PA school is expensive, and Public Service Loan Forgiveness is one of the few real ways out from under it. It's also one of the most misunderstood programs in existence.

Meagan Landress is a student loan consultant with Student Loan Planner, and she walks through the five boxes you have to check: you work for a qualifying public service employer, you're full time, your loans are direct federal loans, you're on an income-driven repayment plan, and you make 120 qualifying payments.

Miss one of those and the clock isn't running. That's how people end up ten years in with nothing to show for it.

Her most useful tip is a practical one - look up your employer's EIN and run it through the PSLF help tool on studentaid.gov before you assume you qualify. Don't guess.

Heads up: student loan rules change constantly, and this episode was recorded in 2022. Verify everything at studentaid.gov before you make decisions. I'm not a financial advisor and none of this is financial advice.

What we cover:

• The five PSLF requirements, one at a time
• What counts as a qualifying employer and how to check
• Why your loan type and repayment plan can quietly disqualify you
• Using the PSLF help tool and your employer's EIN
• Common mistakes that reset people's progress
• How to think about loans before you sign for PA school

Resources:

Free PA School Application Timeline: https://www.thepaplatform.com/services/free-application-timeline

PA Program Map: https://www.thepaplatform.com/pa-platform-map

Pre-PA Counseling: https://www.thepaplatform.com/services/pre-pa-counseling

Pre-PA Academy: https://prepaclub.thepaplatform.com/landing/academy

Mentioned in this episode:

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There have been rumors floating around that some student loans have been forgiven and that is due to a program called pslf.

I'm talking about that today with Megan, who is a student loan consultant with Student Loan Planner and she's going to give you all the details.

Welcome to the Pre PA Club podcast.

If you want to learn how to become a physician assistant, you're in the right place.

I'm your host, Savannah Perry.

Let's get to it.

Hi guys.

Thank you so much for listening and being here this week.

We are jumping into finances and money stuff which if you've listened to the Pre PA Club podcast for a while, you know that I like to talk about those things because I don't think they're talked about enough in PA school.

You also know that I am not an expert.

I enjoy learning about these things, but there's a lot to it and sometimes we just have to hear from someone who knows better than us, which is where our guest today comes in.

Her name is Megan.

You'll hear from her in just a second and she just has a ton of great information about whether you are a student looking for PA jobs and trying to figure out what's going to be best to attack your debt.

If you are a practicing PA and you have student loan debt, particularly if you work for a place that, that, well, that could qualify for pslf or if you are in the pre PA stage and want to prepare yourself, I highly recommend trying to learn about all of these things before you get into PA school and not just ignoring them.

A lot of us do.

So I think you're really going to enjoy hearing from Megan.

All of the links to information that we're going to talk about will be in the description so you can find those, no problem.

A few things coming up.

If you're listening to this in real time.

Next week on March 31st, we're doing a virtual shadowing with Jordan, who we heard from last week.

She's awesome.

She's an ERPA.

She's one of our PA platform coaches.

That will be at 9pm the link is in the description as well and then we're sharing that on social media.

But on April 3rd we will be talking about personal statements.

We're gonna do some more live edits and I'm going to help you figure out if you feel stuck right now with what you should be working on, we're going to get over that hump and make it so that you are able to work essay with some advice on how to do that.

And then on April 10th we are going to do a webinar on CASPA, answering questions, of course, but also again, I just want to help you come up with a plan, an actionable plan of things you can do right now.

So if you are unaware, most of the program deadlines are April 1st.

That's actually the last deadline they can have.

CASPA stops accepting documents on April 8th.

They technically close on April 15th and then they will reopen on what was most recently posted as April 28th.

Those things could always change, but now is the time to be working on some stuff ahead of time and we will jump into that so we'll have separate links for those webinars as well.

And then I'm so excited because once the application opens we can start getting into interview stuff, which is one of my favorite things.

But I will let y' all get into our episode with Megan.

And don't forget, if you need help right now with essay editing, application review, prepa counseling, that's what we use for application review.

We edit experience details, supplementals.

If you need the personal statement guide to help you get started with that, you can always use the code Future PA on any of those things to help if you need that.

That is a little tip, a little info for the day and then we will jump into our podcast.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a review on itunes or let us know if there's anything that you'd like to hear about in any upcoming episodes.

I am Megan Landress and I am a student loan consultant with Student Loan Planner.

And that just means that I help people navigate their student loan debt and figuring out the best way to pay those off or how to get loan forgiveness if we're eligible for that.

Just navigating the best repayment options available to somebody.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, pretty much everyone who becomes a PA takes out loans.

Pretty much.

What made you interested in kind of that area of finance?

So I started out liking finance.

I did the books for a gym that I worked at like in high school and a college and really enjoyed it.

But I went to school for finance and realized I didn't really like corporate finance.

I liked the personal finance, like working with families and helping them achieve their financial goals.

So I did that starting out in my career.

I worked at a financial planning firm and it seemed like we were helping people that already had Money.

So I thought, what about the people that need help getting to this point?

I was young at the time and all my friends were asking me questions about money and felt like there was such a gap in, in, in the financial space trying to help people, like just starting out.

And so I, I started my own practice, financial coach Megan, and started working with people on the find a financial like foundation of their plan.

So budgeting, debt reduction, cash flow, emergency savings, things like that.

And then I quickly realized that I needed to learn about student loans because most folks I would run into early on in their career would have that.

That would be the elephant in the room, the student loans.

And so that's how I got into it.

There was a need that I saw.

And then in within that need, student loan debt was such a big piece of the puzzle.

And so just having a plan and helping people navigate through that allowed us to move on to other financial conversations.

And I figured out how complicated the student loan system is in doing that.

And so now I'm such a nerd about it.

I like and I'm excited to nerd out about it with you today about how to help people navigate it.

That's the.

No one really teaches you that.

They're just like, here, you need to pay for school.

Here's some money.

Take it.

You can give it back later.

And that's it?

Yeah, that's all we get.

You'll be fine.

You're good.

But there's a lot more to it.

And you said it like an elephant in the room.

And I felt that way, but I also felt like it was just this weight on my shoulders that you have throughout school.

And then once you get done, then you're, oh, yeah, I have to now pay back for my education.

Yeah, do that.

What are the ways I can do that?

And so we'll get into that.

So a big topic that I've seen a ton about, I'm in a bunch of financial groups and PA groups is this Public Service Loan Forgiveness pslf.

Can you explain to us what that is and then we'll get into some specifics?

Yeah.

And this is a program that's.

That can be pretty common in working as a pa. And so Public Service Loan Forgiveness, it's not a repayment plan, but it's a program that will forgive our loans if we check all of the qualification boxes.

And there's five requirements that we have to check the boxes for.

First is we have to work at a public service entity.

So that's any nonprofit 501c3 a lot of hospitals or clinics tend to be eligible here or any government entity, so like working for the VA or for a state or local hospital.

Second requirement is we have to work full time.

Third is we have to have direct loans, which are just direct federal loans.

And third we have to be on an income driven repayment plan to be able to work towards this forgiveness.

And then lastly we have to make 120 payments where all four of those things exist at the same time.

And Once we hit 120 payments, whatever balance is left over is then forgiven.

So it could be a really great program if we're naturally in that career path anyways.

Okay, so some questions just about those qualifications.

How would someone know or find out if they're unsure if they work for a place that qualifies like a nonprofit or government place?

Is there someone in that space who can help them or a way online for them to check and see if they qualify?

Probably the most surefire way to check is to grab the employer's EIN number, which stands for Employer Identification Number, and that you can find on your W2.

Or if you just started, if you haven't gotten a W2 yet, then you can ask HR for it.

And what you can do is plug that into the PSLF help tool that's on studentaid.gov and there's a little section under Public Service Loan Forgiveness there's a help tool that'll help you determine if your employer is eligible.

And you just type in that EIN number and it'll tell you pretty much immediately if it's eligible.

Only times it won't have an answer would be if someone has never worked there before that had been pursuing pslf, if they're just not in the system.

But that's very rare.

But that's a quick way to find out.

And then usually if you ask hr, they're probably pretty familiar with it because they have to sign off on your employment certification form.

So that could be another way to check too.

Okay, so that seems pretty easy.

And just for kind of a scenario.

So I'm a Durham pa.

I've only worked for a private practice, so in no way would I qualify for this.

And I.

Correct.

Yeah, like a private practice, private working for a private doctor or something you're probably not going to call.

Correct.

But yes.

I think this is really something good though for new career PAs to know about when they're job searching, especially if they have that really high debt, because that be something that goes into deciding where they work.

I was not familiar with this I probably still would have chosen my job and the way I did.

I went to a public school, so I didn't have as many loans.

But I've seen some crazy numbers and I'm sure you have too.

Yeah, yeah.

That are very intimidating and seem daunting.

Yeah.

And I think what's positive about being a PA too is that the decision between a public sector job and a private sector job compared to other industries or other professions, the pay difference isn't vastly different.

So especially if you're not really sure what you want to do exactly and you're.

You are job searching or if you're just looking for a change, maybe public service loan forgiveness could be an incentive to, to prioritize like public service jobs.

Because typically, like the biggest downside to going into public service for a lot of industries is just maybe a pay cut.

And there are better benefits though.

So there's better, typically better employer benefits with like retirement and health insurance and things like that.

And also public service loan forgiveness can be thrown in there.

So that can sometimes compensate for maybe the pay cut.

But thankfully I do think your industry is pretty like it's not hugely different.

And that's just my perspective seeing like other industries.

So that you might be thinking, ah, I don't know.

I think in most cases that's actually probably accurate.

Like even thinking about.

So I have a good friend in Durham who works for an academic hospital, which would fall under pslf.

Yeah.

And which is for Durham is rare.

There aren't that many positions like that.

But it's our.

It's not that much different.

Like it wasn't a huge pay cut or anything to go there.

And I agree with you just knowing in my area, salaries of PAs who work in different areas, it.

It's about the same working for the academic or nonprofit areas as it is working private.

Okay.

For more of the qualifications.

So what constitutes full time?

Is that like four, 40 hours a week or is there a specific.

Or does your job just say this person is full time?

Yeah, it's the latter.

So if you're only at one employer, it's the employer's definition of full time.

And it just has to be at least 30 hours a week.

Okay.

Another thing, it's a nuance that may not be super applicable to everybody, but if you were between two different public service entities part time, let's say you were working in an academic setting and then you were also working at a nonprofit clinic as well.

As long as those hours together add up over 30, then that does qualify For PSLF as well.

Interesting.

Okay, good to know.

One of my questions was what happens if you switch switch jobs?

Can you work somewhere for a little while and then switch to another job that would still qualify for PSLF without there being a lapse there?

So that's fine.

Yeah.

Different areas.

Yeah, you could switch employers.

You also don't have to have consecutive payments.

And I think this is a huge misconception.

People think that if they do have a gap in employment or they do miss, you know, a period of payments, then they have to start over.

And that is not the case.

Thankfully, your payment count once you have it qualify or once, once you have checked all of those boxes, you've got that payment locked and loaded.

And so if you go private practice, hate it.

Come back into a public service setting.

Then your payment count won't count when you were in private practice, but it'll pick back up where it left off if you re enter public service later.

Okay, so it sounds if you have loans and you work in a public service area, you should at least be signed up for getting those qualifying payments.

Or is it something you can backtrack and do later or not, if that makes sense.

Both.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can always backtrack.

As long as you were on an income driven plan making payments on an income driven plan, you don't have to have the employment certification form submitted or you'll lose like that opportunity.

It's that form is always retroactive.

So you submit that document just to prove that you were full time in that public service capacity and then the loan servicer goes back and counts up your prior payments and we recommend submitting that form once a year anyways.

Even if you're not like switching employers that way, you just always have an updated qualifying payment count.

And that's a great way to keep a pulse on where your payment count is over time.

Okay, can you go into a little bit of explaining the direct loan portion?

This is something I feel like a lot of people, once I graduated had questions about with refinancing and doing all that.

But from what I understand, if you possibly refinance some things, it can affect your ability to do pslf.

Yeah.

And I think they're refinancing and the term consolidation.

Okay.

Those two words get used interchangeably all the time.

The time.

So refinancing would be taking the loan to a private company and that would disqualify us from pslf.

So if we were wanting to pursue that, we would not want to refinance.

Now consolidation, that is where we just take the loans and combine them within the federal system.

So it simplifies a little bit.

The only reason we'd want to really do that would be like right after school if we want to simplify or if we have non qualifying federal loans, which those would be called Perkins or FEL loans, that might be a reason to consider consolidation because it converts those loans into a qualifying loan type for ps, but that's the difference between refinancing and consolidation.

So we wouldn't want to refinance if we were doing pslf, but consolidation might be okay if needed or if we wanted to simplify after graduation.

Okay, thank you for clarifying that.

I've probably used those incorrectly.

Yeah, pretty much like textbook definition.

They're similar, but they.

Yeah, they mean different things.

And I think it's confusing.

And that's what.

So I've seen.

And you can go into this a little bit more, but I've seen how the.

What is.

Where are they calling it?

The pause on loan interest and loan payments has affected people.

And in a lot of these PA groups I'm in, people are like, I refinanced right before this was announced.

They're kind of just out of luck.

Once you go there, you can't go back.

And can you talk a little bit about how this current loan situation is affecting repayment and the PSLF stuff?

Yeah.

There's been so much has happened over the past two years.

So with federal student loans, we are still in a Covid forbearance due to the CARES act.

And this has never happened before.

And this was meant to just provide people relief to not have to make student loan payments while we were going through the pandemic that has continuously been extended.

We'll see probably by the time this comes out.

Like.

Yep.

So the most positive parts about that freeze for federal loans was that of course it means we don't have to make payments.

But for those who are pursuing public service loan forgiveness, as long as we were still working full time in, in a public service capacity all of these months, during the payment freeze will count towards PSLF as if we were making payments.

So we don't have to make payments, but we'll get the free credit.

So it's literally more than two years of free credit towards the program right now for folks who have consistently been employed in public.

So that's one big thing.

And this was an executive order.

That just means that there was a sweep of changes to prior rules around pslf.

So this would not be relevant for someone who recently graduated who doesn't have any payment history on their loans yet.

But for people who have had their loans for a while and may have been working in public service for a while, what the waiver says is those requirements to work in public service full time, those have remained unchanged.

But what they have come back and said changes will be around are if we've made payments on income driven plans in the past or a non qualifying, I should say if we made payments on a non qualifying repayment plan in the past or if we had the wrong loan type like an FFEL loan or Perkins loan historically, we can now go back and get credit for those payments that we made in the past as if we were on the right repayment plan or as if we had the right types of loans, which previously it was, you were just out of luck.

If you didn't know you had to be on an income driven plan or you didn't know you had the wrong types of loans, then we would be starting from when we checked all those boxes.

But now there's a chance to go back and get credit for those prior payments.

And that's a huge deal because it's putting people a lot further ahead towards PSLF than maybe they originally thought.

Or it's giving folks immediate loan forgiveness.

If they've been working in public service for 10 years but just were never on the right repayment plan or never had the right type of federal loan.

So that's a huge thing.

And that expires.

And that just means that you have to submit the paperwork for it by then to claim the credit.

It doesn't mean that you have to get loan forgiveness between now and then to have it be worth anything, but that's the deadline to take advantage of it.

So if somebody does not apply for it, like it won't happen for them, they need to submit this waiver for it to Happen?

Yep.

Yeah.

In the waiver application, all it is the employment certification form.

So it's not a separate document.

They kept it really easy.

It's just a matter of submitting that employment certification form.

And once we've done that, we're good.

Now, if you had the wrong types of loans, we do have to consolidate before October 31st to fix the loan type going forward.

But those are the two things that you would have to do.

Okay, that's so interesting because I've heard of people recently who are like, I signed in to make my loan payment or to check on it and it was gone.

Is this real crazy?

It doesn't sound real, but it is.

So one of two things could have happened.

They could have either automatically gotten the PSLF waiver applied because they had already submitted.

So this is what's nice, is if you've already submitted employment certification forms and maybe got denied in the past for pslf, they're still going back and checking those now.

So you may not have to submit a new one if you already submitted one historically.

But so that could have happened where they were just eligible.

They hit 120 payments and they got the loans discharged.

But another thing that's going on right now is Fed Loan Servicing is transferring loan accounts to different servicers because they are stepping down from loan servicing at the end of this year.

And Fed Loan Servicing is who's responsible for the PSLF program right now and processing the PSLF waiver paperwork.

But that could be another reason, like if they logged into FedLoan and it's not there.

If we didn't do anything or didn't think we were eligible for the PSLF waiver, maybe go check your Student Aid account, studentaid.gov to find out where your loans got moved to, just to double check.

Okay, so can we talk a little bit about scenarios where you would say this is a good idea to pursue versus maybe not a good idea to pursue?

Because so we're looking at essentially somebody's going to pay their loans for 10 years to get that 120 payments.

Are there any situations, or I guess loan amounts or interest rates where it would just be better to pay them off or do something different?

So I think if your balance is greater than your income, then PSLF hands down, will make sense if you're at an eligible employer, mathematically, we will pay less than what our balance is going to be in most always.

In a most always scenario now, if your balance is maybe one to one where your income is about what your balance size Is it depends on what the math is because the payments, this is what's a little confusing is the payments are based on income.

So it's not like we can't crunch the numbers technically for you know, one payment that we're going to make today over 10 years to see if we'd have anything forgiven.

Because your income may change over time, which changes the numbers.

So there is a way that we, we calculate or estimate what that's going to look like in our planning that we do with folks.

But it just comes down to the math.

Do we end up getting a balance forgiven if we go an income driven route or do we just pay it off before we get there?

And that could be a scenario where if our balance is very low and we have no credit towards PSLF yet and we start a public service job, maybe we're not going to make it to the forgiveness timeline.

Cause we just pay it off before we got there because our payment would be high enough.

So it just depends.

But always something worth looking at.

And there are free calculators on our website, so studentloanplanner.com or studentaid.gov there's free calculators online that you can test to check out if it's worth considering or not.

And then that can help you make a decision on it.

And at what point do you think it's helpful to meet with a professional and start planning and talking about these things and figuring out what's going to be best?

And what does that look like?

Is that like a one time thing y' all do or something more like overtime?

Yeah, I think for anybody who's just wanting to make sure that they're doing the right thing with their loans, that's a great time to seek out professional help.

So that we're called what's it's called a certified student loan professional that you would want to work with.

It is a specialty within the financial planning industries.

Just like PAs have their own specialties too.

So we would be trained to know exactly how to calculate out what your payments would be and stress test different scenarios on what your income could change to and what does that mean on the trajectory to get there.

So I think just anybody who wants that more professional guidance and who wants to make make sure that they're maximizing their plan as much as possible or getting it to be as efficient as possible to save money.

And then maybe a trigger that might want to compel people to reach out would be if marriage is in play.

So federal student loans are weird in the Sense that when you're married it will impact your student loan situation because the payments are based on income.

And if we file married jointly with our spouse, which most people do, it will increase our payment.

It'll factor in our spouse's income to your payment calculation.

So a lot of our planning with married couples is considering whether or not we should be filing taxes separately.

There's tax consequences for that, but they might far outweigh.

Like filing separately might far outweigh the savings we reap from that could be a lot better than the tax hit that we take.

So that's what we'll assess.

Also, if your spouse has student loans, that's where it gets real tricky because we're trying to navigate two different loan plans while not hurting the other person.

So that's when it gets fun for us.

But I know that's like maddening for.

Yeah, okay, cool.

No, that's.

I mean, it is just.

I just know people ask me these questions and I tell them straight up, I am not an expert in loans and all these different programs.

Like, I can tell you what I did and it probably was 100% correct, but this is what I did.

Things that you just don't understand, like compounding interest and what that means and when it starts, which now things are completely different and weird, but all of those things, it's just like a different language.

So thankful that we have people like you who understand it and can help.

Yeah, it's just a delegation.

It's just like with anything.

I'm a finance person, but I don't do my own taxes because taxes are their own thing too.

And I'd rather delegate that and have a professional tell me what to do.

Well, where can everybody find you or seek you out if they have questions or need some of that personal help?

Yeah.

Studentloanplanner.com is our website.

We have a huge blog or lots of blog content, especially for PAs.

So you could find your profession in our blog, like filter.

So there's tons of free content on our website to maybe help.

Tons of free calculators you could use.

And then of course, if you wanted one on one help, we do consultations with folks.

That's about an hour and we ask you to send some information beforehand so we could do the number crunching.

We get on that call and by the end of that call together we have our action plan and we know how to execute it.

And that consultation comes with six months of email follow up too, if you had follow up questions.

But our goal is to educate you on your loan situation so you feel very confident on how to manage it going forward.

So sometimes we'll have follow up consultations with folks where their situation really changed or especially with all the changes that have happened over this past year.

Usually it's we've got our plan in place, we know how to proceed with it, and then you move on with the rest of your financial planning.

But we'd be there for you if you needed any follow up help too.

Okay, perfect.

And we'll put links to everything in the description too, so everybody can find you.

Thanks for sharing all this very helpful information.

Yeah, of course.

Thanks for having me.

And yeah, it's in an ever changing world and I think that's the only thing that's constant.

Right.

Isn't that a saying where every day.

There's something new and that's now I'm waiting to see if the loans are going to be on pause again and yep, we'll see.

It's so funny.

People are going to listen to this later and be like, yep, we knew it.

Yeah, the rumor is, is it going to happen?

But the rumor is somewhere it said that someone filed something that makes them think it's going to be paused.

And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, we'll see.

Thank you for having me.

I appreciate it.