Financialaidtoolkit.ed.gov



PSC-ED-FSA-TISD

Moderator: Christal Simms

December 1, 2016

3:37 pm CT

Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants will be on a listen-only mode throughout the duration of today’s conference. Please (unintelligible) that this call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time.

And now I would like to turn the call over to Ms. Jessica Barrett Simpson. You may now begin.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: Hello. Welcome to our webinar on the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. My name is Jessica Barrett Simpson. I work in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid and our Customer Experience Office.

My work focuses on student loans, the borrower experience and it includes outreach efforts such as this to make sure that our borrowers are aware of the repayment options in the programs such as the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

I’m joined by another presenter this evening, who I will turn over to, to introduce herself as well.

Woman 1: Hello everyone. My name is (unintelligible). I also work with Federal Student Aid, but I work in the Direct Loan Servicing unit. In my position, I work with pretty much servicers and specifically the PSLF services which is FedLoan Servicing to help them implement requirements to improve their operations and also communications relative to PSLF. I’ve been with the department for about two years. But previously I worked at a four-year institution for a little over 10 years as a financial aid administrator.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: Before we get started on the presentation I wanted to point out that the PowerPoint slides for this webinar are in the top left of your screen and it can be downloaded. There is also a chat box for you to ask your questions. You can ask questions either during the presentation or you can hold them to the end.

We do have some staff online who are here to answer some of the questions during the webinar, but if we don’t get to them, we will have time for questions-and-answers at the end.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was created by the College Cost & Reduction Access Act in 2007. The purpose of the program is to ensure that students who take out student loans to get an education are not deterred from public service because of their debt.

The program provides forgiveness of the total balance of your student loans after working in a public service for 10 years. There are some very specific definitions, however, who is eligible for the program. The PSLF program forgives the remaining balance on your direct loans after you’ve made a 120 qualifying monthly payments under Qualifying Repayment Plan by working for a full - working full-time for a qualifying employer.

So I just said the word qualifying three times. We’re going to spend a little bit time unpacking that and focusing in the beginning of this webinar on eligibility. So we’ll start out talking about how you qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness and then we’re going to do some sample calculations to show you how to calculate how much you might pay under different repayment plans and how to calculate how much you might potentially have forgiven on your loans under the program.

Then we’ll briefly touch on other types of student loan forgiveness such as Teacher Loan Forgiveness and talk about how that might work with the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. And then we’ll do a summary wrap-up and we’ll answer some of your questions.

So we’ll start first with eligibility. To be eligible, you need to make 120 qualifying payments on direct loans on the Qualifying Repayment Plan and by working full-time for a qualifying employer. We’re going to delve into the aspect of eligibility and we’re going to start with direct loans.

So, only direct loans are eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. If you borrowed federal student loans after 2011, you would have Direct Loans. This includes Direct Subsidized, Unsubsidized, PLUS Loans or Consolidation Loans. If you borrowed prior to 2011, you may have what we call Federal Loans and both Federal and Perkins Loans can be consolidated into the Direct Loan program in order to be eligible.

So you might be wondering what kind of loans do I have, I’m not really sure. You can either check with your loan servicer or you can logon to .

On the right hand of the slide you can see a screenshot of what displays on the and you can see that this particular borrower has two Direct Loans and four Fed loans.

So if you were - (unintelligible) and you wanted to qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, you might consider consolidating your loans into the direct loan program. By doing that it would make all of your loans direct and all of them will be eligible for PSLF.

There are some pros and cons to consolidation and we’re not going to get into detail in - about what those are here. But you can learn more on our websites or by calling the Loan Consolidation Information Center. One thing that we want to point out is that it is free to consolidate your loans. You do not have to pay a fee. And to do a loan consolidation, you can do that on the website.

So next we’re going to talk about Qualifying Repayment Plans. There were five repayment plans that qualify; four of these are what we call Income Driven Repayment plans. And that means that your monthly payment will be tied to your income.

You could make payments on the 10-year Standard Repayment plan or on any plan that is equal or greater to that amount. Those payments would also qualify towards Public Service Loan Forgiveness. But you need to be on an income-driven payment plan if you want to have some amount to be forgiven at the end of the 10-years. If you repaid your plans on a 10-year standard repayment plan they will be paid off in 10-years and there will be no balance left to forgive.

So when you first go into repayment, you’re automatically put on a 10-year Standard Repayment plan. That means that the amount that you pay that first month that you go into repayment, that’s the same amount that you’re paying 10-years later for your final payment.

And for some people that doesn’t work well, because if you just thought of school and you maybe have an internship or a low paying job when you first get out of school, you don’t have as much income to put towards your student loans as you do 10-years later when hopefully you have a better paying job and you’re in a more financially stable position.

So the purpose of some of these income-driven repayment programs is to make your monthly payment more affordable and to tie it to the percentage of your income. So if you don’t make a decision when you first (unintelligible) payment, you’re automatically put on a 10-year standard.

There are some plans that you can switch to without filling out an application. You can just call up your loan servicer, you can request to have graduated repayments, so your balance - your monthly payment starts out being low and then it gets higher as time goes on or extended repayments which would lower your payment, but you pay more interest overtime. But for income-driven repayment plan, you do have to fill out an application. And as with consolidation you would fill out the application on .

If you’re consolidating your plans and applying for income-driven repayment, you would want to consolidate your loans first. Once you’re in an income-driven repayment plan, you would need to recertify your income and family size every year. You will submit the same application each year to see. If your income goes up then your payment would go up, if your income goes down then your payment would also go down.

The third aspect of qualification for Public Service Loan Forgiveness in addition to the types of loans and the type of repayment plans is the type of employer. You don’t qualify for this program based on your jobs; it’s based on your employer. So your employer must be either a government organization, a 501(c)(3) or another not-for-profit organization that provides specific qualifying services.

So here are some examples of other not-for-profit employers that will qualify. It can’t be a labor organization or a partisan political organization, has to be the one providing public services. (Tunika) is going to talk in a few minutes about how to be sure that your employer does qualify by submitting their Employment Certification Form.

But that’s often the question that we get when people look at some of these lists, they’re not really sure what categories that their employer falls into. And the way that you can figure that out for sure and then get confirmation about that is the (unintelligible) and Employment Certification Form.

About 61% of our borrowers who have submitted one of those forms work for a government agency, either federal, state or local, and another 38% work for the 501(c)(3) not-for-profit.

Your employer - employment must also be full-time. If you’re only working for one employer, full-time is defined as either your employer’s definition or 30 hours per week whatever is greater. If you’re working part-time for more than one qualifying employer, full-time means a combined total of at least 30 hours per week.

If you work at a nonprofit organization that has part of the time spent on religious instruction, worship services or pathologizing, the hours spent on those activities don’t count towards those 30 hours.

So now that we’ve gone through the three required qualifications; the type of loans, the type of repayment plan and the type of employer. If you meet those three qualifications, you then need to make qualifying payments. And this is what we mean by qualifying payments. To receive forgiveness on your loans, you have to make 120 separate monthly payments.

After October 1st, 2007 when the program became available, these payments do not need to be consecutive. If you take some time in between if your loans are in different (unintelligible), they don’t - the payments don’t have to be one after another.

They must be made for the full amount that is due for the month and made within 15 days of the due date, so late payments do not count as qualifying payments.

If you make partial payments, they only count as one payment. If you make a payment when it’s not required that doesn’t count. The separate payment requirement does not apply on some instances for borrowers in the AmeriCorp, the PeaceCorp or the Department of Defense may apply a lump sum to their student loans.

So now I’m going to turn the presentation over to (Tunika) who will explain to you how to calculate your potential loan forgiveness and then how to navigate the process.

Woman 1: Okay. So first I’m going to talk about if you’re interested in just seeing what sort of payments you would have under income-driven repayments or under the other traditional plans like the 10-year standards.

The best thing that you can do is go to the repayment estimator. This is basically an online calculator that is available with , it’s also available on and it can tell you how much you’re going to pay under those different repayment plans. And also more importantly it’s going to give you an estimate on how much forgiveness you will be eligible to receive.

New to the repayment estimator are actual calculations for a Public Service Loan Forgiveness. When you go into the estimator, it’s fairly easy. You can - you just answer questions regarding your eligible loan. You put in information if you want estimates on income-driven repayments regarding your tax value status, your income and your residence. And if you hit Public Service Loan Forgiveness, the below button that you see that circled on there, it’s going to give you an estimate.

We’re going to go to the next slide. So next we have our sample borrower (unintelligible) into a tally. And when you go into the repayment estimator, you can either login using your SSA ID or you can go in as a guest. So this particular borrower has all their information, they’re going to login using SSA ID and you see that they have their total loan balance of just $65,500, $23,000 of that is Subsidized Direct Loans and $42,500 is Unsubsidized Direct Loans.

They know their interest rate for their loans and so I keep this simple. We have the interest rate at 4.5%. They’re single, so their family size is only one and their income is 40,000.

Now the repayment estimator does make some assumptions when you sign into it and one of those assumptions is that your income will be increasing at 5% each year and then the borrower would also put in their residence and so this borrower is Washington D.C.

So when you enter this information into the repayment estimator, it’s going to pull out information about all of the repayment plans and that includes your traditional plans like your standard or graduated plan. But also if you put in information about your income in a balance status and family size, then it’s going to give you estimates (unintelligible) income-driven repayment plans such as REPAYE, IBR, ICR and PAYE.

So the interesting thing is if you look at the calculations as for instance on the standard repayment plan that as Jessica stated we know qualifies for Public Service Loan Forgiveness instead of the 10-year plan you wouldn’t receive any sort of forgiveness, so that’s why that dollar amount is zero.

But when you look down and look at the other income-driven repayment plan such as REPAYE or PAYE, you see that under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness column there was a significant amount of this borrower’s loan that’s going to be forgiven after that borrower makes the required 120 qualifying payments.

So next, after going into the repayment estimator, you probably want to know what the PSLF process is and how you would know if you’re eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. So as stated before, to know if you’re on track you need to know what your qualifying loans are and if you have qualifying loans, if you’re on a qualifying repayment plan such as income-driven repayments and if you’re working at a qualifying employer.

So to do these things and to figure out if they’re (unintelligible) for that, the best thing that you can do is submit an Employment Certification Form to ensure that you’re on track to receive loan forgiveness and to confirm that your employment and the payments that you’ve been making on your direct loans qualify.

So this is a shot of half of the first page of the Employment Certification Form. And it’s actually a fairly simple form as well. It’s about two pages. The first page has had biographical information that you’re going to be entering and then it also had some authorizations, understandings and certifications just so you understand as that (unintelligible) PSLF program is and that you’re required to make a 120 qualifying payments in order to receive forgiveness.

The second page of the form involves your employer completing some information about your employment or you just submit to the public service loan servicer FedLoan Servicing.

So when your employer completes the form, they’re going to be filling out information regarding where you work, what’s your employment status is, whether you’re working full-time or if you’re working part-time. And whether you – one of those qualifying categories, whether you work at a government organization, whether you’re working at a nonprofit organization that falls into those qualifying categories or whether you work at a 501(c)(3).

Then your certifying official would need to sign the form, they (unintelligible) their contact information on it and then that form needs to be faxed or mailed to FedLoan Servicing for them to make an evaluation in terms of your eligibility.

So when the PSLF service, they receive let’s say close to about 21,000 of these forms a month, they will do some common mistakes. So one of the common mistakes is that authorizing officials or the person that you have completing this form for you, sometimes they forget to check a still employed box just to show that you’re continuing work at this organization or some of the identifying information such as the employer TIN number. So just make sure when that’s being completed, when you provide that your employer that all the required items are completed.

So next is a really colorful slide is the PSLF Employment Certification Process. So the first thing that you will do is actually get your employer to complete their section of the form. You’re going to submit this form to FedLoan Servicing. And FedLoan Servicing, they’re going to do a couple of things first. First, they’re going to evaluate the loans for completeness and then they’re going to check to make sure that you have qualifying direct loan.

If, for instance, you turn in the form and you only have PEL loan, what they will do is they will reach out to you, send you a letter letting you know that for instance they checked your loans, you only have PEL and they will give you options in terms of consolidating your loan into a Direct Consolidation Loan.

Suppose if you turn in the form and they determine that your employment qualifies, then the first thing that they’re going to do is transfer your loans to FedLoan Servicing if you’re not – if that’s not currently your servicer. Generally they will process from receiving the form to determining if you have direct loans to evaluating whether that your employment qualifies, it takes about seven business days. So it’s not very long.

They will send you notification to let you know that they’ve done an initial evaluation and your employment qualifies and then they will explain to you the process (unintelligible) currently with FedLoan Servicing.

Then after they transfer your loans over and that process could take anywhere from let’s say three to four weeks. Then they’ll actually go through all of your borrower history for everything that coincides with the qualifying service that you have in your Employment Certification Form to count all of your qualifying payment during that period.

And that process, that can take some time depending on how long you’ve been with your employer. If it’s not very long, it can take anywhere from two weeks to about let’s say about a month for them to do those counts. It just depends where you are in the process and how long you waited until you turned in your Employment Certification Form.

Then after that point they’ll send you a letter and it will tell you that you’re approved, it will give you your (unintelligible) qualify and it will (unintelligible) how to check this information on online.

Then the process starts all over again. And we always tell borrowers that you want to submit an Employment Certification Form annually if you can or whenever your employment changes, just to make sure that you’re on track to receive forgiveness after making that 120 qualifying payments. It is not required that you do the Employment Certification Form annually, but it is strongly recommended.

So after you do your - you’ve been doing your Employment Certification Forms and you know you’ve made that 120 qualifying payments, the most important question is when is your loan actually going to be forgiven. And the PSLF application is currently under development and it’s going to be available prior to October 2nd, 2017 which is the earliest state that any borrower will be able to receive Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

Unlike IBR forgiveness, Public Service Loan Forgiveness in order to receive it, you would have to do a PSLF application. And the PSLF application that is being developed would have an employment certification form combined with it so you would (unintelligible) employment and do that application and then Fed loans with the process eligible law where they have their loans written off.

One of the important things that you should remember about receiving PSLF is that you need to be working at a qualified public service organization at the time that you submit the PSLF application and you need to remain working there until your loans are actually forgiven.

And one of the biggest benefits at PSLF is that any of the loans that are written off, they’re not considered income by the Internal Revenue Service. Therefore you’re not going to have to pay any federal tax from the amount of your direct loans that are forgiven after you make that a 120 qualifying payment.

So if you remember back to the sample borrowing we had, that borrower had about close to $60,000, a little over $60,000 worth of loans that will be written off and that’s not something that they would have to consider as income for the IRS. So it’s a really huge benefit if you’re able to qualify for PSLF.

So next I want to talk about other types of student loan forgiveness. And probably the - another big program is Teacher Loan Forgiveness and this is for anybody that’s considering going into teaching or someone that actually is currently a teacher. This is for full-time highly qualified teachers who are going to teach for five years and that’s going to be complete in consecutive academic years. And it’s for certain elements in secondary school or educational service agencies that is serving low income families.

The amount of money you receive for Teacher Loan Forgiveness varies depending on the subject thought. But the one benefit of Teacher Loan Forgiveness is it does apply to direct loan and FED loan. And I know as we’ve stated before, PSLF is only for direct loans.

So great thing about Teacher Loan Forgiveness is it’s something that you’re able to qualify for is that it can be used as PSLF. It’s just that payments that you make during the service resulting in Teacher Loan Forgiveness wouldn’t count towards the 120 payments required for PSLF. And there is also an application for Teacher Loan Forgiveness that needs to be submitted if you want to receive that $5,000 to $17,500 off of your loan.

So the next slide just shows you different types of student loan forgiveness. As we’ve talked about before, Teacher Loan Forgiveness which is where you have to do five years of service to receive up to $17,500 off of your loan.

Then the next we’ve been discussing during this webinar which is Public Service Loan Forgiveness where you have to make 120 qualifying payments and qualifying employment with your qualifying loans. And then the other two are income-driven repayment plans and we have that listed twice for 20 years or 25 years. And that difference in term has to do with what type of income-driven plan that you go into. So if you’re doing repay and you only have undergraduate loans it will be 20 years, if you had graduate you need 25.

The other big difference with income-driven repayment plans versus PSLF and Teacher Loan Forgiveness is that the loans that are forgiven for IBR are still taxable by the IRS. So even though it’s considered in this program or it’s something that you get forgiveness for, that loan that still would have to - accounted as income for the IRS firmly.

And this is the last slide for Teacher Loan Forgiveness and PSLF and this is just showing that these two loan forgiveness programs can work together. If you’re a teacher it just - your full forgiveness wouldn’t occur until 15 years, because you’d have to do your first five for teacher loan forgiveness and the next 10 for PSLF.

And generally if you have high loan balances, this is something that would really benefit potential teachers who’re going to be staying in their field or continuing to do work in a qualifying nonprofit to receive that sort of forgiveness after the 10-year term.

So our next slide is just our cautionary warning (unintelligible) student loan debt release companies or third party debt release companies. And just to remember that if you’re ever asked to pay for any service whether it’s applying for income-driven repayment or doing any sort of recertification or applying for loan consolidation or any of the forgiveness programs whether it’s Teacher Loan Forgiveness or a Public Service Loan Forgiveness, these are all free and you should not have to pay for them.

So always be aware of any companies that are charging a monthly fee to do these services or that are going to charge filing fees to do these services. If you ever want to report a suspicious activity regarding those companies or you’ve been contacted or even if you had to pay something to do one of those free applications, you can report that suspicious activity to feedback.

So we’re going to wrap - reiterate some of the things that we discussed during this webinar. So the most important thing is to make sure that if you’re interested in PSLF is that you want to check your loan types and repayment plans to see if they’re eligible for PSLF. You can do that through or you can go to NSLDS.

If you have federal loans and again these are generally if you received loans prior to 2011, you want to consider consolidating them into Direct Loan Programs to make them eligible for PSLF. And you can check up the pros and cons of consolidating your federal loans on .

If you’re not on an income-driven repayment plan, you definitely want to consider switching to one to qualify for PSLF. And as we saw previously, to be able to make payments based on your income and then have that loan debt forgiven at 10-years is a huge benefit.

After you have done a repayment estimator and you see how much you could be forgiven after 120 month of qualifying payments, you want to go ahead and submit an Employment Certification Form to confirm that your employer qualifies. And the Employer Certification Form is also available on or you can go to to receive that form.

FedLoan Servicing which is a PSLF servicer, they would tell you how many qualifying payments you have made and when you can expect loan forgiveness. And they will do that after receiving the Employment Certification Form and validating all the information that you put on that form is correct and that you’re eligible.

And then again although it’s not required, you want to try and submit your Employment Certification Form annually or when you’re - whenever your employment changes. And then since you’re going to be doing an income-driven repayment plan to really receive the benefit of the PSLF, you are going to make sure that you recertify your income and family size for that income-driven repayment program.

In terms of IBR, recertifying is required so that’s something you would have to do to make sure that you stay in the IBR program where submitting the Employment Certification Form is you don’t have - you’re not required to do that.

So the next slide are resources and I know we said (and also mentioned) those is really the best place to get informational - information about the Public Service Loan Forgiveness or income-driven repayments.

You can do the repayment estimator through their (unintelligible) information on consolidation; I mean also learn information on Teacher Loan Forgiveness. You decide that you want to apply, well you can pull that form off of and if you want to apply for income-driven repayments, you can do that with .

We also included a link for and that is the PSLF servicer. And you can also go to their page. They have a lot of information on Public Service Loan Forgiveness and they also have their phone number, you can call them even if you just have general questions about PSLF or if you turn in your Employment Certification Form and want to find out how well it’s going to take them to approve that.

So finally, Jessica, I just want to thank you again for listening to this webinar on PSLF and I want to open this up for any question or answers.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: And if you have any questions, please type it into the chat box. We’ve had a number of questions so far and go ahead and ask yours. I will read a few of them in case there are others that might benefit from answers of some of these questions as well.

So someone asked us, is it possible to qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program if your loans are in default? And the answer is no, defaulted loans are not eligible. However, if you are able to get your loans out of defaults, they can become eligible.

And we also have a question about the type of employers that would qualify. So there is a question about whether or not a tribal government agency will be a qualifying employer and the answer to that is yes.

Let’s see. We also had a question about the 10-years with the qualifying employer and the question was does that 10-years need to be with one employer or could it be 10 years with different employers? And the answer is that it can be different employers.

You can go from a government agency to a not-for-profit, two different not-for-profits, but in the end it just needs to be - your payment need to be made while you’re working for a qualifying employer. So it doesn’t have to be one, they just all need to be qualifying.

Is there any other questions? Oh, let’s see. Do you foresee any changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program such as caps on the forgiveness amount? (Tunika), do you want to answer that question?

Woman 1: Sure. I know there has been some discussion about potentially capping the amount. We haven’t heard anything yet. So it’s just something I think we’re all following in terms of capping it as of right now. And I know forgiveness is, the earliest - any borrower can get forgiveness in October 2017, there is no cap on forgiveness for PSLF.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: All right. It is something that has been discussed and it’s been proposed, but we haven’t seen any movement on it and so we can’t really make any speculation. We would hope that if anyone in the program that if there was a cap put on it that people who entered it before will be grandfathered in and then the cap would apply for those in the future. But it’s hard to know what Congress will do.

So the next question we have is what happens if you go back to school and add more loans, how without work. (Tunika), do you want to answer that question as well?

Woman 1: Sure. So I - so you still will be able to qualify for PSLF, so generally what would happen is if you go into school you’re going to have in-school deferment. And then when you would get out, if you’re on an income-driven repayment plan at the time that you went back to school, they would align your new loans to that income-driven repayment plan.

You still need to be recertifying while you’re in school even though you’re in a deferment. But you would still be able to, you know, once you’re finished with school, if you’re going into a qualifying employment again, still be able to continue your accounts for Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: So the next question, can a student submit employment certification for a previous employer and still have those years and payments qualified? And the answer to that is yes. You could fill that out and certify all of your employers that you had over those 10 years.

There is a risk to you if you wait and you don’t fill out the Employment Certification Form, because you will not know for certain that your employer does qualify, that your payments that you’ve been making qualify, you won’t know for certain.

So while the Employment Certification Form is optional, is voluntary, it’s something that we highly encourage so that you do know that you’re on track. That’s what we’ve been communicating is to know that since the 10-year period is a long time, you want to make sure that you are on track towards forgiveness under this program.

So do fill out the Employment Certification Form and we encourage you to do that every year to make sure and you know, it doesn’t have to be every year. So if you wait and you do it for several employers that you had in the past, that’s fine. Your employer has to sign it. And so I guess that’s an issue to consider if you’re still in communication with that employer, because the employer has to sign the form. But you can do that as regularly as you want to and we encourage you to do it every time that your employer changes.

Woman 1: And actually Jessica, I want to jump back to again fees question, I want to make sure I answer that correctly. One thing I wanted to say to, Public Service Loan Forgiveness is at the loan level. So for instance if you got new loans, your count would start for that new loan that you receive for Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

So if you had loans that you had prior to going back to school and for instance you made 50 qualifying payments on that, that will be 50 qualifying payments for those loans. And then if you receive new loans then it would start at after you finish with your school and within a qualifying limit, you again would start at one for those loans. So you can receive multiple forgiveness for each of your loans if you’re - they’re not consolidated. And so I hope that answers your question a little better.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: Right. So the forgiveness can be on different tracks. You may have some loans that you got earlier that could be on track to be forgiven earlier and then something that you took out later that could be forgiven at a later date.

And that’s similar to another question that someone asked where they said if I have two direct loans and I’m making two payments on them, does that count as two payments or does that only count as one payment? And it only counts as one payment, because like (Tunika) just said it is at the loan level, so even if you do have two loans, you’re making those two payments each month, it has to be 125 - the 120 qualifying payments on that specific direct loan.

Okay, we have some more questions. On the income-driven repayment plan, the PowerPoint slide shows that you have to repay 20 to 25 years, but the speaker keeps saying that you only have to pay 10, can you clarify the difference?

That’s a great question. So the income-driven repayment and this is slide 28, the income-driven repayment forgiveness is only if you don’t qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. So apologies if that wasn’t clear. But if you qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, your loans will be forgiven after 10 years, those are 125 - 120 payments.

If however you are only on an income-driven repayment plan and say you don’t work for a public service organization, but you are on an income-based repayment plan, your loans can be forgiven after 20 or 25 years.

And we’ve got another question. Can you apply retroactively as you just learned about the program, but you’ve been making regular payments for the last five years for working for a qualifying employer? The answer to that will be yes.

The question that I would have will be are you sure that you have direct loans and what kind of repayment plan are you on. So if you have been working for a qualifying employer for the past five years, if you’re on a 10-year standard repayment plan, your payments could qualify.

We will just encourage you to apply for an income-driven repayment plan, because otherwise you would - you get to the end of 10 years and there will be nothing to forgive. And the income-driven repayment plans that would lower the amount that you would pay each month then you would have some of that forgiven at the end of 10 years.

So yes, you can apply retroactively. It could be possible that you have been making payments and that those payments qualify even if you just became aware of the program today.

We have another question. If a student has federal loans from before 2007 and they consolidate them as direct loans, will they still need to make 10 years’ worth of qualifying payments, are there any exceptions made for these students?

So the answer to that is once you consolidate those federal loans into the direct loan program that is the point at which they become eligible. So any payments that you made on those federal loans previously wouldn’t count towards Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

We have another question. Do you have to make 120 payments to apply? And yes, that is what is required to apply to have your loans forgiven.

Then another question. What is the communication method between applications and FedLoan Servicing? Is it email or paper mail? What happens when your certification is rejected? (Tunika), do you want to answer that?

Woman 1: Sure. So from what I understand that you can communicate with FedLoan Servicing via email, you can call into them or they also do receive some mail letters. If you receive a denial letter since you did Employment Certification Form and then you were denied for any reason whether they said your employment doesn’t qualify.

In that letter they should be giving you the opportunity to rectify any incorrect information that they may have made a decision one that isn’t correct or for instance they told you that you have 100 qualifying payments and you know that you made 110 qualifying payments, then you can go back to them. You can either appeal to them via email or you can call in and they’ll kind of walk you through that process.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: All right. If we’ve missed your question - I think we answered them all, but if we’ve missed anyone’s questions, please ask it again. And if there are any others, now is your chance. So we have a few more minutes if anyone else has a question.

So I’m not seeing any other questions. If you do want to learn more about the program, do go to publicservice and what you will see after we conclude this webinar is a brief survey to ask you about your satisfaction with the webinar and if there is anything else that we can do to meet your needs. So thank you so much for joining us this evening and have a great evening. Thank you.

Coordinator: Thank you.

END

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download