 But this is like, I'll, I just had to, my boyfriend's like, I usually swear. Oh, great. Thanks you guys for coming out tonight on this first snowy day in New York. I appreciate your coming and your patience. Anybody who's late, I'll just make them sit in the back as they, as they trickle in. But welcome to our online audience. This is a DG Academy seminar on saving yourself from student loans. So we're very excited to have Hannah Cole, who not only is an expert on this, but she's also been through our Drama to Skilled Fellows program. So I've loved working with her and knowing her all these years. And I think you guys are in really good hands. And if anybody online has questions, please feel free to tweet them at hashtag newplay. Great. So have a good time. Hi, Liam. I'm playing here at home watching. I feel like Mr. Rogers. Hi, my friends at home. I'll be back in a minute. Thank you. The light comers all arrived. Great. I wanted to start off basically just kind of telling you what the seminar is and what this isn't. I'm not an accountant. I'm not a certified public accountant of any kind. What I am is a writer. I'm a member of the Guild. And I really believe that when people come together and share what they know, we can help each other and we can be a stronger group. The more of us who are financially safe and have our finances in control, have our loans in control. The more of us are at home writing instead of panicking or taking those safety jobs to pay your rent, pay your bills. I mean, granted, you're going to have to pay these loans no matter what. But if you can manage your payments, that gives you the freedom to be a writer, not just a slave to the system, which is probably not what your goal was when you took those loans out in the first place to pursue your dream of being a writer. Or a composer for any of you that are composers. For you guys. Or director for you and actors, we have a lot of different people here today. So what this is is basically an overview of the student loans consolidation process. I'm going to take you through the three best programs that I think are out there right now for consolidating loans. They're government sponsored, which means that they really only cover government loans. These are not consolidation loans for private loans. We'll touch base on private loans at the end and some of the things that you can do if you have those. I know that people, you can max out what you can take out for those government loans that come through, which would be like a plus loan or a staffer, those types of things. And you have to turn to a bank or a private lending institution and take out more money. We'll talk about that later. Those are a little bit different animal. Let's see. There's nothing you can do that's going to make your loans disappear completely. You can't declare bankruptcy and have it disappear because if that was true, every single person who had any wherewithal would declare bankruptcy and nobody would ever pay their loans back. So forget about that. It's not going to happen. Very, very rarely, if you declare bankruptcy, you can convince a bankruptcy judge that you'll never, ever, ever in your life be able to pay those loans back. But they're like, I bet you can at some point. So it's very rare for you to be able to pull that off. If you'd have to declare bankruptcy anyway, if something happens to you in your life, go ahead and try. You might as well try, but it probably won't work. I've been wondering lately a lot about all those names like Freddie May, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Sally Mae. And I thought for a long time, this will reveal where I started when I started this process, I thought for a long time that maybe there was a rich banker named all these programs after his rich children and granted them a trust of some sort. And so when I started researching these loans, I went online and tried to figure out who's Sally May and nothing would come up. And finally, there was something. These are all nicknames for government programs. Freddie Mac is about the federal home mortgage loan corporation, Fannie Mae, all these different types of things. Sally Mae is the Student Loan Marketing Association. So all of a sudden, so it's like, how do we make these big government things sound cute and fun so that people will be like, oh, Sally May, she sounds like a really cute kid at the playground who would be my friend? Not quite. So she's not your friend. But there's things that they can do to make it sound a little more friendly. But that makes sense to me, finally, why my loans, like I had loans through Sally May. And then one day they were all with the Department of Education they'd been sold. And I was like, how did that happen? And it's just that they were transferred from one section to another. And for a long time, they were housed on the Sally May website together. I don't know if any of you guys have had things like that happen in your loans where you log on one day and it's like, not there. And then you get an email and they're like, PS, now your loans are held by these people. That happens a lot. You can start out with one company and your loans can be purchased by another. Who knows why? They're just shifting things around. Some of you might have loans with maybe Great Lakes or Nelnet. You have to write Great Lakes. Yeah, but you got transferred. And they got transferred to Nelnet. OK, so that's common. Some people have things. Mine were finally sold to Fed Loans, which is a consolidation company that takes loans from the government and consolidates them and then houses them. There's all these different companies who are making pretty good money off of our desire to be educated. But that's the way it is. We made the choice to do that. I just really agree. But that money that they make is like post our education, meaning the more they get shift hands, the more that the interest goes up. And then they're almost guaranteed that money in the long run. So the debt seems like a good investment for them. That's a good investment, I think, for a company. When you're paying little amounts each month, and we'll talk about that when we start to look at some of these really low payment plans. I really recognize that principle. You have to be careful. But there's kind of ways to navigate that. But when you're paying a little bit of interest for a long, long time or you're paying bigger payments, but you're paying a lot of interest, oh, that helps them make money. Of course, it's a business or they wouldn't do it. There's always been lenders. And lenders have always made money. And people who have money loaned out to other people always get mad at the lenders. But you don't have to take money out. But I did. I made that great choice. So if you go to page two, kind of get into getting started. The first thing that you've got to do is you've got to get your taxes in order. This is something that kind of held me back for a couple of years when I was really trying to figure out what to do with my loans. I probably made every single mistake in the book that you can make as you get your loans consolidated and your payments in control, which is great for you guys because I learned a lot about the terrible things that you can do to yourself. One of them is deferring your payments for a long time and allowing the interest to a crew. They're happy to defer your payments for you. You can defer your payments for like, I think I deferred mine for two years. And every once in a while, I'd come into some money and I'd make a payment on my interest, basically. But when you're deferring, they're just sitting back and letting your interest accrue. And at the end of the year, it does this thing called capitalization, the loan capitalizes. All the interest that's accrued that you haven't paid goes, and becomes part of the principle of your loan. And then that starts to gain. Interest on the interest. What? That's not fair. That's called loans. Like, that's really why. If you've got your loans in deferment, if you can do anything in your power to keep paying towards that monthly interest that's accruing, you're gonna be a little bit ahead of the game. You'll save money in the long run, for sure. You don't want anything to get capitalized if you can avoid it. Sometimes you can't avoid it. Sometimes you're in a position where you don't have a job yet, or you're interning and you're trying to break into the whole system of theater, or you've got a writing thing and you're earning just enough to pay for your food. But if you can pay your interest, if you can keep up with it, and it's not cheap, because these are huge sums that we're looking at. I think most people I've worked at with are coming in at about 140,000 to 150,000, coming out of NYU grad programs. And for Columbia it seems to be a little bit higher and people are looking at things that, but you're in school longer. So these are somewhere close to 200,000 and that'll vary for each person. That interest can be pretty daunting. And I think what happens is as you're deferring and you see that your loans are growing and growing and growing, that feeling of panic can really set in. So what I hope to do with you guys tonight is kind of help you get through the system, and kind of comb through a lot of that information so that panic doesn't stop you from making good decisions and taking steps to get yourself out of financial trouble. You might not even be in trouble, you might be perfect. So while you're getting your taxes in order, at least you need to have your AGI for last year. And AGI is your adjusted gross income. That means your kind of earned income after they do all the little adjustments of, like, you know, they take something off for student loan, interest that you've already paid, or they adjust you down because you made a huge donation. Probably not, if you're in this classroom, you probably haven't made a huge donation to anyone. But there, maybe you have dependents. There are different things that they adjust your income for. So you need to have your adjusted gross income and you should have all of your W-2s and W-9s from last year on hand. Anything that was reported to the IRS, you're going to need to have those documents on hand as you go through the consolidation process. So this may be for me next year then? That'll be for you next year. Yep, after you graduate, you'll have a six month grace period where nothing really happens, and then boom, it happens all at once. So in other words, have your post-grad have your 2012 tax return on hand? Yeah, so if it's, say it's this year, you'll need your 2012 tax return. If you're looking at next year, you'll need your 2013. But it's always good to do your taxes every year, even if you're only earning something like $5,000. It's okay to go ahead and do your taxes. You don't have to have earned a whole bunch of money. Sometimes they'll tell you you don't need to do your taxes. I've had people tell me that you don't need to do your taxes if it's under a certain amount. Okay, but just do your taxes because you're an American citizen and you should do your taxes. I don't know. And you need to find your FAFSA pin. If you go back in your mind, way, way back to when you first applied for your loan, this might have been a pin that was generated when you applied for a loan for undergrad. They stay, your little pin stays the same. It's a four digit number and it travels with you through all of your loan process. If you can't find it, you can go online to this government site, the direct loan consolidation. It's www.loanconsolidation.ed.gov and it's written down there right after it says dig in on the handout. You go there, you can generate a new, not a new pin, but they'll send your pin to you again and while you're going through the consolidation process, there's an opportunity to kind of put in your social security number or some questions and boom, your pin pops up. So that's, it's not so bad. What was that website again? It's, it's direct loan consolidation and the handle is www.loanconsolidation.ed.gov and it's totally on the level. You're gonna go out there and if you've been looking through websites yourself, it's not unlikely to find a whole bunch of scammer websites because here you are, a nice person, I hope you're a nice person and you've had this like terrible experience and you have all this money that you owe, you're panicked, you can't make your payments and you see this website that's like, let us help you. I really recommend that you just go through the government site because it's really on the level and the other ones might be good and the one you pick might not be good. So I just wanna protect you that way. I'm not saying that every single site out there is a scam. I'm just saying that I can't tell you that from this chair, so I don't, I don't wanna say that. It's just my little rule of thumb is that if it's not the government, they're gonna be making money off of you one way or another. Yeah, everybody makes money off of you, but they might make more. Okay, okay. All right, so you wanted, the next step that you wanna do is some people actually haven't looked at their loans since they got their loans and I've worked with a lot of people who, literally for years after they've taken their loans out, have not opened a piece of mail, have not gone to their website, have deleted their emails because the panic that you feel when you look at those numbers is sickening. And I think a lot of people have kind of like loan shame or money shame where I've seen people with like, like emotional responses where they're shivering or your eyes get glazed over or they stop being coherent when they're talking. It's totally normal and somebody who's really smart, really successful, very educated can look at this number or go through this experience and all of a sudden you're sitting there like feeling that vibration when you get that adrenaline hit of fear. You're sitting there and you're living running and you're like, well maybe I'll just watch Project Runway again because the thought of, I like that show, the thought of going through the student loan process, it's just like you can't even imagine how you're gonna pay $5, let alone $200,000. But you will. Don't worry. It can happen. So you need to find out who holds your loans. Are they all from one place? Sometimes your loans might all be from Salime or they might all be from Great Lakes. They might all be from Nelnet. Some of those companies even have consolidation programs built into their system. I think I worked with somebody and I think he was with, he was with one of those. I'm not exactly sure remembering which one exactly but I think it was Great Lakes and he had consolidation built in so he didn't have to go through the government site. His loans let him do it within their own website. So you wanna kind of familiarize yourself with your loans, their website. I call them all the time. You pick up the phone, call the customer service number and say, I want to consolidate my loans. Can you help me? Can I do this here? Or do I have to go through the government consolidation? What choices do I have with you? Getting on the phone with them is really good. And then if you've got some loans that are, like maybe you have a few loans with, say you have a few loans with direct loans and then you have a few loans with Bank of America or Citibank or something. You just kind of wanna suss out the, where you've put your eggs, which baskets, how many do you have? Because what we're gonna try to do is put everything in one place so that you can calmly manage those payments and not accidentally miss one where you're like, oh right when I was 22 I took out a loan for this crazy undergrad program that I never finished and that's just been accruing and like going to collections that you never knew about. I've seen that too. Not good. Let's see, so that once you find out what your loans are, you wanna kind of take a look at the types of loans that you have because some of these programs consolidate certain types of loans and some of them consolidate other types of loans. My favorite loan, I guess I've come to have favorites, is the subsidized Stafford loan. It has the lowest, usually it has like the lowest interest rate of any of the loans and your interest is subsidized by the government. So while you're in school and they're helping to pay that, they're nice. The next, you also have the unsubsidized Stafford loans, graduate plus loans. Those are like bigger ones that you can take out like $40,000 at a WAP, like 55. Okay, it went up since I was there. But yeah, it can really, and sometimes they'll do like an emergency plus loan for you if like your computer crashes and you have to buy a new computer. They're like, yeah, here's another $5,000 for your computer. Then you might have some private loans. Those can be okay or they can be a little tricky depending on where they're from or who they've been sold to. And then if you've got personal loans from the family and friends, my take on that is, thanks, suckas. You should pay those. I mean, really work with the people who've given you private loans. Talk to them about how they want you to pay that back or if they mind waiting. I mean, ouch. In my family, we say a loan from a family member is a really nice gift. But don't break up your family because you don't pay a loan. So that's that. And you wanna see how much you currently owe. So kind of like if you do have loans from different places, if you wanna make an Excel sheet, you can kind of like plug those numbers in if that totally freaks you out to make an Excel sheet, write it down on a napkin but add up and find out exactly how much money you owe. Take yourself, give yourself that moment to be like that panic and that prickle to see how much you really, really owe and then snap out of it. It's just money. It's just a number. It has nothing to do with your value as a human. It has nothing to do with your purpose on the planet. It's a number. And it's a number that you attach to your life but it doesn't define who you are as a person. And I think it's good to remember that and kind of separate yourself from that choice that you made. You might be really excited that you made that choice and you look back and you're like, you know what? It's gonna be worth it even if I have to pay for the next 25 years, it was worth it to do that. You might look back and be like, oh man, I probably could have just like, hold up in a room and Saskatchewan and written a whole bunch of plays for free but whatever, you already did it. So buy guns, you have to move on. Kind of take a peek at the types of percentages of interest that each loan has. You might see that one of your loans is like 2.7% and another one is like 8.2. Say, I just worked with a girl whose grandfather gave her $20,000 and she's like, well, I think I'll consolidate my loans and then I'll put $20,000 towards it. And her mom was like, no, why don't you pay $20,000 towards one of the loans that has the highest interest rate and then consolidate. You've still paid off the same amount but when you consolidate, your interest rate actually, the average is lower, just a teeny tiny bit but over 25 years, a teeny tiny bit can be a lot and as you consolidate, there'll be a point where they ask you if you want to have automatic debit for your loans. That's something that I could not say yes to when my loan payments were $1,700 a month. I had to say no but when my loan payments were zero which is what they are right now and that's still counted as a payment. Yes, of course I can do automatic debit and lower my interest rate just a little bit. We'll get into those awesome payment prices later. So yeah, I really do recommend if you have a huge lump sum or you get like, you sign a book deal all of a sudden, it could happen to you. Then go ahead and pay a big chunk or if your credit card has a higher interest rate pay a big chunk off that. There's lots of different things that I mean, we have loans everywhere, credit cards are loans too. So after you've kind of figured out these basics and you've got your W-2s lined up, you've done your taxes, if you can't figure out how to do your taxes and you're panicking just because you have like three years back taxes, which is not unusual for writers and artists to have like years of taxes that they haven't done. There's a lot of writers that I've met or artists that just don't associate themselves with that type of process or I don't know how to describe it really, but it's just not their bag. So kind of get caught up with that. You can just take all your stuff in a plastic sack to H&R Block and be like, I messed up, please help me, they've seen it all, they won't judge you, maybe privately at home they judge you a little, but we really have seen it all and it's not worth hurting yourself one more year to have the embarrassment of walking in. Just walk in, give them your documents and they'll help you work it out. And then you go through the consolidation process. So that's really where you pop up, I don't know if you probably can't zoom in on this, but you'll go to this LoanConsolidation.Ed.gov and when it says which, you know, you look what service you want, you click on Borrowish Services. And it pops up again. Welcome applicants and you sign in and you have to sign in with your FAFSA. So you'll see a page where it like asks for the last, like maybe a couple, your last four digits or your whole social security number, two letters of your last name, your date of birth and your FAFSA pin. That's where you can like, I forgot my pin, oh no, and they help you figure out what it is. As you go through this process, they're going to ask you to enter in financial data, they're going to ask you to select which loans that you want, all of them, like just, I recommend consolidating them all, but remember like that's up to you, like maybe you want to hold one out that you're like determined to pay off. People have different methods, but they'll ask you which ones you want to consolidate. And then there's this really weird moment that every single person I've worked with who's had to consolidate their loans, there's this weird moment where they ask you to put in all your W-2 forms, and then it doesn't quite add up right to your AGI, to your adjusted gross income, and you have to kind of make it add up right, and every single person is like, but I can't lie, I can't lie because this is a government program and their IRS is going to come after me. You're not lying, you're working within this system telling the best truth that you can, and sometimes you have to round up $5 or round down $2, it's just, you're rounding. So don't panic, they're not going to come to your house, in my experience they have never come to anyone's houses. This is, and they're going to review it anyway. So they have all of your documents that you've put in, so they have the exact numbers, and then don't forget that you might have had something like maybe you had a W-9 that they didn't actually send you a form for or something that you did as a freelancer, and it's not adding up to your AGI, you have to kind of comb through your data and see if you've missed anything. Sometimes unemployment actually counts, not sometimes it always counts, unemployment is income, so don't forget about that. Child, like if you receive child support or alimony, I think they look for that too. You'll go through this and if you have any trouble, you can give them a phone call. When you keep a phone, when you call any of these loan places, I really recommend that you keep a little notebook that says loans on the front. Some people like to do things very tidy on a computer, you can keep a computer notebook, but just say loans, you write down the date that you called, the time that you called, and when the person answers the phone, they're going to want to speed through their name and get you to your question. And you say, so nice to meet you, thank you so much for helping me. What was your name again? Do you have an ID number for reference? Great, okay, my question is, and you get that information down. Because sometimes someone will tell you, you're going to be completely done, all of this is going to be finished for you in three months. And then three months go by and you're like, doo-dee-doo-dee-doo, then you can call back and you'll be like, I talked to Ted on this date and he told me this, I've got it in my records, I'm sure that he took a note and it's in my file. So just refer to my file, please. And they usually do keep those notes. But just remember the people who work at these places are humans, they're just people like us. And so they might make a mistake or they might do something and your loans get kind of bonked. You just remember that there are people, they're not like a creepy entity out there that's out to ruin your life. They're just like some dude who woke up that morning, put on a sweatshirt, went to the Nelnet big building where he goes and sits at a computer with like 400 other people and he's just waiting to get to like coffee break. So if that person doesn't work for you, you can ask to be escalated. Usually you have to ask three times. You have to say, I'd really like to talk to a supervisor because I think I'm not explaining this right or I'd really like to talk to your supervisor because I have a question that I think is gonna only be able to be answered by somebody a little higher up that really, don't say higher up, that makes them mad. But you ask three times and on the third time, they usually all of a sudden say, sure, no problem. Because they've got protocol that they have to follow. I'm on the phone with these people all of the time. If I'm sitting down with someone and we're going through their loans one-on-one, we just pick up the phone and we call and we call and we call. You can get a lot done, you can get a lot done faster when you escalate the call. If you don't have to escalate it, don't. You don't need to. Sometimes they can solve it pretty very quickly. But I called when I was calling Fed loans, they had purchased my loans from direct, from the government and hadn't transferred my special plan with it. So my first bill that I got was $1,700 again after I had been told that it would be zero. And I was like, you know, that panic and you say, it's just a human, it's just a person, they probably messed it up. You call on the phone, you're like, this is what I was told. And I escalated the call and 30 minutes later, it was solved and everything was fine. So don't feel that just because you're the person on the other end with the problem or the debt that you're not in control of your finances, this is your money. Yes, you owe it to them, but they want your money. So they'll work with you. If you turn to the next page, I'm going to talk to you about some of the plans that I really like. But if we, sorry. Yeah, any questions? Do you want to take any questions that have come in at this point? Because I kind of just talk talk. I got a couple. Yeah, sure. If you want to go and then we'll. Well, we're talking about like consolidating, but what happens if you just have one? We just have a. Do you just have like one giant loan? I think. Maybe they just have like the subsidized. So you took out, that's usually like a pretty low amount, like $4,600 or $12,000. No, after three years, it's like 80. So there's. I didn't do a graduate plus. It's not a graduate plus. OK, sometimes each year, they'll give you a loan for each year. And each of those, even by the year, it's like it's got a different number. You can still munch those loans down together. You might not need to, but to get on these programs, you usually need, you have to consolidate them through this government site. Because then it has a different stamp on it. And all of a sudden, it's eligible. So, yeah. It's probably going to get to this, but you can't. I know the government like Stafford, unsubsidized, subsidized, those can always consolidate it. But if you're taking a private, like if you're taking like great legs or a Nelnet. Like something that's Nelnet can have government loans inside it. It doesn't. OK. Yours might not. But some people do. No, this is a mistake my parents made. Yeah. It's undergrads. It happens. I mean, it happens to make a mistake. But it's still a loan. They might not filter that into like. You cannot consolidate a private loan into a government consolidation. But they might have their own consolidation programs. There might be another consolidation program that's available within that company that can kind of crush your loans down. But it won't be available. It won't be eligible for one of these programs. So it's amazing that two payments work together. Yeah. And there's some other things that we will talk about a couple different things that you can do at the very end with private loans. I have a friend who just did kind of a little mastermind deal where he took out a personal loan and a much lower interest rate, paid off a big chunk of his loan, and then he's paying lower. There's smart things that you can do. And because of the way that the economy has changed, there's more options out there than there used to be. So we'll take a peek at that, too. Sorry, the Great Lakes is our staffer loans are going through Great Lakes. Yeah, so that's why it's kind of complicated. You can have Great Lakes, and Great Lakes owned my car loan. That's a total private loan. But Great Lakes also, for a time, owned part of my staffer loan for my first graduate program that I went to. So I was like, well, what do they do? Who are these people? It's a giant loan company. They do everything, you know, they do it all. But you can't consolidate private with government, yeah. It's too bad, that would be amazing. And maybe someday they'll do something like that. But private is private in government. Those are those programs that, you know, we're all paying taxes, and that's part of the, I mean, you can't consolidate these loans if you're non-American, either. So these loans are only for Americans. I probably should have said that before everybody started watching. If you're a Canadian, you can't apply for this. That you are, yeah. I see the income-based repayment one. Now it is looking into that on the website. And so is that a consolidation plan? It's a plan that gets attacked. All of these three things are plans that you can attach to your loans once they've been consolidated through this government website, the Direct Loans Consolidation. So I think once somebody was able, that same guy who consolidated his loans, I can't remember the program, he was able to access this because they had their own government, I don't know. I'm not gonna get into that in case it's wrong. I don't wanna lead anybody astray. What I never was able to find on the internet was all of these plans laid out side by side. They are super similar. These plans are very similar. And you have to kind of decide which one sounds best to you. The Pay As You Earn plan is something that's new as of December, 2012. It only works for people who took out their first loan that's gonna be consolidated after the first day of October, 2007. So most of the people that I've worked with haven't been able to apply for this at all. That might be, I mean, I guess that's changing now for people who are graduating. Yes. What if your parents took them out? Parents, it's really different. You'll see when we go through this, parent plus, it'll, the parent, we'll talk about that in just a second. So if you look at, if you qualify for any of these programs, the Pay As You Earn, so you have to have partial financial hardship, that's something that you don't have to worry about. You probably are here because you have partial or total financial hardship. And it's good to laugh about it because like here we are, we're all, you know, creative people who wanna make a difference in the world and tell our stories. And we've like nailed ourselves with these like whoppers, whopper loans. But yes, we have financial hardship and you know that every time you go to the grocery store, you qualify for this. Whether the government thinks that you qualify or not, they will calculate it, you don't have to calculate it. And you also have to be for this program for Pay As You Earn, you have to be a new borrower as of October, 2007. Most of you will qualify I think for that. That's all my grant. Yeah, and this program has started to get pushed. I used to really like the best one used to be the IBR and that's still a really great plan. That's the income-based repayment plan. And that has some really amazing options. Even if you get married, it has some great options that are different from income contingent repayment. We'll go through each of the details. The Pay As You Earn basically has the very lowest of the low payments possible. Which one is this? The pay as you earn. So you should try for that one first if you qualify because your payments can be the lowest. But you might think that one of these other plans looks better to you for your situation. So it's really up to you to take a look at these different plans and see which works best for you after we kind of go through them. All of these programs have fluctuating payments. Each year you do your taxes. Each year the company that holds your loans will send you a little form, usually by mail or by email depending on what you've selected. And they'll say, time to send us how much you made last year. And you'll say, okay, well my AGI for this year is this and here's my documentation. And you have to send it back into them and they readjust your payment. So one year your payment can be zero, the next year your payments could be 70, the next year your payments could be $450 and the next year they could be zero again. And it's just, it fluctuates with you. So if you have some like great gang buster year where you're like rolling in the dough and you're having such a wonderful time, then the next year you'll be paying a little bit higher premiums. So make sure you save some of that money for your loans. But then if you go through a quiet spell and you don't have huge amounts of money coming in, then you get to readjust and it goes back down again. So that's really nice. There used to be something that was like a graduated payment plan. I don't even talk about that one anymore. And it was just something that went up every year because they just expected you to keep making money more and more each year. Finally they were like, oh, that's not really happening for our citizens the way that it used to. And we're looking more at these kind of fluctuating repayment plans which is great for all of us. They're based on your income and family size. They're adjusted each year. The first one on the income based repayment plan it says usually lower. That yeah, it's usually lower than the income contingent. I should have made that distinction. The pay as you earn plan, one of the nice things about this plan is that it's based on 20 years of repayment. The other two are based on 25 years. So when they do this beautiful thing called forgiveness that sounds so nice but has like a pinch at the end. When they do this thing called forgiveness you're getting your loans forgiven after 20 years which means five less years to accrue interest. That's one of the best reasons to pick pay as you earn because at the end of that time do you guys know about forgiveness at all? Yeah. Okay, at the end of these three plans your loans are forgiven. And that means that they take whatever you owe whatever's left and they like wipe the slate clean and no longer do you owe your government any money except you have to pay taxes on it as income. Oh, that's still paying it. So they get it, they kind of get it here or they get it there. So. I don't know what to say by that. This is one of the horrible things. Right, like you do the forgiveness, like it happens. Yep. What is it, how do they do that on their taxes? It's quirky. No one's actually had their loans forgiven yet because these programs are so new. And I'm really hopeful that by the time we get to forgiveness, it's a true forgiveness which to me means cancellation because by the time you've paid that long chances are you'll have paid pretty much everything that you owe or a great deal of it. Nobody wants, I mean you took the money out, you really do owe it, you have to pay the money. It's not like some magical thing that the government is like so excited that you're gonna be a writer. It's like you chose to take that money out, you're in debt, if we lived in ancient England, not ancient England, but if we lived in like olden time England you'd be in debtor's prison. Like literally sitting in there, hoping your friends would pay you out so you could buy a piece of mutton. But we have credit cards now, we have all these other things so we don't go to debtor's prison so often. But you are in debt, you're like 200,000 in the hole. And that's something that's hard to get your mind around because a lot of times you're living like, you know, you're buying a latte and you're like, I need that latte because it's so snowy outside and New York is dirty and I need my latte and you're like, it's so good. Well you kind of like, I tried to tell myself that I just stole that latte from the government because that's $5 I could have paid towards my student loan. When you go and you get your haircut or you buy beautiful new clothes, that's money that you don't actually own. You owe someone so much money but like this money that you're earning, they're letting you use it but technically you owe it to them. So if you can kind of start to readjust your thinking and think like, okay well I'm gonna make my sandwich, I'm gonna make a little sandwich every day. If you make your sandwich every day, you just saved like $300 on lunch. That's a loan payment. That can be a big loan payment. You don't buy a latte every day, like $5 latte. At the end of the month you've got like $150 in your pocket and those are the types of things you have to start thinking of. There's no shame in being frugal. It's really hard to look at yourself and say like I owe $200,000, it's not mine. You still have to have a nice shirt to be able to go to work but because otherwise you can't make the money to pay the loan, so there's things that you have to do but try to kind of start shaving those excessive or kind of luxury items, it's hard to do but at the end of the month if you kind of keep track of that, like my sister for awhile, every time she was about to buy a latte she wouldn't buy one and in this little book that she kept in her purse she'd write down five or she'd write down 372 and at the end of that month she would put that money into her that she's a lot better at that management than I was at the beginning. So it's hard to kind of readjust your thinking but so let's go back to the pays you earn. These loans don't consolidate every single type of loan so some of you won't be eligible for this or you'll want to choose a different plan because you'll want it to cover more loans but they do cover all the federal direct loans except, I don't know, it's the federal family education loans, they don't consolidate those loans but they use them to calculate your need. They don't consolidate any direct plus loans that were made to your parents. I think a lot of people's parents are being generous and they take out these loans kind of, is that what happened to you? No, I had my undergrad loans, I couldn't obviously take out any by myself if I was too young. So my parents took them out but I was a co-signer so you're the one who has to pay them. But they took them out before 2007 so I don't think this is applied to me. Just move on from that one but we'll go through for anybody at home who can do this. None of these plans cover direct plus loans that were made to your parents. Sorry. The perks of the pays you earn, they're the lowest payments of all three plans, there's limits on how much they can capitalize, the capitalization of the interest, the interest that accrues, this is kind of a new plan for me. So you might wanna read through it a little bit more closely, but the interest that accrues but is not covered by your loan payments will not be capitalized even if you're in deferment or forbearance. The other plans will capitalize that interest. So if you've chosen this plan and then you have to go into deferment for a little while and the interest is still accruing, they treat it a little bit differently and it's in your favor, which is really nice. They also cap the amount that can be capitalized, they cap it at 10% of the original loan. So you might end up having to pay that interest at the end, all of the interest that accrues, but only 10% of the original loan, only 10% of the original loan amount can be capitalized back into the loan and into the principal. Each year. Total. Forever. Okay. It's so quirky and complicated, but it's the life of your loan. So once you've already capitalized 10% of that original loan amount, the rest of your interest will continue to accrue, but they're never gonna dump it into your principal. You're never gonna capitalize on the interest. Right, so you won't be paying interest on your interest except for that 10%. That's a really nice perk. So they basically only capitalize your loans once? Well, it kind of happens over a few years. Like, it capitalizes every year, but once it reaches that 10% maximum, then those loans are no longer capitalized and put back into your principal. They just kind of float above it. It's weird. Oh yeah. It's a weird process, and I wish they would just never capitalize anything. Because that's really how your loans compound and grow as monsters that tear through your life. Yeah. And I have the websites for each of those pages. Let me show you. There's this really lovely website. It's called Federal Student Aid. It's a government office. It's there to help you. It's there to kind of walk you through things. And I've put- It's on that site. Were you on it? It's a really good one. Yeah, I was on it last night. I was gonna do the IBR last night, but that was like 12 hours. I couldn't do it, as what I said. Yeah, it's a really nice website because it tells the truth and it's pretty clear. A lot of the websites out there are very convoluted and kooky. This one, they've done like a, they redid it recently. Even it's beautiful. I think it's really nice and it shows pictures of people that you're like, oh, I can be friends with that person and they have a loan. Me too. So it makes you feel like it's a friendly site. So each one of these loans has their link at the bottom. And you can kind of go onto that site and take a peek. But I like having them side by side. For the income-based repayment plan, one of the reasons why I liked this plan is that it's something that I didn't put down on here. But when you, if you get married, or you have like, you join yourself with someone else legally in a marriage or a civil union, only your income is considered when they adjust each year to do your loan payment. In the income contingent, and this was true and we'll have to make sure that it still applies now, with the income contingent plan, when you get married, they take both of you together. If you file together, they take both of your incomes together and adjust it. So say you have, your partner has $200,000 in debt and you have $200,000 in debt, but he's making $80,000 and you're making $20,000. They're like, the household's making $100,000. And that's how they choose what you each pay. But if you're like, I'm making $20,000 and you're on another plan, they're like, she's making $20,000 or he's making $20,000. And that's how they calculate your payment. For me, I was like, okay, well, the person that I'm with seems to be doing really well financially. I don't want my payments tied to their payments during our first years of, like, if we ever get married, I'm not saying you have to ask me, but. I did this for you, I did this for you. So when you do, like, join legally, you're, I don't know, to me it made sense, but then there's other things on other plans that are also perks. This one, it's still based on your income and family size. It still adjusts each year. This you pay back over 25 years. After 25 years, your loans are forgiven. You still have to pay taxes on them. It's usually lower than the loan you would have paid. But here it comes, 25 years from now, I'd be like sending my own kids to school if I had kids, if I'd be sending them to college. And all of a sudden they'd be like, hey, remember when you decided you wanted to write musicals? Muahaha, boom. And all of a sudden it's like, I made $150,000 that year on top of my salary and you're in another income bracket. So you have different taxes that you have to pay. Right? Yikes. For the rest of your life? For the rest of your life? Just that year. Just that year. Yeah, just that year, just that one year. So you're like, plan and you have to get on a payment plan then with the IRS and we have that. So it's like they're gonna get it from you here or they're gonna get it from you there. But if you take one of these lower payment plans and you have like $70 loans, you can take it upon yourself to pay $300 a month and use that payment plan as an emergency backstop for yourself. I think that's the smart way to approach it. And you're like, okay, well I'm gonna tell myself that my loans, my loan payments are $200 a month or try to base it on how much interest you actually owe. That's gonna scare you when you look. It's like a lot. But you try to base it on that and you're like, I'm really gonna go for it. I'm gonna try to keep my interest low. I'm gonna try to pay it off each month. That way, 25 years go by, you've kind of spread out that damaged financial payments over a long time and it won't hit you the same way. They'll be like, maybe they forgive like $20,000 at the end instead of 170,000. Well, 20,000 you can probably like work into what you owe. It's easy to think like 25 years from now I'm gonna be a millionaire. I'm gonna have a TV show. I'm gonna have a show on Broadway and I'll have socked all my money away and I'm gonna be super duper smart. Just plan for each day. Just, you never know what's gonna happen. You don't know, you just don't know. So try to be responsible and think in 25 years I could be exactly who I am right now and do I wanna hose myself or do I wanna take care of my future self by paying as much as I can and not eating out every day? Or, I mean, a lot of us have already shaved all of those things off but I'm looking around here and I'm seeing some pretty nice bags including my own, which I won't talk about. But, you know, we all make those choices where you're like, you buy a really nice pair of shoes because you need to go to an event and boom, there's $300 that seemed reasonable at the time that could have been a loan payment and then your little child is hungry in 25 years because you've bought boots. I don't know, yeah. When they're doing income-based repayments, do they take into consideration the total amount you owe between private and government loans? Well, your full debt, I mean, that's... It goes in there. I'm not exactly sure if they take in the entire amount that you owe. They're taking in all of your federal loans. I really don't know if they look at your... There might be a place on there where you put in your other debt or that I really... Unfortunately, I don't know a lot about private loans. So these are great because after, let's see, so 25 years they forget that you pay your taxes and hopefully you're feeling really proud of yourself when that happens. There's a list here of everything that they take. It's basically like the standard, the staffers, the federal plus, they don't do anything, the plus with your parents, that never works. And then there's something that all of these three go with. It's this 10 year public service forgiveness program and we'll go over that in the end. That's like the best thing ever. Income contingent, pretty much the same, but it's something that you might wanna choose if you don't quite qualify for IBR or pay as you earn. Payments, again, you make them for a maximum of 25 years. At the end, your loan is forgiven. You have to pay the taxes. But they do a couple of little things here where there's a cap again on the capitalization at 10%. So you'll never be capitalizing more than 10% of that original loan amount. I've had people choose this plan on purpose because they're like, you know what, that sounds good to me, that sounds smart. And you can kind of do some calculations and see which one is gonna benefit you. Each one of these plans has something, they all qualify for something that I really love and I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate this into the next 10 years of my life. If you work for a 501c3 or certain programs or it's basically like, let's see there, you can basically qualify for this program and it might be on the next page where you get your loans forgiven after 10 years. So you make 120 qualifying payments while working at a public service organization or a 501c3 and there are very stringent rules about what qualifies and what doesn't qualify. But after 10 years, they forgive your loans but this time forgiveness means something else. It means canceled. So you work for a nice theater company that happens to be a non-profit theater company. You work there for 10 years, you're so happy because you have time to write and you're earning a paycheck. Maybe you're not earning as much as you would earn in a private sector job, but in the back of your mind, you're like 10 years now means cancellation of the rest of my loans. So you could be really happy in making enough money and at the end of 10 years, you submit your paperwork and the government reviews it and decides if you get to cancel your loans. They might say like, you're almost there but those two months when you work less than 40 hours, we're not gonna count those. So two more months for you and then yeah, you qualify. So it's full-time. It's full-time. You have to work full-time. But you have to have a job anyway. So you could look for employers, you gotta just plug in 501C3 and they go, which is the C3? Non-profit or a 501C3. There's also programs where there's some debt forgiveness for teachers and we're gonna look at those on this page. Sometimes it means forgiveness of everything and sometimes it just means forgiveness of something. We should probably check time. You have questions coming in? I have some questions on Twitter. Sure. The first is. The world of the past. If I have a good financial month, should I pay more of my loan or should I pay my usual monthly fee? It depends. The only debt that you have is your loan. Pay more on your loan. Any time that you can pay more on your loan, you're helping your future self. But if you've got a credit card that's at 22%, pay more on that because that's a loan too. It's not just fun money that you get to keep on a little plastic card. But it's helpful to think of a credit card as a loan and if you can, pay that one first. Pay whatever, it's got the highest interest. Yes. Second question. Should you take out a personal loan to pay off student loans? Are there lower interest rates than student loans? Yes. A couple of people that I've just worked with have done that recently and they were able to find really great personal loans that I think were at like 4% or 5%. There's some really good interest rates out there right now. To get a personal loan, you usually have to have a job. And kind of good credit or fair to average to good credit. And then you can get a personal loan. Maybe they'll give you $6,000, but that's $6,000 at 4% instead of at eight. And you can like go ahead and put down a big chunk. Then you have to remember that you have to pay the other one too. So just keep really good records. But I've done that, absolutely. And there's some things that are happening right now with transfers, with credit card transfers. People that give you 0% APR for like two years from Bank of America or from Citibank Discover. There's some places that are doing some pretty amazing things like that. You can be savvy, but you also have to be careful because the more of those that you take out your credit score can go down and then it hurts you later. You just have to be kind of cautious about doing stuff like that. But it can give you some good relief. And then our third question. If I stay on IBR. Yep, income-based repayment. And pay my federal loans according to what I'm told I, what I, I'm sorry, according to what I'm told I owe. Are they forgivable after 25 years? Yeah, they're still forgiven, but like they're tying your payments to how much you're earning, not to how much you owe. They're tying your payments to how much you earn. You owe what you owe. And the longer they can get you to pay something small, the more money they make in the long run or the government makes in the long run when you have to pay your taxes. So yeah, you can pay zero dollars every month if that's what they tell you to pay and you can keep going on your merry way. But to really kind of get ahead of it, you should go ahead and make some personal choices about like, okay, well I'm gonna pay more on that so that in the future down the road, you're not really, I don't know. I mean, a little bit of a pinch now saves you a lot later. That you owe that money. You have to remember that nothing you do is going to erase this debt completely except maybe working for a 501c3 for 10 years if the government approves it. If not, you're still on your plan paying and in that plan. So even if you don't end up qualifying, you should go for it if you think you've made 120 qualifying payments, 10 years. Any other questions from the live feed? That's good enough. So on this page, I was just like looking online the past couple days to see what new things are out there. In this past year, all sorts of really great stuff has popped up online that I have never been able to really find before. There was a great article on Huffington Post about a guy, in fact I have it up here so I can give you the author's name. It's called Sally Mae is willing to settle my student loan. Can that be true? They had private loans and they were paying a small amount each month. Sally Mae dumped the loan to another holder, another lender and that person kept making little payments. This is an article by Steve Rode, the get out of debt guy. I like this guy a lot. Yeah, Rode Lake, Rode Island. Okay, and Huffington Post. Yeah, Huffington Post. And the article is called Sally Mae is willing to settle my student loan, period. Can that be true? Question mark by Steve Rode, get out of debt guy. That loan was dumped off of Sally Mae onto somebody else's plate. It was a private loan. He was like paying $100, paying $100, paying $100. And they said to him, you owe $50,000 and you're not really making a dent in it. So we'd like to do a settlement with you and get this over with. And they offered him a settlement and he's like, what about this? And they said, what about this? And I think he ended up paying, let's be accurate, but he ended up paying like $10,000. Just call it a day. Just settle it. He counted with $10,500 and they came to an agreement of $10,900. $10,910 on $50,000. That sounds like magic. And there is just like anything that's like too good to be true. There's always a pinch. And the pinch is that it wax your credit for seven years and it's on your credit for seven years. It might be harder for you to get a credit card if you don't already have one. Might be harder for you to buy a car, buy a house, apply for another loan. But seven years at $10,000 instead of the rest of your life at $50,000 that never goes away, that's a personal choice that you have to make for yourself. Those loans, those private loan settlements, that can happen with credit cards. It can happen with a cell phone bill. There are things that you can do that you can settle your debt that way. I had debt coming out of school when I graduated in 2009 right into that big recession and was literally somebody with two master's degrees babysitting so that I could buy peanut butter and jelly. And that was hard and it was embarrassing and at the same time it was the situation and I knew a lot of other people were in the same situation. And I, every once in a while would put something on my credit card because I was like, oh my gosh, I've gotta pay my rent. So I better put my groceries on my credit card and then boom I had this huge credit card bill and I was like, oh my God, on top of my loans now I have this credit card bill. I am literally the stupidest girl in the world. Now what? And I considered doing that. I considered asking for a settlement and I called and I talked to the credit card company about it. They're like, this is what it would look like. This is what it would do to you. And I thought, okay, well I'm just gonna go try to make a whole bunch of money instead. And was able to pay it down over time but sometimes it's the best option. You can't do that with the government loans though. No, they'll find a way to get it. Salt, this company, and then on this page where it says forgiveness and cancellation that's about what we talked about. There's this cool new company that I hadn't heard of until just this week. It's called saltmoney.org. They have a free ebook online and when you print it out it looks like this and it has color which you can't afford so don't print it out in color. Print it out in black and white. And it's this kind of awesome compendium of all these little forgiveness programs that I never knew existed. It's called 60 plus ways to get rid of your student loans without paying them. It's an almost comprehensive guide to student loan forgiveness and discharge. I prefer the word cancellation. I think most of us do. Yeah, I don't like that other word. But on their, in this, they have, most of these forgiveness programs are for people who work in healthcare. Oopsie, should have done that one. Or military service or teaching. But there are some pretty awesome forgiveness programs even state by state. Unless you're from my state of Washington which has none. So Washington staters solidarity. We'll have to find another way. But a couple of my favorite ones in here that most writers and artists and composers are eligible for is the public loan, public service loan forgiveness which we've already covered that 501c3. And the other one is the teacher loan forgiveness program. A lot of people are teachers and you have to teach in a school that qualifies. It's not just like, I'm a teacher. Dwight or Dalton. Like maybe that works, I don't know. And those are great schools. It's just that they might want to place you in a school where there's need. You know, and to stick it out at a school where there's need is very noble and sometimes difficult. But up to $5,000 a year for five years, I think they cap it at $17,000. $17,500 of forgiveness. And they just take that right off your loan. But it's $5,000 a year added to your income which is manageable. It probably won't knock you into the next tax bracket. Instead of having it all happen at once. So there's something about that that I like. So if you're a teacher already, look into this. Yes, because I do a lot of teaching and some of it's private, some of it's either at universities or sometimes it'll be at work in prisons and detention centers. Are you working as a freelancer or are you working through a program? Sometimes as a program, sometimes as a freelancer. This is gonna be a full-time job through a school, probably not freelancing. Which I do all my stuff freelancing too because I was like, I'm a teacher. Here I am right now and it doesn't qualify because they have to be able to track it and prove that it's true. So if you're teaching like in, I think I looked at a school working at a school in Brownsville and they were like, yeah, that would qualify. And then you look at another school in a different neighborhood like three streets over and they're like, well not that one. So it's kind of encouraging you to seek out these jobs where there's need and they reward you for doing that. So it's really, you'll see if you go through some of these, they reward you for teaching in Alaska, they reward you for teaching in Arkansas at schools where there is need, not like Little Rock where like in the best neighborhood of Little Rock, but maybe a small rural community. Well, if you're a writer that's not tied to New York and you can move around to one of these rural communities, not only are you like living in a place where you can do your writing, you're really helping people by being a teacher and being an educated person. There's something that I find really beautiful about that. I don't know why I think that's just so- It's very romantic. It's very romantic. I guess we're all romantics here. Maybe you're not a romantic. I am. Sure, I am. So I really like that program. One of my favorite random programs that I found in here is that it's called RISLA Loan Forgiveness for Internships. If you're a Rhode Island resident or you are going to school in Rhode Island, this is so weird. And you also have non-federal student loans, it's private loans, that are held by the Rhode Island Student Loan Authority. And you also have completed a three credit internship after May 1st, 2013, paid or unpaid. You can get $2,000 once to forgive. So you should go ahead and like search this out by state. They might not have every single thing listed in their little book, but you can be like, okay, well, I grew up in this place or I'm living in Chicago right now. I wonder if there's any forgiveness programs that are just tied to living in Chicago or living in Illinois or living in North Dakota where you can be a veterinarian and get $80,000 in loan forgiveness. If you're in an area of need in a contracted position, there's usually lots of stipulations. Some of these things, if you go to the next page, and this is kind of before we break into the end of the whole thing, I guess. If you're in deferment right now or if you ever go into deferment, like we said, try to pay the interest on that loan. Sometimes you're gonna be in a financial situation. I hope it doesn't happen to you, but it might, where you cannot pay $5. You cannot pay, you can't even buy a cup of noodle. And that's why these programs are great is because they let you like, you're like, okay, well, this month I'm just gonna cost on that zero payment because I just barely made it. And you're like, but next month if I earn a little bit, I'm gonna put $25 towards it. Any little bit helps. And when you're looking at the other places where you can lower your debt, I think a proactive approach where you're on the phone or now they have that nice chat with a helper and it's actually a helper. It's a real person and not an Autobot. I just lowered my APR for my credit card from 22% to 13.99. How did you just do that? Yeah, so because it creeps up, creeps up, like you miss a payment, it creeps up, you miss one more payment, they put you to the tippy top. And then you kind of sit up there with paying like the highest APR that you possibly can pay. And yeah, I mean, I try to use my own examples, but I had a card that had crept up to 22%. And I was like, I hadn't noticed that, but I was like, oh, gosh, every month I'm getting interest that's $300 and I'm paying $300 a month, so I'm just paying my interest, I'm never gonna be out of debt. And I was like, wait a second, that shouldn't be that much if it was at 12%, like I thought it was. And I went in and I got in the little chat room and I told the guy, I want my payment lowered to 12.99% like my credit union card is. And he said, well, let me look into that and here's the phone number that you call and he referred me to this other department. So I call, got on the phone and I'm like, hello, and you just tell them what you want. And you're like, I want my APR lowered, I've been with you for a long time and it's time to lower it because I've seen some really great programs out there but I'd prefer to stay with you. And you just be really polite, but the thing that seems to work is when you say, I'd really prefer to stay here but I have to look at my options. They need customers to make money and even if you are paying at a lower APR, your lower percentage points, you're still paying them, that's better than getting nothing. So often they'll work with you. The first, another time when I tried that, they said, well, remember when you paid that payment two days late, like six months ago, make two more payments and then we can review it. Or they'll say, well, you've only been with us this amount of time, make these more payments and then we'll review it. And then you call them again exactly on that day and you're like, you told me to call you. I'm so excited, is it possible? And you just stay like professional and pleasant because just remember it's you on the other end of the phone in a cubicle and maybe they, I mean, they're probably in the same situation but they're just trying to pay their dad. So you can also do a little kind of like self-imposed Ponzi scheme where you open a credit card at 0%. There's some credit cards right now that are doing it for 15 months at 0%. Transfer the chunk over that they let you, pay the minimum on the 0% for the two years, pay like gangbusters on the big one and then it happens and two years go by and you have to pay the normal price, the normal one on the other one again. But at least you got two years at 0% so that helped you and use it to motivate yourself to pay the higher, the part with the higher APR. You can kind of play these little tricks on yourself. I think they're fun but that's probably why I'm sitting up here thinking like money is like, I like to think of it as Tetris or a game because then it makes me feel not too afraid. They're just numbers. You can do it with your cell phone company. I took a job once at T-Mobile in the collections department. You would not believe what they have at their fingertips to help you. You didn't realize that your daughter was texting, texting, texting on your family plan or you're tied to your parents' family plan and they ran it up with text. You can call and they can issue a credit. If they want to, if that person doesn't help you, you can gently accidentally disconnect the phone call and call back and hope you get someone nicer or you can ask three times to escalate to a supervisor and they can help you. You can also call. Cell phone plans are changing all the time and now that you can take your number from one company to another, they have more incentive to try to make you happy. So you can call them and be like, you know what, I've been with you for such and such amount of years on the same plan. Can we review my data and my usage and make sure that I'm not, like maybe I could be on a lower plan and I'd really like to. Otherwise I'm gonna go over to this other company that's offering this other plan. If they don't seem to be willing to work with you, oh, hold on, my mom's calling. Just click, just hang up the phone and call back to the next person. People are just as varied on the other end of that phone as we are in this room, except we're less varied because you're all here for the same reason. You can do that with your bank account. I was happily, merely going along with my bank account and my checking account that I'd chosen for myself and then all of a sudden I noticed that I was getting an 8.95 charge each month and I was like, what? I don't have any charges, that's why I picked this plan and so I went on to Bank of America and I was like, what's up you guys? And I don't wanna pay that fee and I don't have to pay it over at Washington Mutual which is now defunct. And so they worked with me and they put me on an e-checking account that didn't have that fee anymore. I just can't talk to a human. Well, that's fine, for $9 I'll talk to a computer. And you can also do this with the IRS. When I came back before I moved to New York I worked in Mexico and I had made payments into my IRA Roth account which is a retirement account where it's like, it has special tax breaks. So I was making great money in Mexico and I used that money to make big payments in my IRA Roth but I didn't know that that was like not okay or you have to be using money that you made in the United States. So then I got this big fee from the IRS and I had to undo it and I went in and I sat down at the IRS over on 44th and sixth and I said, this is what happened. I'm just a human, I'm a person, like what can we do, I want to pay you. When you say those little words, I want to pay you. That helps them understand what you're doing there. Most people are there trying to not pay. But if you're like, I want to pay, can you help me? Can you help me figure this out? They can just go click, click, click and they see all the money that you owe, they see all of your payments that you've made and the lady said to me, oh, you really pay on time, you've done your taxes every year except for this big botch and they totally canceled a whole bunch of the fines and it became something that I could pay. If I had just kind of gone happy, go lucky and tried to figure it out myself, I would have just had to pay this horrible fine that I owed, it was my fault. But a human person, you taking the time to go and sit there, you'd be amazed what you can do one-on-one with a human. Yeah. With the person at the IRS behind a counter where they're protected from you. All these companies, including the IRS, only make money if you participate, you know, you can try not to pay your IRS fee, hold on true. Are there any questions about any of that type of thing? Those are the types of things I think kind of give you hope because it puts a little bit of the control in your own hands. Like lowering your APR can make a huge difference over the course of five years. You know, you can do that. I thought, that's it, that's your stuff with that. It can be, sometimes they can just say no. But if they see that you're calling kind of consistently and you really want that, I've only been put off one time and then the next time I call, they help me. So they're keeping track. The people who are working at those places are taking records and putting it in your file and they also put down in your file if you're nasty. Like when I worked at T-Mobile, if somebody used like bad language or was, you know, racist or cruel or said horrible things to you, which they did all the time because they were mad about their payments. Not that all T-Mobile customers do that. It was just people who were panicked about money. But I heard things said to me that I had never heard in my life and you put that down in the notes and the next person that comes up, they're like prepared that that person's gonna be unruly. So you really wanna maintain a professional attitude when you're talking to these people because I don't know, I've had experiences where you call and somebody's got like some little power trip. It's like, and they're like, I, you owe us money and we're gonna get you and we're gonna turn you over to collections. We're gonna do this. And you just say, oh yes, I understand that. Thank you so much for helping me. But I'd really, I need to speak to your supervisor. And if they don't escalate you, you say, I've asked you three times to escalate me. I'm gonna have to take next steps. I have nothing against you. I just need to talk to your supervisor. Do not interact with these people. Don't let them fluster you because they can put some crazy thing down in your file. Not that they would or should. They're trained not to do that, but like they can, they're just a person. So I really like that. I've done this one too, which is so tacky, but you're like, I'm on my cell phone. I'm just hanging up from that one. I don't know. But you can do that because you're an actress. You'll probably really trick them. I guess I talked a little fast. Does this help at all? Are there any questions where you're kind of thinking back over your own personal situation and you're like, okay, well, IBR sounds good for me, but I'm a little nervous about that forgiveness at the end. I'm just nervous that I've done that the undergrad ones, and even with getting on an income contingent or whatever, some sort of payment plan, there's still like $500 a month. How do you do that when you're an artist living in you? But it should be tied to your income. I know, that's why I'm focused on my taxes. Yeah, it's like if I made, because what I usually do is in the summer, I work a lot so that I can make up for or live off of something. So I feel like working in the summer hurts me. So you really would want to plan ahead and put money aside knowing that you're going to have to make those payments. I would never encourage someone not to work or earn that money, but that is tricky. If you've got those high months and low months, you've got to be really hard on yourself and be kind of like squirreling money away. You guys remember that Disney cartoon where there's the grasshopper and the little, there's like the ant of one of them saves for the winter and the other one is like fiddling all the summer. You know, like I'm a person who fiddles all the summer. Like that's my nature and I've had to train myself to be the little person who squirrels away. It is so counterintuitive to my nature to do that because when I have money I want to buy all my friends' cake, you know, and I have money and I want to buy my mom a really amazing gift because I feel like that's what money's for is to make yourself happy and to make other people happy. That's really great, isn't that sweet? But when it comes time to pay my loans, I'm like, oh man, I bought my mom like a sweater and now I'm the one paying the piper. So I know it's hard sometimes to kind of discipline yourself but that's what I would recommend is learn to squirrel it away, put it in a savings account, don't put it in your checking and don't think about it. It's not your money anyway. Exactly, yeah. Can I have a word on forbearance? Yeah, there's two kinds of things. There's the ferment means deferment. That's a word that everybody knows. Forbearance is similar but it's like they put kind of like a different type of hold on your account. I'd really, I've never done a forbearance. I've never qualified. Yeah, I know a guy who's just, he just like, no, he's not doing it. He just declared forbearance and he's not paying it. Yeah, he's not paying it but it's still a, it's still accruing. He's going to, okay, I figure. Eventually your forbearance will run out. Your deferment will run out and the loans will activate again. You can't even do deferment anymore. Like even in school deferments, I think it was 2012. Yeah. It was, yeah, as of July, 2012. If you were, even if you were a student and your loans from undergrad were in deferment, they were no longer in deferment. They were in forbearance. So there's still incurring interest Right, even in deferment, there's still a incurring interest. There's sometimes there's a little fudging when it has to do with subsidized or unsubsidized, like the subsidized loans. Not might be the difference that you're looking at, but I'm not, I'm not positive. So I don't want to stick on that. But with private loans, basically I've given you a list here. This is right off the financial, it's called financefinancialaid.org. See you later. The website's at the top there. It's www.finaid.org. This looks at private consolidation and there are all these companies that do private loan consolidation and they can be helpful. This is from a government site. These are places that should have been vetted by the government. Cedar education lending is one that I see pop up a lot. I haven't seen any of the next ones, except for Wells Fargo and SunTrust. Those are ones that I've seen come across my desk. And the terms are there and you can kind of take a peek. Next student is on suspension right now. They've suspended their program themselves. They haven't been suspended. But you might be able to look at some of those for yourself and see if that makes sense to you. But private loans for me, that's not really where I have any expertise. But they can get better. Are there any other questions that are popping up? If not, I do work with people one-on-one if you would like private help. Sometimes this is kind of like a do-it-yourself. You can take this and you actually can use this. I've had like lots of people, like 30 people write me back and they're like, I just used your little packet that you emailed me for free. And I went through and I consolidated my loan. I fudged that funny little number and everything went through and you were right and I feel so much better. Oh boy, do I feel great. And I have other people that were, they're like, I took your seminar last year and I started to do the process and I literally could not. Yeah, so overwhelming. You start to, yeah, it's really overwhelming and you don't have to feel embarrassed about that. It's so common. If that's the case, I do these little workshops up at my house or maybe we could do something like that here where you bring your computer, you bring all your documents, we put up a table and I just walk around and I help you and some people are on the phone with their loans, other people are working with their accountants from their parents, they're calling their moms, they're getting financial advice from the guy that they're, we're just like a little factory, a little student loan consolidation factory. And I know that the people that need this help don't have a lot of money to pay and we always work it out. So if it's one-on-one and I'm taking time away from work, I really do work with you to make it something you can afford. And you're welcome to call me on the phone, you're welcome to email me. My email is on the website, I think. If you don't have that. Yeah, you can tweet me, it's my new tweet that I got last month. My Twitter account, 1,000 tiny snips. We have your website. And you've got my website there. So these are all sorts of ways that you can find me and track me down. And after probably mid-December, I'll have time to sit down with people one-on-one and maybe that's something that we can do here one night where we just have a workshop and people bring their computers. So I could also work with you one-on-one over the phone if you are like really freaking out. I never, never judge you. I was you, I am you. Like I made way more mistakes than you're making right now and I'm okay and I got out of it and I'm paying my loans down. And I'm also buying boots. I'm a bad, I'm a bad loader. All right, thank you so much for coming tonight and I hope that helps you a little bit.