Helping my Aunt with Student Loans & PSLF-- Advice??

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Calling all of the amazing people on here also dealing with the crazy landscape of student loans! I’m currently helping my aunt with getting her loans forgiven. She’s been a special education teacher in a title 1 public school in Oklahoma for the past 12 years and is drowning in student loan debt. I was able to walk her through the studentaid.gov website to pursue PSLF and she already has 111 qualifying payments, and 76 more that need to be certified by an employer. My hope is that once these are certified, the remainder of her loans should be forgiven through PSLF immediately. Which brings me to question 1:

  1. What steps should we be taking (after employer certification) to make sure her loan forgiveness is processed correctly? Do we need to contact her provider (Mohela) with additional information? And how long should we expect it to take to get that forgiveness confirmation/letter?

The other complication is that my aunt has a set of private loans through Naviant-- Signature Student Loans and Tuition Answer Loans. I know these private loans are not eligible for federal forgiveness, however…

  1. Does anyone know if there is a forgiveness path for Navient private loans? Or should I be advising my aunt on how to pay them off as efficiently as possible (on a public school teacher’s salary)?

Any/all advice would be so welcome! It’s encouraging getting to help my aunt with this because I’m so far away from PSLF myself-- however I know she’s been screwed over by her loan providers before and she hasn’t had the resources to advocate for herself. I really want to make this happen for her.

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@rural I’m tagging you here because I know you’ve actually received PSLF forgiveness (huzzah!) and have been super helpful with advice in the past! How long did it take for your loans to be actually forgiven, and what hoops did you have to jump through to get there??

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It took six or seven months after I got the 120 months certified, but they put an automatic forbearance on it as soon as my application for forgiveness was in.

Once it was all done, I also got a refund for extra payments over the 120. I don’t know if that was a special pandemic thing or not, though.

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Check Reddit r/PSLF if you want supper detailed and up to date info- it was a great resource for me

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Thank you!! That’s great to know. I’ll have to look into the refunds as well-- I wouldn’t be surprised if she has extra payments she didn’t need to make.

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