I don’t know if this is the right category to put this in, but I’m struggling to figure out my plan for my student loans and would love some thoughts/advice! Right now I’m pursuing PSLF to pay off my undergrad loans, and am a little less than 2 years in (I think-- I’ll explain my confusion in a second). I’ve been on the SAVE plan making $0 monthly payments, but only recently I was alerted that my loans were placed in forbearance for several months while some “administrative restructuring” was going on with the program. I didn’t know this was going on until I got the notification that the forbearance period ended, and have no idea whether those months will count towards my 10 years of qualifying payments or not.
And now that the courts are blocking SAVE, I’m seeing news that loans will be placed into forbearance AGAIN. And again I have no idea if that means the next couple of months will or won’t count towards my PSLF path.
I really think the SAVE plan is the lowest-cost and PSLF is the cheapest way to repay my loans. But I’m getting to the point where the uncertainty about how long it will actually take to achieve PSLF (and if that program will even still exist in 10 years from now) is making me nervous.
TLDR; Is anyone else concerned about the future of the SAVE and PSLF Programs? Should I consider switching out of the SAVE program so I can still make qualifying payments towards PSLF? Or should I abandon PSLF altogether and start aggressively paying off my loans?
Hi! I am pursuing PSLF and I’m only a few months away from my 120 payments, and I am also on the SAVE plan. I know for sure that any months when you are in administrative forbearance those $0 months do NOT count towards your 120. During the past 9+ years that I’ve been in repayment they have changed the group administering my loans many times and every time they transfer us to a new group they put me in forbearance for a few months and I get super annoyed because that just stretches out the time until I can apply for forgiveness. However, the $0 payments during COVID times DO count toward the 120.
If you are considered to be in “active repayment” and you happen to have a $0 payment then those $0 payments DO count as well.
From what I’ve read and the emails I’ve gotten from Dept of Ed, the entire SAVE plan isn’t going away, but there are certain parts of it that were blocked by the courts. Weirdly, a few weeks ago Dept of Ed recalculated what I should be paying under SAVE (without me submitting a recertification) and my payment went down from $532 to $406 per month. The message they sent me says that my payment will be $406 per month for the next 18 months, and then it goes back to the “standard 10-year repayment” of $1080 per month. However, I will reach my 120 payments before that date so I don’t need to worry about it, unless they put me in forbearance that I didn’t ask for again
I’m pursuing PSLF but my loans are on REPAYE, which was the lowest payment plan before SAVE came out. The cap on payments is different (10%) and you continue to accrue interest but in conjunction with PSLF I think that part is basically a wash at the end.
I think if you definitely qualify for PSLF there’s no reason not to pursue it. I’m in a career field where pretty much every employer is government or nonprofit (libraries), which IMO the point of the program was to give an advantage back to people wanting to enter public service fields but needing specialized education to do so.
So lots of thoughts here and am typing on my phone so can’t make my brain make them into something coherent, so I’m just going to brain dump about PSLF related things that may or may not have any bearing on anything you wrote about
Have you submitted any certification qualifying work forms yet? You can wait til you’ve done all 10 years but I do it every year to keep an accurate count of where I am and then I also don’t have to go back and try to get the info from 10 years worth of employers when I’m ready for forgiveness.
The Dept of Ed is taking over the calculation of PSLF payments bc Mohela has sucked at it so bad. They are in the process of doing the recalculations and they say that they should be done with that at the end of the summer and then will begin processing the new PSLF determination forms that have been turned in since they started that.
I would hold off on switching IDR plans to something besides SAVE if it will result in you having a payment. This is under the assumption that you aren’t only doing nonprofit/government work to get PSLF but because that is the work you would be doing otherwise. Being in forebearance l doesn’t matter for me - I’d be working at a npo anyways so whether I make 10 years of payments in 10 years or 10 years + 2 years of forebearance doesn’t matter to me. I guess technically I will pay more bc my income is increasing over time but I haven’t calculated that out. So I would prefer to keep my payments the lowest they could be through the SAVE plan.
In the SAVE plan lawsuits forgiveness is one of the things that is being targeted, but that is only forgiveness based on length of payment not PSLF forgiveness.
I am pretty sure that under the IDR waiver that will end in September, some periods of forbearance will count towards PSLF and if yours don’t end up counting you can file an appeal with the Dept of Ed ombudsman to argue yours should be counted.
I get a lot of info from studentloanplanner.com. They are financial planning people who specialize in PSLF (mostly targeted at medical professionals but very helpful for non medical PSLF people too. I paid for a consultation with them in the spring to help me figure out how the IDR waiver recount would affect my two sets of loans with different PSLF payment counts and ended up consolidating my loans and will save like 7 years of payments on my more recent set of loans.
I got forgiveness under the PSLF program back in 2020, and I was never eligible for SAVE or REPAYE because of the age of my loans, but I’ll second hanging in there and see if this doesn’t work itself out in a couple of months. I wouldn’t switch to a plan where you’ll have to make a payment right now. A couple months won’t make that big a difference, and we’re likely to have a lot more clarity by then.
I’ll second certifying your employment every year. I did that, and I think it made a difference in getting my forgiveness through back in the bad old days when they were denying 99.9% of applications.
ETA: I would strongly advise against paying any third party company for help with PSLF. Most are scams, and the rest are charging money for something you can do yourself. Talk about it here and on Reddit (r/PSLF) and you’ll find tons of info.
Ugh this is a nightmare. Thank you for posting. There’s really no work around!! You can switch to another payment plan in the meantime, but they have taken down the online application for those other payment plans, and there will be very long processing times if you use a paper application I guess I will be stuck with yet another admin forbearance that I don’t want and didn’t ask for which will draw out how long it takes to reach 120 payments. I’ve worked for my federal agency for 12 years now and I’m still making payments! My original forgiveness date was September 2024 but now it’s already been pushed to at least September 2025!
Sucks. But you can save the money and make the payments retroactively once this forbearance ends, it says. There’s paperwork involved, of course, but that could get you there as soon as the forbearance is over. It says not to make payments during the forbearance, so don’t do that.
Yeah, I saw that you can make one lump-sum to cover the missed forbearance payments but it can only be done right at the end, if those payments will make you eligible for forgiveness. This is the first time I’ve heard of that.
In reality, I have to continue working long after I get the forgiveness so I might as well just do it the “easy” way and wait until their count hits 120. The “dream” is that once I hit forgiveness I could quit my job and we could move to a LCOL area and live off of savings/DH SSDI/whatever small amount of income I wanted to earn. But in reality disabled kids has ruined that dream anyway, so there is really no reason to rush the forgiveness anyway. A payment not made now is just a payment made in the future.
