save payments due so what do we tell them should people be making payments right now uh this is so this is a good question so kind of going back to the weird language on the save part of the student aid.gov website um and also one of the other things before we get to the payments one of the other language changes on that website is saying that processing forbearances are going to count towards IDR and pslf forgiveness for 60 days so that just means basically if you're in a processing forbearance usually that happens is when you are consolidating and or when you're switching income-driven plans and they need time to be able to make the switch for you so if you're in a processing forbear that time can count for up to 2 months is what they're saying but the general forbearance which everybody who's on Save got thrown into is not going to count so I thought that was an interesting um you know piece of information to where maybe we could argue or or call the loan serer to request a processing PR bearance if we're trying to switch plans or if we have recently Consolidated to try to get you know a couple months counting um but then you know going into the payments due in September we have been seeing a lot of people get payments uh or payment notices about things due in September so should you pay I think it depends right I think people us I know people want to punch Us in the face when we say that but when when would you think it makes sense to pay because I don't know I've got opinions on that but what do you think I feel like a lot of people probably shouldn't if you're not sure that it's going to count we'll talk about some options later of ways that you can get this time to count but honestly it might make sense just to you know write out that $ Z payment the 0% Insurance onto your cash you can make a payment later um I think for most people that's probably what I would suggest yeah I think I'm totally in the same boat because there's just so much uncertainty with pslf we know there's a there's a PSL buyback option which we'll talk about here in a little bit but that just means that these forbearances that are not going to be counting right now we could purchase later we could pay a lump sum to purchase these months later so there's there is a uh fallback option there for our pslf folks for our non pslf folks these months don't count we don't know if there's going to be some kind of buyback option maybe there is but we don't know um I'll tell you my crystal ball opinion I think it's totally G to come come down to the outcome of the election this November and I think depending on what administration we end up with I think they might retroactively just count it anyway yeah that's a good point too so that's like best case scenario like if they come back and say hey sorry for all the stress guys we're going to let we're going to let these months count after all my gosh that would be great um but if not maybe there's some kind of buyback option as well for the longer term forgiveness folks too or there's maybe a way to petition to purchase those payments um at like a you know ad hoc perspective like maybe maybe with a complaint for example we'll talk about some other options there coming up but yeah I think generally back to like should you be paying in September during this pause if you've been thrown into forbearance um probably not I would say probably not because it may be a waste and there may be ways for you to be able to make up for it later I think is is really the main point there and then the other thing that we're seeing is that a lot of people are in a standard repayment instead of an income driven repayment like maybe someone applied for Save like they did a consolidation or something and they didn't process it and so standard repayment is the default and when we talk about standard repayment we mean standard 10 or the amount equivalent to standard 10 which depending on your loan balance can be a very large and prohibitive you know to your cash flow amount and so you do have some options I think for most people if you're going for forgiveness I would make that payment I would probably strategically request a forbearance right so that way you know even if that month didn't count you just tack on an extra month at the end of your timeline to forgiveness but at least you preserved your cash flow right yeah you can ask for forbearance um you do have up to 36 months of forbearance available to you they won't give it to you all at one time like they won't say yeah we'll put you in a forbearance for three years right that whole IDR waiver that's what that's for like servicers got in big trouble for doing that because they did they put people into forbearance for long periods of time so they might give you a hard time on how long they're going to give you forbearance for maybe it's a month maybe it's 3 months but you have the right to up to 36 months of forbearance available um so that's good to know you can you know argue for it petition for it you know advocate for yourself um but yeah the standard payment uh like likely is going to be a pretty high payment compared to your IDR uh like what it should be and so you could preserve that cash flow and what I would suggest and what we've said before is go ahead and set that money aside like how much you should be paying an anticipation of payments kicking back in later and also an anticipation of maybe being able to to buy those as a lump suum later on down the road now yeah and then I would also stick those payments in a high Y old savings account if you're like what do I do like don't just stick it like under your mattress or like in a you know no interest savings account let it earn a little bit of money for you yes yeah uh highi savings accounts are getting like upwards of 5% right now which is pretty awesome um but man I'm just going to pause for a second to tell the folks like if you're on pay pay is you earn or ibr wow your life is good right now isn't it because you don't have to worry about all this like craziness I had a couple clients uh yesterday that our game plan for their their like financial plan and for their student loan plan was to stay on pay until we had to recalculate their payment because then Fill out a forbearance application to postpone or reduce student loan payments then it would make sense for them to switch to save but we didn't want to make their payment higher earlier and uh pay was a good like second option like a backup option save wasn't going to work um but I met with them yesterday and it was such a relief to just be like man yeah just keep making your payments we're still we're we're good it's counting towards forgiveness there's no ambiguity peace of mind they're sleeping at night H yeah so I'm sorry for those that that are on the save plan and going through this this heartache this frustration it is very frustrating um but I am hoping that we're going to have some uh retribution in the future in some form or fashion to be able to to kind of make up for some of the madness that's going on right now um so Megan how does someone get on for bar since we were kind of talking about that's a question we get a lot do I have to call somebody do I have to fill out a form there is a general for barant application you could Google this just Google like General forbearance application PDF try to put PDF at the end of it so it pulls up like the actual application itself um this is a standardized uh forbearance application where you could explain your reasoning for why you want a forbearance gives you a couple options for why you're requesting the forbearance one is financial difficulty which could rightfully be so if it's asking you for a standard payment a really high payment when it's supposed to be that income driven payment that hasn't been approved yet because of all this madness um another option is change in employment uh so if you're you know if you had to drop part-time hours if you're out on maternity leave not the same income or you're between jobs you could request West for that reason medical expenses or there's an other box and you can explain the situation so you could use I think any of these options whatever is applicable to you but the other box could be a good place for you to to kind of explain that you're waiting for the save application to be processed because you submitted it a while ago or you're waiting for the pay application to be you know submitted and processed because you submitted that a while ago you could kind of list out what your reasonings is is there and upload that to your servers portal every serer has an online portal where you can upload documents and usually it's in like the document section or um I think I think that's what it's called for all of the servicers yeah usually it says like messages yeah yeah there's like a message section too so upload that there or you can give the serer a phone call whatever makes more sense for you um there probably will be some wait time with a phone call so maybe multitask at the same time do you know clean something cook dinner while you're you're calling um but that could be how you go ahead and uh get into the forbearance and ideally if you can ask for a processing forbearance that would be good especially if they if you are legitimately waiting on them to process an application for you because that processing forbearance as we have now learned with the new language update should count for up to 60 days so that's something there and we're kind of talking about this as a temporary solution just because of people being placed on to standard but like if you are on maternity leave or you know God forbid you have cancer like those are time periods that could still count for pslf so just everything's kind of case by case yeah yeah this is definitely during this weird time where like if there is a large payment coming due and you cannot afford that payment or you do not want to make that payment because it's much higher than what an income driven payment would be then that's where the forbearance makes sense because we can't quickly switch to a different plan or quickly recalculate your payment that's that's really what it comes down to here normally we wouldn't be recommending for barrance we'd be saying hey update your payment make sure make that payment affordable but there's just there's no way to do that right now because they're not processing anything so yeah that's why I've been calling it strategic forbearance like we're doing this with a strategic intent that's not actually the name of a type of forbearance that exists but that's why we're doing it it's intentional yes intentional so let's see what else we've had a couple questions about the partial financial hardship requirement for some of these income driven plans like income based repayment for the pay as you earn payment and we've also had folks ask like could I just apply for the standard 10-year plan and why someone might be asking that is because the standard 10-year plan payment technically counts towards pslf um and the income driven plans have a partial financial hardship except for Save except for repay uh where the payment can't go above a certain amount and so the question we'll get is well you know if someone's trying to keep their payment lower um you know they want they want to make sure they're maximizing their forgiveness timeline or choosing the right income driven plan if save is not going to work out um the question might be should I just apply for the standard 10-year plan and the answer is uh probably you're probably not going to be able to and probably not and the reason why uh is because if you have Consolidated your your student loans which many people have for one reason or another but if you've Consolidated your student loans and your balance is over 60,000 your standard 10-year payment it's not 10 years they spread the the amateurz schedule out over 30 years so you can't simply request or ask to be put on the standard 10-year plan because they're going to automatically amuze it over 30 years but does that make sense I'm explaining that yeah yeah so maybe said differently is that the default before you consolidate your loans right the default is standard 10 if you don't pick anything if you don't do anything with your loans and when you graduate you will be on standard 10 once you consolidate the definition of standard is no longer 10 it is now based on what is your loan balance and so they kind of have these like break points like 0o to 7500 and 7500 to I don't know 15,000 something like that but it goes from like there's a 10year I know there's a stand 20 there's a standard 30 the standard 30 is if your balance is over 60,000 which most borrowers that we work with have so y it's weird you're confused you're a good company it is yeah it is pretty confusing and a lot of people don't know that and so they think oh well I could just go and apply for the standard 10-e but they Consolidated and then they get their payment back and it's way lower than they expected and it's like yeah they they amiz it over 30 years not uh not 10 and so that's not going to count towards pslf and that's the whole point right we want we want a plan that's going to be affordable towards the the Forgiveness path that you're going so who can con you know apply for the standard 10e plan well people who did not consolidate so if you have loans that have never been Consolidated for one reason or another um that's totally possible we see it a lot uh then technically you can apply for the standard 10-year plan but but it's not as simple as them just amateurz the balance at that time over 10 years unfortunately what they do and what a deep dive into the language uh confirmed for me the other day and for another client the other day was that um what they do is they take into account uh basically it's it's like a hierarchy order of like operation if they and they take the highest payment so that's that's why there's a lot of confusion around this because it's not one answer it's technically a couple different conditions and whichever is the highest payment is which one they choose if that makes sense when you say highest payment you mean highest payment by dollar or months of payments made Dollar by Dollar so why don't you give us an example yeah so let's say um you're applying for the standard 10-year plan you have been in repayment though for four years on let's say you were on the save plan you're to switch to the standard 10e plan to to be eligible for pslf um you have already been in repayment for four years so the the student loan system is going to take that into account and they're going to take that 10-year amateurz period subtract the four years that you've already paid and they're going to amateurz your balance over the six years that are left that's going to be one calculation and then the next calculation is going to be what would be your balance amatz over 10 years that payment's going to be lower than what this the six-year amateurz payment's going to be so they're going to choose the six-year amateurz period can you pick and choose or argue over the lower amount no not based on how the language is written and so that's why there's some confusion around that now if you you know never were on a repayment plan like you just started recently started in repayment could you go and apply for the standard 10e plan and it be amateurz over 10 years yes because you haven't been in repayment and that's going to be the highest payment calculation um but it's it's kind of complicated like I I've been listening to myself like uh this is this is a lot of math the moral of the story is that the house always wins and they're going to pick the payment that does not favor you but it favors them because they want you to pay more correct so can you technically apply for the standard 10-year plan and it count towards pslf yes but it's going to be higher than an amateurz balance over 10 years it's going to be whatever time you have left so I've seen it like where it calculated something crazy because someone was in repayment for eight years and they amzed it over the last two years left and it was like a wild payment amount and we were like how are they getting this payment and that's why because they're choosing the higher higher of the two numbers so um pretty complicated there now the good news is let's go back to the the partial financial hardship with ibr and with pay so the good news is if you're already on ibr or pay the plan does have that partial financial hardship requirement Monthly income-driven repayments (IDR) can spike if you don’t update your income which says hey your payment can't be what the payment would be if am amzed over 10 years that is a true statement they're not going to subtract how much time you've been in repayment to calculate that partial financial hardship number they go off of when you first entered the income driven plan which is you know exciting that's not exciting basic better whatever your payment would have been on standard 10 you graduated you didn't pick anything or on standard 10 whatever that payment would have been if they calculate your payment on ibr or one of the other plans as less than that amount you have a partial financial hardship yeah yeah so the word is it sounds like really aggressive right it sounds like you have to really not make a lot of income to to qualify for a partial financial hardship and we get the question a lot right like well what's the most I can make and it's like ah it depends on what your what that calculation is the 10e calculation um so there's not really an income limit it has to do with what was your amateurz balance at the time when you entered your income driven plan like if it was amateurz over 10 years what is that payment that's the standard 10year calculation and a great fast way to know what this is a lot of people have been getting these notices lately actually and I'm sure your your email has gotten blown up with it too Sim where yeah I know exactly know this you're talking about you know what I'm talking about yeah so they get this this message this PDF document from the serer that says hey your IDR payment is you know $500 a month until February 2025 right and then February 2025 it shoots up to 4,000 a month and we get all these panicked emails like oh my gosh why is my payment exploding next year what did I do wrong am I not on the right plan and what they're saying is is if you did not update your income if you didn't recertify on time that is what your standard 10-year payment would be that's that cap on your income driven plan the the pay plan or the ibr plan you're going to get this as well uh even if you're on the the save plan save plan doesn't have a cap but it if you don't recertify your income they're going to throw you on the standard plan so um that's that's what that means if you are wondering or panicking about like what's going to happen in 2 technically it's not an error they just don't explain that well in the letter that they send one sentence all they had to do is add one sentence if you recertify right but no they had to add more confusion to everything exctly all I have to say is if you recertify on time this would not be the payment it would based off of income I bet you I know why they do it though it's because they don't know what your income's going to be next year at re certification so they're just going off of your original balance yeah they're giving you like the worst case scenario but that is uh a good indicator of what the maximum payment could be for you on your income driven plan um which could be helpful if you're doing calculations and you're trying to figure out like am I close to the cap am I ever going to reach the cap and a lot of people don't because the the balance the math just doesn't work out to get there based on income but um I think knowing that number can be very powerful because there's a misconception amongst a lot of like high income earners like dentists and Physicians well we're not going to get loan for we're just stuck paying these off but depending on how much income you have depending on how much you borrowed from medical school that might not be a true statement at all yep now one last thing to mention on this partial financial hardship requirement we have been seeing questions too about people concerned that they're on the save plan they're concerned that the save plan is going to get repealed and they're worried that they're not going to be able to apply for ibr or for pay or new ibr because they're not going to have a partial Financial hardship at that point right have you seen some of those questions yeah and I think that's a actually really legitimate question so you know that is a legitimate concern because your income save didn't have a cap so your payment could be whatever it was based on income and you would still qualify for pslf but if we don't have save uh repay is going to come back so that's one thing to keep in mind so there's a couple things that I think we can help uh calm the nerves with so repay will come back which repay did not have a cap either it does require you to include spousal income though so that might stink because if your spouse's income is not included in your save payment right now it will be on repay um but it is still a qualifying plan towards loan forgiveness if you're really close to that timeline might make sense just to hang out on repay until you get to the Forgiveness threshold maybe we don't get as much forgiven as we thought originally but it could still work out mathematically to continue that path um another thing you can consider if you didn't already you could look at filing taxes married separately coming up for this upcoming tax year to see if that makes a difference on if you would qualify for the partial financial hardship in um you know next year for with 2024 taxes so that could be telling most of my clients like if you're not sure what to do and you're like you know you don't want to run the numbers or whatever like go file separately because you have three years where you can amend that return from separate to Joint but you can't do the opposite you be like well I filed a joint return and I want to change it there's this thing in the tax world you can make up but you can't break up when it comes to amendments you can make up you can go from separate to Joint but she can't break up so if you need that flexibility right and a lot of people are nervous to file separately because they're like is that like legitimate I've never done that before um there are a lot of reasons why someone would choose to file separately has nothing to do with student loans a lot of people do it because they don't want you know to be liable for their spouse's income right because you're jointly and SE what's the word jointly and SE separately liable whatever it is yeah several whatever you're you're liable for your spouse's uh taxes right if they if they didn't pay enough and you file jointly you're you're on the hook for that so if you file separately that's not the case and that's a big reason why a lot of couples choose to file separately so there's any number of reasons it's totally legitimate and you have three years to amend the return so if you did see like hey I ended up paying a lot more in taxes because I filed separately you'll probably get a good chunk or all of it back yep amendments are definitely something you can have in your back pocket um and then one last thing I'll mention here and then we'll move on to the PSL buy buyback information um is you can also use alternative documentation of income so let's say your tax return um let's say you do file separately your tax return shows your income but it's higher than what you're currently being paid maybe you're not taking extra shifts anymore maybe you quit that part-time job or maybe you reduce your hours whatever the case you can submit alternative documentation of income which could also potentially get you below that partial financial hardship um Meg have you heard though with uh with the alternative documentation of income that they sometimes they use gross income and they don't take out the pre-tax deductions so what can what can borrowers do about that is it just a matter of like you have to fight back and be like excuse me you forgot to subtract my 401k contributions because that's totally what I would do yeah so what I tell folks to do is if you're submitting alternative documentation of income that could be a pay stub it could be a bank statement it could be um like a picture of a check that you got that month it could be a number of things I highly highly highly recommend sending in a cover letter that explains your income so do the math for them like payt it out for them like they're a first grader right like here's my gross income minus PSLF buyback can give you credit for months that didn’t qualify before my pre-tax deductions that's my like adjusted income for this month times how many pay periods I have a year Circle that number this should be my adjusted gross income and then also explain if you filed jointly or separately if you filed separately they can't use your spousal income even if they ask for it if you file jointly you're going to have to to you know send in your spouse's income information too so the cover letter can really help explain it keep it simple really boil it down to just what that number should be and have supporting documentation with it they're probably just going to look at the number you circled and use that honestly I don't we're going to do a deep dive so I say just a little Cliff note here do not use to commit fraud we get this question a lot from uh self-employed business owners hey what if I just like for one month paid myself less right on paper and so I can issue a pay stud that shows I'm actually paid this like artificially low amount yeah that's fraud so don't do that yeah we do not recommend fraud in any form or fashion because they can audit you right talk about that but they can audit you they can audit you and they can they can find you um and that's a that's a very real thing it can happen and that would be a really crappy situation to be in and at at the end of the day like your payment should be based off of your income right we're talking about income driven payments so the payment should be based off of the income that you're bringing in so we just need to be honest right yes maybe you make a great income so that means your payment sucks it's going to be higher but you make a great income so um so be honest always be honest uh do not falsify documents or intentionally leave things out um of your income calculation so so without further Ado people are waiting for what is this pslf buyback we are getting so so many questions about this program because it's new yes it's new it came out about a year ago so it's not subject to the things that are being argued right now it should not be something that they take away um but pslf buyback it's kind of a second chance at getting credit for forbearance months or months that did not qualify for pslf so there's a couple requirements here for pslf buyback and this is not something that everyone can do right now uh the PSL buyback is think about it as like delayed gratification uh you can only apply for this when you with with all repayment and all forbearances that you're looking to buy back you're already at 120 payments so let's say let's just take somebody who's supposed to get forgiveness in December as an example right these months of forbearance right now are not counting you're probably going to have four five six months of of forbearance that's not counting towards pslf we can't do anything about it right now but in December you go ahead and still apply for pslf as if you are supposed to have 120 payments as if you're about to get the loan forgiveness and what you do pretty much immediately is submit this pslf buyback request and the buyback request what it does is it says hey these are the months I was in for barrance and you can see your itemized months in the student aid.gov website now which is pretty cool definitely go check it out if you haven't already uh but if you're working towards pslf and soon the IDR payment tracker should be there as well but right now the pslf tracker is there go look at all the itemized months that they counting it'll separate out the ones that they have already counted and the ones that need certification and the ones that they're not counting because maybe they were in forbearance and you want to pick those months out that you were in forbearance and say I want to pay for these months and they take that information back they come back to you with a lump sum and you pay that lump sum to achieve the loan forgiveness right then and there because we've met 120 payments with that lump sum that you're paying for those forbearance months so that's basically if you're like if you're like 90 months and you buy want to buy back those months and it's only three months that's going to bring you to 93 they won't let you do that because it doesn't bring you past the 120 so that's a requirement has to bring you past that 120 threshold you need for pslf yep so we can't do that now unless we're already pretty much at the point of knocking on the door at forgiveness and so people want to know we're getting this question all the time well what's my payment going to be like what is the cost of the buyback and they're doing like a another two-part calculation right they're looking at either like what your payment was right before the forbearance or what it was after the forbearance or they might ask you uh for a tax return yes correct they say if you were on an income driven plan that the payment would be based off of what that income driven payment should have been now the question is what if save doesn't count towards pslf because they repeal it I think what they would do is C you know use basically what that save payment is but backwards calculate it into what repay would be because that's what save replaced and then that's what the lump sum would be based off of that payment times however many months you're asking for because most people were in repayment and you know they were already in repayment on an income driven plan so hopefully that calculation is pretty easy and pretty manageable because even if save gets repealed maybe it's just based off of the repay calculation which was um you know it it depends on exactly what your numbers are but it could be between like 75 to $150 more expensive than what it was on Save potentially uh by how they calculated it so now if you weren't on an income driven plan then what they would do is they would look at that year's tax return so that's what you would need to supply for them to calculate what the payment would have been if you were on you know the cheapest income driven plan at the time so if that's something that you know that you're going to need to do in the future it's best to save up for that because it's going to be a lump sum and it'll be due within 90 days of you receiving that confirmation on how much you have to pay so you need to have that ready to go to pay as a lump sum so you could be done on time one other question we've been getting is there is one little sentence in the the terms and conditions of the pslf buyback language which this is all on the student aid.gov website just Google pslf buyback and it'll pull it up but one of the question or one of the the technicality says that um you can't buy back months on a consolidation loan which sounds a little scary at first because that means like you a lot of people do have consolidation loans so you're thinking like what what does that even mean but what what they're meaning is so kind of backing up when you have a consolidation loan it's a brand new loan right they consider it a brand new loan and a lot of people may have Consolidated right after graduation or recently for the IDR account adjustment to correct their payment count or to correct their loan types um so the new consolidation loan whenever that that date was we can buy back as far back as that consolidation settled we can't buy back anything before that time period with that being said that's you know we can buy back for most people who had already Consolidated we're sitting in this annoying forbearance we can buy back these months so that's a good a good thing now but what if you're someone who had some forbearance pre consolidation well a couple things one it should have been taken care of from the IDR Account Adjustment which we're still waiting the waiting the payment counts to be completely finalized here this is like this is the little boy who cried wolf because I feel like we've been hearing about this payment tracker not the pslf one the IDR one this this payment tracker is coming I feel like we've been hearing about it for almost two years I've been so excited about it too like it's G to help so many people like just feel more confident in where they're at with their payment count and like be able to hold them to it like for where they're at so so rumor has it this is the month right end of month maybe is what we're doing rumor has it it's supposed to be end of this month and it we've seen evidence of them trying to add up the payment counts in not the data files like I wish it was in the data files but actually in your student aid uh portal there's like a way that you can go in and and see what they're starting to estimate so hopefully end of this month end of September we're going to see that payment count for the IDR Account Adjustment but with that said the pslf payment tracker is already there but we're still waiting on that that IDR payment count adjustment which is supposed to count prior forbearances you know time in re in repayment make make sure that you should be credited with all the months that you should have and so that's kind of the first line of defense is if you are trying to to make sure that you're getting all the credit possible but you see forbearances before your consolidation they might count we just might not see it yet because the IDR Account Adjustment isn't being credited quite yet if not so let's say if not the IDR Account Adjustment is done doesn't look like those months that you're looking at pre- consolidation are going to count what you could do is submit an FSA complaint which I think you're the complaint queen Sim yes so FSA is kind of like your first stop I don't this is my um hot take because I think I'm in the minority but I don't think you're going to find a lot of success there but that is your first stop right you're establishing a paper trail so you're kind of going up the chain of command so start with FSA kind of document everything hey I was placed into this forbearance I was steered into forbearance by my serer between you know these dates right and I shouldn't have been I wasn't told about income driven repayment or maybe I was like two months away from the cut off I didn't quite meet the definition of 12 months consecutive 36 months or more total I was like really close right on a caseby Case basis they will still give you credit for that FSA is your first stop my favorite place I feel like such a Karen I have a favorite place to complain but here we are my favorite place to complain you guys is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau why is that because the entity against whom you are complaining has 60 days to respond they literally have to respond to you they can't keep ghosting you I have been through this process myself with my husband loans we filed a complaint against MOA they took 59 days to respond so right up you know they they used the whole time but they did have to respond and we did have resolution so that's one stop another place is your um constituent Services of your local Congress person I guess depending on you know if you feel like that's that's going to be helpful if you have like a congress person who cares about you know education issues or they they really care about their constituents granted you're not going to be working with that Congress person you're going to be working with like a staffer but either way I think that that can also be helpful and not just for student loans I mean you can contact them for literally anything you have like an IRS issue or non-financial like that's that's what your tax dollars are for yep so I think with that said this episode should give you a couple things to put in your back pocket for later because there's a lot of unknown but we need to know how to Pivot and so we've got a lot of pivotable you know options ways that we could go about things depending on what's Happening Here coming up so we'll continue to keep you posted and thanks SIM for joining me on this podcast episode Travis will be back soon and anything any last words just know that knowledge is power and I know it's a corny thing to say but when you know your options you can make good decisions don't feel like you have to do any one thing right now just arm yourself with knowledge and then you know don't don't feel stressed about taking your time to make a decision about what's best for your student loans because things might change again anyway in in your favor yeah and we're here for you we'll keep you posted as as time goes on and as things start to unfold thanks for trusting us with your your game plan and if you need one-on-one help we're here we're we're able to really map out all your different options so uh book a consult with us if you need that that one-on-one support and uh we've got plenty of free content on our website as well so check that out free calculators as well but stay stay positive keep moving forward focus on something that makes you happy today and we'll see you on the next one