 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today and it will be to our archives for you to watch at your convenience, and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of those archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries here in the state. We're like your state library, so we provide services to all types of libraries, public, academic, K-12 corrections, museums, archives, anything. So we will have topics on the show for all types of libraries. Really our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries. Book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, anything you think they may be interested in, libraries across the board may be interested in. Sometimes we do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on and do sessions specific to services and programs we're offering here in Nebraska, but we also bring in guest speakers, and that is what we have this morning. Joining us today is Matt Amory. Amory, did I pronounce that right? Amory, I didn't get it. Okay, and he is joining us from the east coast, Kent, Massachusetts Public Library, but he's going to talk to us about something very important to many public librarians or anyone in public service. The public service loan forgiveness program, which has had some struggles over the years, but seems to have gotten back on its feet, seems to be working. Yeah, we'll learn all about that. So I'll just hand it over to you, Matt, take it away and tell us all about it. Okay, thanks. As thank you, Krista, and thank you, N Connect. Thank you. Thank you, Nebraska. Hello, Nebraska. My name is Matt Amory, and I am a technology librarian in the Canton Public Library in Canton, Massachusetts. I am also a public service loan forgiveness recipient. So there aren't that many of us around, but I can tell you that this program worked for me as a public servant, as a town employee. It worked for me, and I made 120 payments, and my remaining balance on my student loans was discharged, was forgiven, with no tax consequences. So. Congratulations. Thank you, Bart. Congratulations. Thank you very much. And so what I have, what I have, I learned about this. So let me just talk a little bit about what we're going to do today. So we're going to talk about, we're going to briefly talk about what the public service loan forgiveness requirements have been, what they were in the past, and what they will be once again. And then we're going to talk about this incredible temporary waiver of rules, which allows, right now, between now and October 31st of 2022, for huge amounts of, huge numbers of payments, which had previously been disqualified to become qualified and increase your count of qualifying payments and move you further along the line towards that 120 payments. So that's what we're going to do today, and I'm going to show you a PowerPoint document that actually walks you through exactly the steps that you need to take to get on track. So I'm going to advance my screen here. And first off, I'm going to say, under normal circumstances, I have a presentation that starts with student loan debt and talks about how bad student loan debt and how unfairly student loan debt intersectionally affects women and minorities and all of that. But because you're here for public service loan forgiveness, I think you probably know all of that stuff. Everyone who has student loans and who works in public service can benefit from this program. So that said, here are the original requirements for qualifying payments for public service loan forgiveness. So to start with, the whole idea of public service loan forgiveness is that you accumulate qualifying payments. So each month that you make a payment, depending on whether you meet the criteria or not, your payment will qualify or not qualify. You don't have to do 120 in a row, which is great. So like if you work for a couple of years and then take some time off, you can come back when you come back to work again, you can pick up right where you were. So payments do not need to be sequential, but the idea is to accumulate 120 qualifying payments. Now in the past, prior to October of this past year and after November of this coming year, these are going to be the qualifications that payments need to meet in order to qualify and in order to add to your account. So while you are making a payment, you need to be employed full time in public service. You need to have had direct loans in repayment, and you need to have paid on time and in full, and you need to have been enrolled in a qualifying repayment plan. So that's an awful lot of mouthful, and that's kind of complicated. And all of those definitions are available on studentaid.gov, the federal student aid website. But a lot of that stuff is really confusing. And even though it's been simplified and it's been explained better now than it ever has been before, there were a lot of people who started making qualified payments as far back as 2007, who have never had any information about how this program actually works. So those people have, for the benefit of those people who have been shut out of making qualifying payments, because they had never been informed, the administration put in this grand sweeping temporary waiver, which relaxes the qualify, which relaxes the necessary qualifications for qualifying payments. So during this period of time, between last October and between this coming, and up until this coming October 31st, a lot of the rules which had arbitrarily disqualified payments in the past have been waived. Specifically, this means any payments that were made prior to a loan consolidation. So loan consolidation is where you bring together loans and you replay the entire balance as one single loan. Oftentimes, and the worst thing about this was that there are loans that are ineligible for public service loan forgiveness. The only solution to that was to consolidate the loans. But when you consolidated the loans in the past, you started all over at zero on a new loan. So under this waiver, if you consolidate your loans, you get credit for payments that you made before the consolidation. And if you have consolidated your loans in the past, you will get credit for payments that you made on those loans prior to their consolidation. So that's a huge, huge, huge change in the way payments are qualified. And please note that this will go away on October 31st of 2022. This waiver is funded by COVID recovery money. So the authorization is limited. So going back to the rules which has arbitrarily disqualified payments, which have been waived. So payments made while enrolled in a non-qualifying repayment plan. Again, many people made a lot of payments without realizing that they were in a repayment plan that did not qualify for public service loan forgiveness. So a lot of those people, when they go to try and apply for their public service loan forgiveness, when they think they've made 120 payments, they discover much to their chagrin that they have actually made only six qualified payments. And so the last category of payments which will not, which will qualify under the temporary waiver, but had not qualified in the past, are payments that had not been made on time or had not been made in full. So what this means is that lots, if you have lots of payments that have not, that have been disqualified in the past, you will get credit, qualifying payment credit for those payments in the near future by spring without any action necessary on your part. The department of education is going through their payment records and they are reclassifying, disqualifying, disqualified payments as qualifying payments. And you will see a big, if you have made disqualified, if you've made payments in the past that have not qualified, you will see a jump, a bump in your payments, a jump in your payments, possibly a huge jump in your payments. That is something that we had a question about. Somebody wanted to know already, how do we know that this is a thing, that this is happening, but you said they're proactively doing that part. They are proactively going through every single student loan account. Yes, the department of education is going through all of their payment records and will change the status of payments that have been received in the past and they will send information about those now qualifying payments to your loan servicer. More on loan servicers later. But under these new rules, it is now possible to consolidate ineligible loans without disaster. So as I mentioned before in the past, if you were to consolidate your loans, it would restart your payment account at zero. So let's move on. And so what this means, so this is limited and temporary. So some of the rules have been relaxed, some have not, which makes the path to PSLF easier to negotiate and changes the disaster and removes the disastrous consequences of making a mistake, doing things in the wrong order. But you must consolidate your ineligible loans before October 31 or 22 because, as I mentioned earlier, this waiver is temporary, it's funded by COVID dollars. This information is all available at this URL down here and you can find this URL by searching PSLF waiver and going to the studentaid.gov link that you find. So under this new waiver, there are now three categories of borrower and those three categories of borrower have three different paths to PSLF under the waiver. So the first category, if you are a borrower who has any federal family education loan program loans or Perkins loans, so federal family education loan program was the old program that they where the government backstop the Department of Education guaranteed student loans that were issued and owned by private banks. So basically a pretty ugly system but those loans are consolidatable. Those loans can be consolidated into direct loans Perkins loans which are typically owned by the higher education institution which you are attending. Those loans are also federal loans and they can be consolidated. So first category, if you are a borrower who has any fell loans or any Perkins loans, you must consolidate those loans into direct loans. Second category, direct loan borrowers who have never certified their income must certify their income. So if you so there are two pieces of there are two pieces of this of this process. There's making a payment to your loan servicer and then there's certifying your employment which allows for the payment information to be cross referenced with your employment, your employment information. So when the two when both of those things are available when you have a payment and when you have a when you have a qualified employment that together makes a qualifying payment and adds to your account. So direct people who have all direct loans but have never certified their income must certify their income. And the third category borrowers who have already certified their income and are on track those people need to keep on certifying their income periodically in order to continue to gain qualifying credits. This information again and all the information in this in all the information all the subsequent information in this in here is is at this URL the specific URL loan types next steps but this is all available within the PLS limited waiver page and you can find that on Google if you just type limited waiver PSLF and you go to the student aid site. As you probably know if you've done any googling about student loans the first thing that's going to come up in any search is going to be a private lender looking to give you a slightly lower interest rate but when but if you have refinanced with a private lender like that you when you when you refinance with a private lender you become completely ineligible for public service loan forgiveness because your loan is no longer owned by the Department of Education it becomes the proper it becomes owned by Sophie or Ernest or some bank or some some other some other private institution and it's not it's because it's no longer owned by the Department of Education the Department of Education can't do anything about forgiving it so these are the three categories so those so the same way that the five the same way that all of those requirements for qualifying payments are confusing even these three categories can be confusing especially if you're especially if you haven't if you're new to the public service loan forgiveness program and you and you don't really and you're and you don't have a and you don't really have any if you don't if you just if you've just been paying your loan payments as you as they come in if you don't really have a lot of familiarity with what your loan types are i'm going to show you i'm going to show i'm going to have the next the next slides are all about asking questions and getting you started so um we're going to talk about what that means and we're talk about where we fit in so the first question that we need to ask here answer question one this question is do you have federal student loans in repayment and have you worked full time in public service so if you're here um and you're a librarian you work in public service the definition of public service um for public service loan forgiveness purposes is do you work for a government employer if you do you're automatically working in public service municipal local county state tribal or federal government qualifies 100 percent if you work for a 501c3 non-profit 100 of 501c3 employers are qualifying employers so if you work for the government if you work for a 501c3 non-profit you definitely qualify if you work for a different kind of non-profit that's not a 501c3 but does work does have public service does do public service work you also qualify but there's there's that's a that's a very small slice of people in the broad world of people who are eligible for public service don't forget this so here uh so do you do you have federal student loans in repayment have you worked in public service um these links go to different places in here but i'm just going to the second question so the second question is do you know what types of loans you have there's more than one kind of loan so oftentimes people will say i have a navient loan and i have an ed financial loan and i have a great lakes loan so those are three different servicers but those loan servicers do not own the loans and describing your loans in that way is not the type of loan that they are when in order to find out the type of loan that you have you need to visit the you need to visit studentaid.gov and look at your aid summary and that will tell you exactly what type of loan you have and the types of loans that we're interested in are direct loans we're interested in fell loans and we're interested in Perkins loans so the direct loans qualify already to for for public service loan forgiveness the fell loans and the Perkins loans once again need to be consolidated into direct loans in order for them to become eligible so let's move on to the third question here do you know or did your aid summary show that you have fell or Perkins loans these loans are not eligible for ps left so i sort of talked about that earlier question number four have you ever certified your employment by submitting an employment certification form that was the old name for it or a ps lf application form that's the new name for the combined form which is the application for final forgiveness for under ps lf also under te ps lf temporary expanded public service loan forgiveness but we're not going to cover that right now it's different from the temporary waiver if you know what tp te ps lf is you're ahead of the game and you're and the rest of these questions are probably going to be simple for you so the fifth question is did the department of education say they would add qualifying payments for you so a lot of people who are borrowers received an email from the department of education that says looking back at your payment records which is the process that they're in right now looking back at your payment records we estimate that you have 50 extra payments which are currently disqualified but will qualify real soon real soon in the spring and then the last question is does this make more sense now so what we're going to do is we're going to we're going to walk through these questions and so i'm going to say do you have federal loans i'm going to i'm going to answer these questions this is like a choose your own adventure powerpoint now do you have federal student loans in repayment have you worked full time in public service and i'm going to say yes and i'm going to click over here to go to question two question two says do you know what type of loans you have there's more than one type of loan and i'm going to say yes i do i know that i have all i know that i have direct loans did you do you know or did your aid summary show that you have fell or perkins loans these loans are not eligible i have i only have direct loans i'm going to say no have you ever certified your employment by submitting an employment certification form and i'm going to say no no i don't know i don't i'm going to go to action three so action three this is employment certification basics let me actually go but let me go let me actually go back here and i'm going to go back to i'm going to go back to the first question so again if you're starting at the very beginning the first thing that you need to do is determine the types of loans that you have because the types of loans that you have again that's direct loans fell loans perkins loans the type of loan that you have will determine what you need to do so again click on the aid summary at student aid.gov in order to get into student aid.gov you'll need to have a FSA ID a federal student aid ID if you've recently applied for a if you've recently put in a FAFSA if you've been if you've been on studentaid.gov you have one of those already but if you don't if you've never been to studentaid.gov or if it's been a long long time since you got your loans you may have to go to studentaid.gov and establish a login that usually takes 48 72 hours but once you have that ID you can get into studentaid.gov and you can get into your very own personal aid summary page and that page will display the loan type for every individual loan that you have again the three different types that we're concerned about are direct fell and perkins so no matter so even if you have things that are not those like all of your loans are going to be at that one location every single one of your loans will have either the word direct in the title the word fell in the title or the word Perkins in the title if you have other loans that are private loans or if you have taken out a home equity line of credit on your house in order to in order to pay off your loan in order to pay things off if you borrowed money from your your uncle in order to pay off your loans those those those that's not going to be free that's not going to be forgiven through public service so but any federal loan owned by the Department of Education will appear in your aid summary and in that and in that line you in that title of that loan you'll either see the word direct the word fell or the word Perkins so having having that knowledge about your loans what we're going to do is move on here this is go to question three but what I'm going to actually do is go back here and go to determine your loan types now what we're going to so if you so if you do have any loans which are fell or Perkins loans those loans have those loans are not eligible for PSLF no matter whether you've been paying on them since 2007 no matter whether you've been paying on them since 2011 no matter whether you've been paying on them since 2017 they are not eligible for public service loan forgiveness because only direct loans are eligible so if you do have fell loans or Perkins loans you need to go through the process of direct loan consolidation in order to convert consolidate those loans together into direct loans so right now between now and October 31st of 2022 you can consolidate loans and you can preserve the payments that you made prior to consolidation as we as we talked about before but after 10 after 10 31 2022 the rules are going to revert to the previous complicated rules and the previous consult the previous harsh consolidation rules and so if you have these loans and you need to consolidate them get that consolidation down by right away yeah yes right now why not now please don't wait you want to do this consolidation before you apply for the forgiveness because they've got to be in this type of exactly right so if you apply for forgiveness if you apply for forgiveness if you send in if you send in your forgiveness application if you send in your employment certification and you don't have all of your loans consolidated you're you could run you could find yourself with some of your loans forgiven and some of your loans not forgiven now the great thing about this temporary window this temporary window this window under the temporary waiver is that when you consolidate your loans you get the new consolidation loan rather than having a count of zero on it it will have the it will have the loan count that is the highest of any of your loans which is fantastic and actually means that people who have had loans from their undergrad eight years ago and have loans from their grad school and have loans from their master's degree from three years ago and have loans from their phd from one year ago and have parent plus loans in there for their children that they've only had for like six months they consolidate all of those together and they pick up the the payment count from their undergrad loans so they really so this is a fantastic opportunity to consolidate your loans and come up with the highest possible count um again after 10 31 2022 this will no longer be the case so if you do have fell loans or Perkins loans to consolidate do it now please do it now please do it now don't don't come around don't don't come around November 1st and say I really didn't I really wasn't I really wasn't notified about this this is terrible this is a bad this is a bad program because this is this this temporary waiver is your opportunity if you have been treated poorly by the public service loan forgiveness this waiver is your chance to get to get to finally stop getting the short end of the stick so the second thing about so here plan your consolidation um when you can there's two different ways to consolidate you can consolidate entirely online or you can fill in a paper online you can fill in a paper uh consolidation application regardless of what you do when you fill out that after you after you figure out all the loans that you want to consolidate you must select fed loan servicing as your new servicer fed loan servicing is the pslf loan servicer so if you're currently with granite state or um ed financial or aes or any servicer other than fed loan your servicer that you're working with right now can not calculate the number of qualifying payments that you've made the servicer that you with now can not qualify your payments fed loan once again is the only servicer who will be able to calculate your payment count and will be able to forward your student loans to the department of education for forgiveness so select fed loan servicing as your servicer as you consolidate also um if you are not in a qualifying repayment plan and that's an income driven repayment plan the three the four income driven repay repayment plans are income based repayment income contingent repayment pay p a y e pay as you earn and repay revised pay as you earn so income based repayment income contingent repayment pay as you earn revised pay as you earn those four income driven repayment plans qualify you make qualifying repayment you make qualifying payments under those plans and you and they'll count towards your count um again consolidate before 10 31 2022 or you'll miss out on these these opportunities um so next um consolidate um this is the address for the online consolidation form again you're going to need an FSA ID to get it to get into that page um if you go to the FSA if you go to the student aid website and you you can find the pay you can find the pdf of the paper application and you do not need to have an FSA ID in order to get to that so next after you do submit your consolidation forms which you must do dated by October 31st of 2022 in order to take advantage of this what you need to do is wait there's a lot of waiting involved in this program especially at the beginning especially as you're getting set up so after you consolidate you need to wait between 30 and 60 days for your consolidation to be finalized for a fed loan servicing to take all of your loans from all of your other services and consolidate them into a direct loan that they are servicing you got to wait 30 or 60 days for that and you secondly have to wait for fed loan to contact you usually they'll send you a piece of mail or they'll send you an email um and in that email there will be instructions to set up an online account at myfedloan.org myfedloan.org is where you are going to go to check your progress where you're going to go to submit sub uh to upload subsequent employment certification forms and the great thing is the check the check my progress which is available on a desktop version but not on the myfedloan app um check my progress will show you exactly how many payments you've made and will show you exactly how many payments will remain to be made so the next okay so we're gonna so consolidation um we've talked about consolidation and that's and again if you have Bell or Perkins loans those loads need to be consolidated and you need to move those loans to fed loan servicing and as you're doing that you need to sign up for a qualifying a qualifying repayment plan so here we get into the second category and what you need to do if your loans are already direct but you have never yet submitted employment certification so each month that you have made a payment plastic correspond with a month that you worked in public service in order for it to qualify so fed loan servicing gets will take your employment certification and it will track your number of qualifying payments again no other servicer can qualify your payments and no other servicer can or will track your account of qualifying payments not naviants not a advantage not mohila not great lakes not nel net not nobody and none of those other servicers are reliable sources of information about any facet of public service loan forgiveness because they do not administer the program they are not the public service loan forgiveness servicer only fed loan servicing is so employment can only be certified and payments can only be qualified with a pslf application form signed by your employer so this is the old employment certification form the new pslf application form combines these two forms that were almost identical into one form so in order to certify your applicant in order to certify your employment you need to fill in this form you can't just send a letter that says hey i've worked um i've worked for the i've worked for the county for the last 15 years you got to fill in the form because fed loan responds to forms not to uh not to not to even impassioned impassioned letters so they have to have the right paperwork the fed federal government is very specific they are very very very specific yes they don't understand yeah they can think they're very specific they're very very literal very literal that's the word again very literal yes if you certify you apply for ps that you apply you apply for public service loan forgiveness by submitting the public service loan application form you certify your employment by submitting the public service loan forgiveness application form and temporary expanded pslf application form and employment certification form the easiest way to get one of these forms the easiest way to to print out one of these forms and get it for your employer to sign is to use this great thing called the pslf help tool you can get to that at student aid dot gov slash pslf there's also a paper form available at that address but the paper forms are not processed as quickly and if you're like me sometimes when you fill out a form in paper you write things wrong spell things wrong i make a lot of mistakes when when i'm filling forms in paper but using this pslf help tool will automatically generate a properly formatted information saturated form that will be accepted by the government as long as you have as long as you have your proper signature so here's one last thing even if you have a totally legit public service employer there are some employers where when you put in the employer identification number the pslf the pslf help tool may say that they are likely ineligible because the the database that they use to verify employers is not 100 complete if you get that likely ineligible message don't panic just know that they are working on it but they have a huge huge huge backlog there's no timeline for when that project is going to be completed in todo and there's no there's no timeline for when your individual employer will become eligible but that process is ongoing so once you have this form what you need to do is bring it to your usually usually bring it to human resources but if you're a teacher you can get it signed by your principal basically anyone can sign your form by signing it they are basically saying they're basically affirming that they have that they have access to your personnel file and that they can that they can verify your employment going for the period that you specify so second third piece of submitting employment certification so the easiest way once you have once you have your form signed the easiest way to submit it is to upload it on your myfedlone.org account you can upload a scanned image directly using the upload tab at myfedlone.org if you are doing this for the first time and you have a different and you have a different servicer what you'll need to do is fill out the paper form and you need to submit it by fax or by mail or by fax and then by fax again and then by mail as I did I sent the fax I sent the I sent the fax with the fax confirmation sheet and then I took a copy and I put that in the mail just to be sure you know some people aren't as compulsive as me but anyway so again you cannot certify your employment with your old servicer if your servicer is mojila or naviant or aid vantage or nail net anyone else besides fed loan the way to certify your employment is to submit the form to fed loan you can either do and you can either do that on myfedlone.org by uploading it or you can get it to fed loan by fax or by mail and you need to certify every period of employment from every employer to get credit for every qualifying payment so people often ask do I have to go back to my employer from seven years ago to get them to sign off and the answer is well you don't have to but if you want to get a qualifying if you want to get qualifying payments if you want to get qualifying credit for the payments that you made while you were employed seven years ago you do have to go back to that that HR department I found that sending sending the form with a self-addressed stamped envelope was very effective during this period of office closure sometimes people have a little bit more difficulty with that there are some pretty specific rules for how for like there's some persnickety rules about how these applications can be accepted but you'll but like me you'll find out exactly what those are when you mess up so last thing after you submit your employment certification again you have to wait when you submit your employment certification your all of your loans will automatically be taken over by fed loan so you're going to wait 30 to 60 days for your for your sorry this is consolidation you're going to wait 36 days 30 to 60 days for your employment certification to be finalized and you're going to wait once again if you don't have a fed loan appointment you're going to be you're going to wait for fed loan to contact you about setting up an online account at my fed loan dot org once you have your my fed loan dot org account you'll be able to click on the check my progress button on the desktop version and that will present exactly how many payments you've made and how many payments remain and the next state the next rinse and repeat rinse and repeat after you have submitted all your employment up to the present date what you need to do is in six months you need to submit employment for submit your employment certification for that six months they recommend that you do this on a sort of an annual basis some people are more compulsive some people like to do it every single month i don't know that that i don't know that you need to be that i don't know that you need to be that compulsive about it but maybe you do all right so then so rinse and repeat keep current with certifying your employment so you know where you stand and again it's not required to submit uh annual employment certification but that's the recommendation so um we've talked about checking out your loan types we've talked about consolidating your loans if you need to and we've talked about certifying your employment so those are really the only things that you need to do and again if you so again if you have if you have ineligible loans those need to be consolidated when you consolidate those loans now under the temporary waiver you will get credit for all of the payments that you've made on those loans in the past when you have those loans with all of those payments in the past you need to certify certify all that employment for all that period of time and then you need to continue to submit employment certification going forward if you have all direct loans with different payment counts you have some loans that have 80 payments you have some loans that have 20 payments you can also consolidate all those loans together and like magic your loans that you've only been paying on for a little while will pick up the highest payment count of any loan that you have ever had which is still in repayment nice okay so consolidate consolidate consolidate certify employment certify employment certify employment that you mentioned that because that's really slick uh because someone did ask actually i was gonna bring this up they said i have 10 separate direct loans do i need to consolidate those doesn't make sense to do so so the only reason in general the in general consolidating is good for almost everyone the only person the only borrower for whom consolidation will not be advantageous is the borrower who has every single loan has the exact same number of payments so like if you wouldn't make a difference consolidating won't make a difference for that person it's just a waste of time exactly well you know it's just it's it'll just it's just a way it's like it doesn't make it won't make any difference but anyone who has either any ineligible loans or any direct loans that have a smaller number of payments than other direct loans in their portfolio consolidate certify your employment and then it'll go back then for all of those it counts from whichever had the most payments exactly that's really awesome here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna get out of here and i'm gonna uh let's see what am i gonna do i'm going to i'm open this up a little bit and we're now at the time where uh i guess we have so i'm all done that's all that's that's everything about that's it that's it does anybody have any questions um yeah does anybody have any questions um i see you have a slide that says more resources there um more resources so this forgive me let's i'll go back to i'll go back to full screen here um um this entire presentation with these questions and these steps is an expanded version of this web page student aid dot gov announcements pslf limited waiver loan types next steps um and on that page is where those three categories of borrowers exist what i did with opening up the questions a little bit more was help people understand where they fit into those three those three categories if you do not believe that you fit into one of those categories you are mistaken um and then there's more there's a lot more great there's a lot more great information in general about public service loan forgiveness at this url here there's a lot more specific information about the limited the temporary limited waiver at this url here and then there are also a lot of you know that so in addition to calling fed loan um the phone wraps at fed loan have way way way way way too much call volume to be able to answer your phones in a uh in a in a reasonable time um so met so please so calling fed loan calling calling fed loans a bad idea calling your servicer is an even worse idea because like i said earlier your servicer if it's not fed loan whether it's navi an aid vantage mohila uh granite state nelnet uh osla any of any of these other servicers they do not have specific information about your public service loan forgiveness progress the only information that they are going to give you is going to be um stale bad non-specific unreliable so calling your own loan calling your existing loan servicer is the absolute worst thing they will give you you'll come out of there with less information than you have now calling fed loan talking to them on the phone not not a good use of your time emailing fed loan from your myfedloan.org account might work sometimes you get boilerplate responses but it's good to have a paper trail um messaging fed loan on their uh facebook page tends to get good responses from really from talented qualified uh pslf representatives um it does take it does take a little while um but they do they do give individual responses i myself received an individual response that answered my question the question that i had talked on the phone and emailed and not gotten any info not gotten any satisfactory answer when i when i when i when i direct messaged fed loan on facebook they got back to me in a couple of days and they gave me a they gave me an authoritative response which was actually what i had thought it was going to be even though the phone reps and the emails had not been able to reassure me so there are so fed loan is uh so fed loan is a resource you can contact fed loan in a bunch of different ways there are also some peer-to-peer resources um i'm going to mention public service loan forgiveness program support on facebook that's a group that i'm an admin of we have about 90 000 members um and we're moderated and administered by um you know jerky know-it-alls like me helpful helpful there's also a subreddit or at r dot at r slash pslf that has about 20 000 members and they're again moderated by you know jerky know-it-alls like myself but they also have one of their administrators is a fantastic uh bonafide professional student loan counselor and she is on the inside of this public public service loan forgiveness process she is very very very very very very very uh learned and uh and talented at dealing with this um both of these groups have experienced huge huge huge growth since uh october when the when the wait when the waiver was announced since uh since last march when the uh when the covid loan forgiven when the covid forbearance was put into place since and every time when every time when the loan every time when that forbearance has been expand has been extended we've received huge numbers of new members that so that that brings up another question so if you are if you do have direct loans and you are in if you have direct loans you are currently up till april up till the up till the end of april of this year you have been uh you basically have had a your payment has been reset to zero and your interest rate has been reset to zero so if you are paying zero because your uh because your servicer is not is not asking you to pay anything and if you're paying if you're paying a zero percent interest rate then you know that you have direct loans if you are still receiving bills from your servicer if you're still being charged interest then you know that the loans that you have are not direct loans and that there is something that you need to do that you need to consolidate those loans into direct loans so uh peer-to-peer resources that's it there's nothing left um and we actually comment um I have a couple of questions that did come in anybody does have any questions go ahead and type them into the questions section of your go-to-web on our interface um but I'm just jumped on the one um Laura who's actually a librarian here in Nebraska who's been a presenter on our show before said the the PSLF Facebook group is so helpful thank you we're doing this presentation too they get more of this information out to everybody so okay so yes uh I'm I always like to hear good feedback about the about the group that we run it's yeah it's wonderful um I'm gonna turn my screen sharing off and if I is there a way that I can maximize this uh this window for myself um well I can uh to do the questions or um um yeah sure if any so if anybody does have any other questions um and I'll show too also this is um the group the Facebook group that they have here that you are welcome to join um I've I joined it um lots of good comments and information it's on lots of people as some of the questions coming in here struggling with it but it's also kind of um I found looking at what's in there and seeing the posts come up um it's it's encouraging because so many people you said not for your many people have received have been able to go through this but there are people posting I got it here's the screen shot of my zero oh yeah that I owe and so it's really encouraging and you're like oh they did it I can do it it'll happen it's it's not you know and some of the some of the some of the forgiveness numbers are colossal people who went to dentistry school people who went to med school people went to law school are reporting that 300 400 thousand dollars has been written off their ballot huge huge huge numbers but even but there's a but there are there are a tremendous number of people who also are receiving forgiveness for um 50 thousand dollars worth of debt 45 thousand dollars of which is interest oh it's ridiculous yeah like the the that's a whole another discussion don't get me started don't get me started on the federal on the department of education uh loan portfolio it looks like we do have a couple other questions um do you want me to read these or you got it or are these questions by voice or are these questions by text uh in the question section um okay that I can um do you see them there if you click on questions or if I click on when I click on I have an attendees and I have a chat okay yes I only see it on my side that's okay I will read them off to you not a problem um the first one we have here I do the shorter one um it shows that I have assuming in the system there three ps lf eligible payments but I've made at least 12 payments on time to Nelnet in 2021 how can I address this okay so in general uh in in general when you switch to a new servicer in general they will pick up the payments the qualifying payments that you have made to your previous servicer in general um sometimes but there are there are some situations in which that's not going to be possible so if you are still with it sounds like you have it sounds like you've already moved to fed loan you see that you have three qualifying payments from fed loan what what the department of education is doing right now as they apply the waiver to all borrower's accounts is they're going back through their payment records and they will definitely pick up those 12 payments and by the spring time hope probably before the end of April when payments resume you will see those additional payments in your account so they're coming just wait and hope then yeah real soon real soon as they say in government work she says okay um and uh someone else here who says it looks like they've gone through all the steps and they're still waiting um she says I've gone I've done all the steps applied for um fell for consolidation um on 10 6 so October approved on November 5th submitted my ps lf on November 5th and have heard nothing from fed loans since then um been with a qualified employer for 25 years still waiting okay is that yeah so that uh it's it's not it's not atypical let me put it that way um sometimes uh sometimes if you some people uh some people were encouraged to submit employment certification uh but before they submitted before they consolidated their loans uh and those people sometimes seem to have uh been held up more than other people um in general it's a good idea to consolidate all your loans together and then submit um your employment certification especially if you have one set of loans that have 130 140 180 a huge number of payments and you have another set of loans that have fewer payments because what happens sometimes is uh your payments will be you know your your large number your your payments that your your loans that you've been paying on for a long time will actually get forgiven before you can consolidate your newer loans in with them so um yeah so you want to consolidate first wait for the consolidation to be final and then submit your employment certification and again it can take it can take a long time yeah so that's not yeah um all right we have another question you're popped in uh excuse me did Matt say the past two COVID years are not in the system yet um counting towards the payments is that correct so um I didn't yeah I didn't really have a I didn't really have a slide or description about the COVID forbearance but in March of 2020 they the Department of Education announced a like uh moratorium on payments in the future they announced that what they call this forbearance um that there are zero zero dollars is due every single month zero interest is charged and that month where you pay zero and where you have zero interest it counts as a qualifying payment so while it is called forbearance which is scary because they want to be qualifying they want the payments to qualify yeah exactly so so for all intents and purposes during this COVID forbearance you are in repayment but your payment has been changed to zero dollars and your interest rate has been lowered to zero so if you have made payments on your direct loans during the period of March 13th 2020 through the present you can get those payments refunded to you directly in full from your servicer so that's a good thing to know yeah you shouldn't that's a very good thing to know that some people some people are like wait a minute you mean I can get a refund and we say yes because I'm thinking well I you know having the putting a pause on those you know loan payments is fine is nice but I don't need to and I'd rather keep working on paying it off well that's actually that's actually so the the whole sort of philosophy of debt is usually about making sure that you have uh making sure you have the lowest possible interest rate making sure that you are making extra payments making that you minimize the amount of interest that gets charged right with public service loan forgiveness that's not the theory that's not how it works best what public service the way public service loan forgiveness works best is when you have a when you have a payment plan a payment amount which is calculated based on your income an income driven repayment number if you make if you make that payment you satisfy the responsibility for having made a payment that month um and once you do that uh so if you do that you probably will have interest ballooning on your account but public service loan forgiveness repay forgives principal and interest at the end of 120 payments so people ask all people always ask these questions they're like i'm i'm i'm i'm reluctant to consolidate because i have a 1.75 interest rate on my loans now and i don't want to make i don't want it to go up yeah constantly saying you know while doing your debt snowball or your debt avalanche or your debt scrum or however you want to try and like sock away extra payments to chip down on your principal that doesn't make any sense if you're involved in public service loan forgiveness because every dollar that you spend every extra dollar that you spend on your on reducing your loans is just a dollar that will not be forgiven later on so if you're committed to remaining in public service for the next for up until the end of 120 payments that you that that are required it does not make any sense to pay any more than you are required to right so that's actually a really good response totally different from your other types of debt that you have yeah you can like if you if you want to and especially like if you so like if you have extra money um you know uh pay down your mortgage debt pay down your car loan debt pay down your credit card loan debt yeah buy something that makes you feel good because putting it down on your student loan debt is not going to help you at all do something else with your money yeah and so someone's just clarifying I think this was it so do the payments of zero dollars during COVID forbearance count as qualifying payments yes they do exactly the question we they do yes yep so it's kind of sneaky but it's what they did it sound it feels like it's not it's not sneaky it's the rules I know right but it's it feels like is that really true yes that's what they did yeah I was telling the story I was telling the story the other day about how like the the sneakiest I ever felt was when I took a home equity loan of credit out on my house that I was living in and I used it to put a down payment on another house I had it was a huge amount of money and I was like oh no they're gonna they're gonna it's it's not gonna be they're gonna they're gonna take it away I know they're gonna take it away but it was just it was just the rules do this that's how it works all right these are the rules um yes after you make 120 qualifying payments your principal and interest will be forgiven and unless you live in Mississippi um you won't pay you'll never pay any federal income tax on it and unless you live in the state of Mississippi you won't pay any state tax on it either okay I don't know if we have anybody from Mississippi here today but yeah even if we do yeah if someone watches a recording no that's good to know okay so Mississippi has to be different than everyone else okay god damn Mississippi god damn all right um all right we're a little after 11 o'clock uh central time so oh I can stick around if anyone has you know we yeah we don't need to wrap up anything that's what I was gonna say if anyone still has questions you want to ask of Matt um go ahead and type in the question section we'll stay as long as it takes for you go I'll get your questions answered and for anything else he wants to mention um okay so someone says so thanks you said wow so I can ask for a refund for the full payments I made during COVID and I still get credit for those two years as qualified so basically you get money yep so if you have if you have direct loans if you have if you have fell loans or Perkins loans payments on those loans have continued to be due during the period of March 13th 2020 to the present so but any payments that you have made on direct loans those payments are refundable direct ones or if you consolidated into those other ones into the direct you can you can no longer consolidate into fell loans there used to be fell consolidation loans um and like people got tricked they thought that they thought that they had to consolidate and that that was going to help them out but then they discovered that they had consolidated into more fell loans that were still ineligible so it didn't make any difference yeah it didn't make any difference but during this period of time during this waiver all payments prior to any consolidation will count so people who were treated this waiver has been generous this waiver has been geared towards people who have been treated really really badly by this program and people who um had ineligible loans and consolidated them thinking that they were going to become eligible and then found that they that those consolidation loans were not eligible those were some people who had really been treated badly um yeah I remember before October of last year when they did make this change there was all there was repeated news stories and people talking about it online and people I knew talking about it saying over you know this program has been in place for a long time this public loan forgiveness and only yeah and 98 percent of the people who apply are being denied it's completely broken it's not working and is anybody going to do anything about this you know what's the point and people are so discouraged and saying what's the point this whole program is is is a disaster and I hope and someone did do something about it yes they did finally yeah so and hopefully people hear about that the people who you know who were so discouraged in the past didn't just give up and so I hope you're here if that was your case or someone will see this or see all the all the all the different other presentations and things that you've done yeah I don't want to get I don't want to get political because the Department of Education's loan portfolio has been managed poorly during Republican and Democratic administrations going back oh yeah going back a long time but during the previous administration the department the Secretary of Education was particularly unwilling to she actually did the previous administration did actually make a bunch of process improvements to the to the public service loan forgiveness so but but she was very but the Betsy was very unsympathetic towards any people who were looking for loan forgiveness of any time of any kind but yes so someone did someone did do something to make changes to the there there are there's legislation that defines the way the public service loan forgiveness can work so there and then there's there are there are rules that the Department of Education interprets so the changes that have been made have been largely rule changes and there's an ongoing process of negotiated rule changing new rulemaking which has been very enthusiastic about which which is looking very positive but those changes probably will not go into will not go into effect until September of 2023 there are various different things that may be included in those new rules but we don't really know yeah um always someone has two questions this is from Laura um she said I just consolidated my loans because I had Perkins loans the rest of my loans are direct the reps said I can either consolidate the Perkin loan with one of those direct loans or consolidate all of them together she said from a credit standpoint it might help if I consolidated all of them so only had one loan listed versus 21 on my credit so I consolidated all of them um but I know with the direct loans it won't make a difference for the count but is it okay that I did that yes absolutely cool um and then she says also I got a second question I got a letter from Fed loan after I consolidated wanting to confirm that I intentionally included direct loans is that normal is that okay that is so Fed loans operates independently of the Department of Education and Fed loan has not Fed loan maintains that they have not been given enough specific direction about how loan forgiveness is going about how about how these changes are affecting their workflow so many people when they consolidate they get a scary letter from Fed loan that says that's that raises their alarm and indicates to them that their payment count will go down to zero and that they will have to restart building 120 payments but that is temporary so when so like right now right now because it's not their rules or their operating procedure Fed loan cannot add qualifying payments to consolidated loans but in the spring real soon as they as I've been saying a lot real soon the Department of Education will review every single borrower's account and every single payment that has ever been made and they will go bad qualifying payments so if you consolidate now it's like an automated letter from Fed loan just because of what you did that without exactly it's an automated letter from Fed loan and it's the same automated letter well they might have they might have made a little bit of changes to it but it's pretty much the same automated letter that you would have gotten from them if you had consolidated five years before any of these changes went in before the waiver came in great so it's all a waiting game at the moment more good good stuff is coming in the next few months hopefully um hopefully spring yeah coming uh it depends on when you think of spring coming to I know we had that it was the meteorological first day of spring and then the spring begins and here in Nebraska today the high is going to be 77 I don't know what's going on in the world but thank you fossil fuels yes thanks climate change all right um oh got another question that just came in awesome um the income based payment plans consider my spouse's income and as a result the monthly payment is quite high aside from filing separately or do you have any suggestions in reading some of the income repayment plans some of them say they will forgive a balance after 20 years of payment is that different from the ps lf 120 payments okay so we've got two questions here right um so let me start with the second question um there are other loan forgiveness programs out there um people often ask in our group about borrower defense people often which is a different a different program for student loan discharge people often ask about um teacher loan forgiveness which is a different program from public service loan forgiveness people often ask about and people often ask about this program that you're talking about which the government refers to as idr forgiveness um so any income driven repayment plan well each income driven repayment plan has a provision in it that if you pay your same income based repayment number your same income driven your same income contingent repayment plan number your same pay as you earn number your same revised pay as you earn number for a period of time whether that's 15 years or 20 years or 25 years they have this clause in the income driven repayments that allows for forgiveness of the complete for forgiveness of the whole balance of that loan at the end of that period of time now that's an unproven um system and the balances that you the balances that are forgiven under that program um have historically been taxable although there was a there was a loophole carved out that for the next five years they will not be taxable but if you think that if you thought that the level of um acceptance for public service loan forgiveness was accept was unacceptable two years ago the acceptance rate for income driven repayment um is even lower it's um so uh so that is an option but it's under almost all circumstances it it's not a good option and in almost all circumstances coming looking for public service loan forgiveness is a better is a better option so back to the first question um income driven repayment plans do uh so one of the income driven so income driven income driven repayment plans sometimes take in spousal income income driven repayment plans are not always the lowest payment plan that is available oftentimes depending on their financial situation um people find that couples find that if they file jointly the payment their student loan payment is really high yeah and strategy that they use is to file is to do married filing separately and reduce the income of the borrowing spouse with things like taking childcare deductions with things like taking um IRA deductions with things like taking um all pre-tax all pre-tax deductions so basically they increase the uh the the the reported AGI of one partner and decrease the reported AGI of the other um it's not it's not there's nothing there's nothing illegal about that it's but what but what happens is that as a result of having the lower AGI the the borrower spouse has a much lower payment and the idea is that the the lowering payment um over balances the tax consequences of filing married filing separately so right married filing married so the strategy of married filing separately um does work for lots and lots and lots of people um I think that was the answer I think that's the answer to the question do you want to ask about filing separately to make it so that's the payments are not as high yep yeah if you're going to do that you really want to make sure that you run your taxes both ways whether you have an accountant do it or whether you do it on your own whether you use a turbo tax or uh whatever whether you use a whether use a software product or whether you just do it by hand right you'll you'll learn for yourself um no one can no one can advise you about what your financial situation is what's going to be best for you but in general marriage filing separately reducing the income of the spouse who's paying back loans tends to be a successful strategy for a lot of people yeah but test it out first and you do the math to see if it does or mileage may vary as they say yeah um I have another question that came in um is it a good idea to ask for an internal forbearance with fed loans to avoid paying starting in May 2022 especially since I'm way over 120 payments and waiting for forgiveness yes it is so when you fill in your employment certification form slash temporary expanded public service loan forgiveness application slash public service loan forgiveness application your single form there is a checkbox on it that says it basically there are two checkboxes one is I just want to know how many payments I have made and I want to continue on in repayment and the other box is I believe I have made 120 payments and when you click on that box you will enter forbearance and you will not have to pay after April 1st 2022 because you'll be in forbearance and what you're basically saying is I'm just waiting for fed loan and the department of education to recognize that I have made 147 payments um and then I don't kind of frustrating I can see that this is all coming up at the same time too in the spring department education will go will be going back and find all those little payments but also in spring May the payments are going to start up again so hopefully the department education yeah I think I think the hope is that the extra payments will be added before the before payments restart so the answer to your question is if you believe you have made more than 120 payments then yes absolutely do request forbearance because while yeah while while payments over 120 on direct loans are refundable it's one less thing to have to do later you know like why pay you know why pay $1,200 now to get it back in five months right when you know that 120 payment thing that you did is gonna take care of it anyways you just gotta wait for the wait for the different um you know federal departments to catch up with each other kind of and she says thank you both big all caps absolutely all right that was the last question we had um does anybody have anything desperate that you want to ask right now of matt before we wrap things up um go ahead and type it into the question section um and I should have mentioned earlier well I did mention the beginning we are recording so if you did have to take off or didn't get you know stay here I know I did see some people did leave as it hit some people it's a lot an hour to watch and that's fine um everything's being recorded so any questions we have here will be in the archive recording um so I'll keep on the questions and show you over here um where our recordings come appear is our main encompass live website if you google and or use your search engine of choice to look up encompass live we're the only thing called that on the internet no one else is allowed to use that name because you will come up with just us there's no encompass insurance not that I know we gotta do encompass live okay the whole thing that's I don't know about anything else um every insurance company there could be yeah um we have comments coming saying thank you so much for all the great info um but these are upcoming shows but right underneath them is the link to our archives most recent one will come as at the top of the page here so this is last week show today's will be here um by the end of the day tomorrow I should have all the recording ready and posted up here everyone who attended today and registered for today's show get an email from me letting you know that it's ready for you to watch um while we're here I'll also show you there's a search feature for our archives you want to look for any other topics you might be interested in you can search our full show archives or just most recent 12 months if you want to jump something just current um and that is because back over here um this is our full show archives I'm not going to scroll all the way down to the bottom because you can see this is a huge page um this is going back to when encompass live premiered which was in january 2009 so we're in our 13th year of the show and all of our shows are here um this is something we do we're librarians we work we archive things we keep things for historical purposes and as long as we have a place to keep them all um they will be here so just pay attention to the original broadcast date when you do watch any of the older shows uh lots of the information will still be good and stand the test of time but many things some things will become outdated information may be wrong um links may be broken resources and services may have changed drastically or no longer exist anymore but like I said we will always keep them up here for historical purposes but just pay attention to that date if you do watch any of our shows so I didn't see any other questions come in now while I was chat talking that's that's good I think we've answered everyone's questions for now um everyone you know thank you everyone for being here today you can always go I definitely highly recommend go and join the group on um facebook or the reddit to get in from you know help for mats on there too and he posted here I think it was uh she was posting things here but there wasn't he did post about uh attending today's ribbon are somewhere down in there um that the recording we pushed out to this group as well so um thank you everybody for joining us thank you so much uh Matt for coming on tell us about all of this I know as I said people have been struggling and it's been painful and it's awesome that we finally have a way to make this work and it's working yep it does it does continue to get I don't think that there has ever been a change that they have made to the public service loan forgiveness program that which has not made it better and easier um and this particular set of changes not only makes it better and easier but it makes it simpler um which is really on the federal definitely really it really is you know there are three there are three categories and again if you do not believe that you fit into one of those three categories just read those three categories again think about it probably do yeah and take a breath take a breath in the breath out and okay ask yourself what it is that you need to do next and again if we're if you and and if and there is help out there yes there is help there is Matt there's other people um other people have gone through this um have give good advice as well on there yeah awesome so thank you so much um for Encompass Live we also do have a Facebook page for our show um we've posted reminders there's a reminder to log into today's show um reminders about other events going on we had our uh when our recordings are available so if you do like to use Facebook um give us a like over there we also post on to Twitter and Instagram using our hashtag Encompass Live so you can look there for that um so that'll wrap it up for today um I hope um these are upcoming shows um next week we are talking about the importance of chit chat to your small library um Shelly O'Brien is from Neckles which is a Northeast Kansas library system just south of us and she's going to come and talk about these informal conversations and how you can help them out um in this even into the smallest library so please register for that show and any of our other upcoming topics we have coming up on Encompass Live thank you everybody for being here thank you Matt good to see you and everybody good luck with your loans go and get them all forgiven thanks a lot bye bye