Episode 222: Student Loans: Understanding Loan Forgiveness and Income-Based Repayment Plans with David Gourley, CSLP®

Stressed about student loans? We’ve got you covered. In this episode, David Gourley, CSLP®  explains loan forgiveness programs and special payment plans based on your income in simple terms. Whether the loans are yours or your child's, you'll learn who qualifies, important deadlines, and easy tips to manage the debt better. Don’t miss out on key insights to tackle student debt.  

Listen and Learn: 

• Secrets for understanding confusing student loan programs
• Important dates and changes you need to know about
• Easy ways to combine loans and plan payments better
• What's next? New loan forgiveness plans that could help

Resources:

• Check out David’s Linktree 
• Follow David on LinkedIn
• Follow David on Twitter
• Read: Studentaid.gov Announcement on IDR Waiver 
• Listen: Episode 131: Student Loan Forgiveness with Alexa Kane 
• Listen: How Aspiring Physicians Can Manage Student Loans: https://pearlplan.com/2022/02/15/episode-103-how-aspiring-physicians-can-manage-student-loans/
• Listen: Episode 103: How Aspiring Physicians Can Manage Student Loans
• Read: Navigating the Double Consolidation Process for Parent PLUS Loans 
• Read: Changes to Student Loan Planning with the New SAVE (IDR) Plan 

Transcript

Melissa Joy: 0:01

Welcome to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. I'm Melissa Joy, a certified financial planner and the founder of Pearl Planning. My goal is to help you streamline and organize your finances, navigate big money decisions with confidence and be strategic in order to grow your wealth. As a woman, you work hard for your money and I'm here to help you make the most of it. Now let's get into the show.

Melissa Joy: 0:35

If you have student loans, they're probably a great investment, but they also are likely something that sticks around with you for way longer than you'd like them to be around, and today we're going to talk about some timely and important strategies that you need to be aware of if you have student loans or someone you love does. I am so thrilled to be joined by David Gorley. David is a former teacher and he left the classroom to become a financial planner. He founded a company and focuses on helping educators and their families. And focuses on helping educators and their families. He is a certified student loan professional, CSLP, and has spent the last three years dedicated to helping people with their student loan situations, and he's based out of Kansas City, Missouri. That's close to home for me. I grew up in KC and is married with two kids, and a third on the way later this year. David, welcome to the podcast.

David Gourley: 1:25

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Melissa Joy: 1:27

Well, I think this topic is so timely and I recently sent you clients for one of the programs we're going to talk about today to do some in-depth analysis on a very specific student loan situation, and one of the things I think we can start off first is that not every financial planner, including myself, is an expert on student loans, and I often rely on people who spend all day, every day, thinking about them, like yourself. So can you tell me the difference between what a general financial planner knows, like me, and what a certified student loan professional may be familiar with?

David Gourley: 2:03

Yeah, so the biggest, biggest thing is, like you said, I have pretty much spent the last three years talking about student loans, reading student loan information and learning literally everything that there is to know about it. So I know all the in-depth strategies, I know the different repayment plans, different options that are out there, and I'm not going to say that other financial planners don't know it. But, like you said, there's so many things as in the financial world, there's so many things that we do and don't know, and I know sometimes the lanes that I don't know a ton on and I will seek out other advice and I think that's super important for other financial planners to be aware of also is just, hey, this is not an area that I'm an expert in. Let me ask somebody who might know more.

Melissa Joy: 2:45

I do have access for ZPLR, for Mutual Planning Software, High Assist Student Loan Module. We can definitely talk about things, but we're going to get pretty specific into some programs today. First of all, you started your career as an educator and most educators, even in many private schools, are eligible for public student loan forgiveness because they work for employers that are in the nonprofit or government field. Tell me, let's start there. Let's talk about what are the terms of the PSLF Public Student Loan Forgiveness Program.

David Gourley: 3:18

Yeah, so there's actually so many different potential employers that qualify Teachers for sure, both non-profit if they're a private school, and then any public school teacher, but also nurses, doctors at public hospitals, police officers, firefighters, military, any non-profit worker that's working in the non-profit sector, and city workers, government workers. It's so crazy how many people qualify that don't maybe know that they do off the bat.

Melissa Joy: 3:45

We live in Washtenaw County, Michigan, which is home to University of Michigan, and so so many people are employees in the University of Michigan health system, as educators et cetera. So that's prime example.

David Gourley: 3:58

Exactly, yeah. So the basis of PSLF is that you have to make 120 qualified payments. So 120 qualified payments, that means basically that you have to be paying on these things for at least 10 years. But it's not just 10 years because you have to be doing, you have to have the right kind of loans and the right kind of repayment plan, and a lot of people don't realize that, so that's where there was some misinformation at the start of this thing. So let me just back up. It started in October of 2007, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and so the very first time that it was eligible, that people thought their 10 years was October of 2017.

David Gourley: 4:36

Well, a whole bunch of people applied, and very, very few got accepted through this forgiveness less than 1%, actually and so then the talking heads got ahold of it and said, okay, well, this doesn't work. And the answer is that it does work. It just you have to follow the rules, which were super convoluted and hard to follow. So you have to have direct loans and direct loans. So there's several different types of loans, but there was an old type of loan called FFEL, which stands for Federal Family Education Loan, and those loans do not qualify for PSLF. The reason being is that they are privately held but government backed loans, so the government can't forgive them because they don't technically own the loan, whereas direct loans the government owns them and the government holds them, so they can actually forgive that loan.

David Gourley: 5:23

The second thing is that you have to be in the right repayment plan, and so the typical repayment plan for PSLF is going to be an income driven repayment plan, idr, and there's so many acronyms used and it kind of it's one of those. It felt like that way in education and I know sometimes it feels that way in the financial planning world too. But student loan world is no different. There's tons of acronyms. So IDR stands for income driven repayment, and inside of the income driven repayment plan there are five different options, which is I know it's tough.

David Gourley: 5:56

There's ICR, which is income contingent repayment, ibr, which is income based repayment. Then there's an old version and a new version of that. Ibr, which is income-based repayment. Then there's an old version and a new version of that. There's pay, which is pay as you earn, and then there was repay, which is revised pay as you earn, which has now switched to the save, which is saving on a valuable education. Again, way too many things that I just said there. But just know that all of those are inside of the income-driven repayment plan umbrella and if you aren't on one of those then you likely don't qualify for PSLF moving forward. So that's the big thing Does?

Melissa Joy: 6:31

it weed out people that like, let's say you're a doctor, you specialize, you work in a hospital for 10 years but you're making $800,000 a year, then the income-driven repayment plan would have you paying more of those 10 years, and thus it's kind of a means testing.

David Gourley: 6:48

Exactly so. There's different ways around it, and one of them that we'll get into in a little bit here, though, is that if you qualify for pay which is pay as you earn, and there's very specific qualifications on that but if you do qualify for that repayment plan, there's a payment cap that's capped out at your 10-year standard repayment amount. But here's the crazy part I'm going to say this a lot of times that is ending on July 1st of this year, so no one will be eligible to get into pay after June 30th, so that's kind of a big one for the people that are high income earners who might qualify to be in the pay repayment plan.

Melissa Joy: 7:25

Interesting. So we have some deadlines coming up that are relevant. If our listeners are already like, ears are tingling because this is them.

David Gourley: 7:35

Is that right Exactly? And so, on that same note, you're talking about the doctor that's making $800,000 a year. The IDR waiver, which actually has been out for some time now. It was supposed to have ended. There was a hard deadline and when I say hard deadline, it's very, very soft because they keep kicking the can down the road but there was a hard deadline of December 31st 2023. The program ended, except it didn't because they kicked it out until April 30th of 2024. And they said okay, this is the absolute end April 30th 2024.

David Gourley: 8:07

Sorry to everybody who's just now listening, you missed it. Except they just announced last week that they actually are going to extend it until June 30th of 2024. So will it be the last extension? I don't know. But if you're in this boat, there are some things that you need to do today, the day that, as soon as you listen to this episode, to make sure that you qualify. So that person that made $800,000 where the income driven repayment plan didn't make sense, they can still qualify for PSLF using this IDR waiver right now, because any repayment plan that you were in now counts for credit and any type of loan counts. Even if you had those FFEL loans or the direct loans, it doesn't matter. You can get credit for any payment that you've made from October of 2007 until now, as long as you were working in a public service role.

Melissa Joy: 8:58

So so people are seeing some crazy crazy stuff Get out of jail, free card for past payments where they want to catch up people that didn't have the education or choice.

David Gourley: 9:09

Exactly, and I think a lot of the reason why they're doing it is because there was so much of, there were so many people who thought that they qualified for PSLF, that were in those FFEL loans and they told them in 2017, like, oh sorry, we gave you bad information, you don't qualify for anything, and so the Biden administration has been trying to make that right and fix some of the negligence on the loan servicers. Part.

Melissa Joy: 9:37

This IDR waiver is a one-time fuzzy math in terms of when the deadline is, but you've got to assume that the next deadline is the deadline, because at some point in all likelihood, it's going to go away.

David Gourley: 9:50

Yeah.

Melissa Joy: 9:50

Where you can basically go backwards and turn payments that did not necessarily qualify in the past into payments that are qualified for public student loan forgiveness in the past into payments that are qualified for public student loan forgiveness.

David Gourley: 10:09

Yeah, and it gets way crazier than that because the IDR waiver it's the best thing that's ever happened in student loans and it's especially helpful for people who have varying timeframes on their loans.

Melissa Joy: 10:16

Okay, tell me more.

David Gourley: 10:19

Yeah, so I'm a former teacher, so I'm going to use teaching as an example.

David Gourley: 10:22

Most people graduate from undergrad with a certain amount of loans and then start in on teaching and go through their career and then, at some point in time, teachers hit a spot where they have to continue education or they won't move up on the pay scale.

David Gourley: 10:36

Yeah, so you have to go get your master's and then, likely, if you get your master's, you say, oh, that pay bump was pretty nice and you go get a specialist or a doctorate or something like that. So right now, through, let's say, june 30th, is that hard deadline. It's maybe a soft deadline, but right now, if you do a consolidation of your loans, they will give you the repayment history of your oldest loan on all of your loans. Let's dive into that just a little bit more. So let's say that you graduated in May of 2024, just right now with your doctorate but you have undergrad loans from 2007 that are still hanging out there. If you do a consolidation of your loans, they will give you the repayment history of the 2007 loans, even on your doctorate loans, meaning that I'm seeing people who are getting all of their loans forgiven right away, even if they graduated with $100,000 debt last month?

Melissa Joy: 11:32

One. You have the waiver and you have the consolidation. Are all those happening at the same time?

David Gourley: 11:36

They can happen more or less at the same time. Basically, the consolidation has to happen at studentaidgov and you have to consolidate your loans. If you're going for public service loan forgiveness, you'll have to do that with using Mojila as the loan servicer. The second part of that is submitting the PSLF application. So that's public service loan forgiveness application. It's also done on student aid, but basically you go in and you fill out an application that shows that your employer basically you have your employer sign off, that you were employed with them through certain timeframes, and if you get all of that done by June 30th, then you're good. All it has to do is be created by then. You don't even have to have the signatures by then, but they do kind of run concurrently, so they're going to happen at the same time. Whenever I do this with people live, I help them implement as well and we do the consolidation and the PSLF applications at the same time.

Melissa Joy: 12:31

Well, this is the beauty of financial planning that I hope our listeners, whether they qualify for this or not, are taking to heart is financial planning isn't just about what you should do. It's about implementing what you should do, and a good practitioner is helping to click those buttons, fill out those applications, because what I know is, especially in a very bureaucratic process which is certainly what we are dealing with when it comes to governments and institutions that are nonprofits If you don't have that assistance, you may have all the best intentions but miss the deadline.

David Gourley: 13:10

A hundred percent and I tell people all the time if you want a student loan plan, there are people out there that charge significantly less than me. But, as you said, I will sit there with you and click every single button along with you. And that part of it is so hard, Like that's the. That's the part where you get stuck immediately when you open it up and you're like, oh well, I don't know what I'm going to do on this particular page, and it's like just click that and let's move forward. You got to trust me.

Melissa Joy: 13:43

Yeah well, and I think you're very reasonable for what you do, just to put in a plug. So we will make sure to have your details and show notes and I know you're really focused on these deadlines and just like to give a quick plug for you, david, when we still have that April 30th deadline, I talked to you on April 29th or April 30th and you made a window in your evening to talk to a client that was hugely impacted by the advice that you were able to give. So I mean, that's a huge plug for your willingness to kind of be the advocate for people that may be eligible for thousands, if not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

David Gourley: 14:16

Honestly, the reason why I even got into this. Being a former teacher, I always felt like teachers especially, but probably there I mean, there's a lot of professions that this applies to but that we were treated so poorly by the financial institutions and then also just by financial planners and advisors, like nobody really wanted to work with the space.

Melissa Joy: 14:36

Well, you get into annuity companies too that, just like are raping and pillaging when it comes to expenses for teachers.

David Gourley: 14:43

Oh my gosh, we could do an entire another episode on that.

Melissa Joy: 14:46

We'll have to earmark that one. It's a sad episode though.

David Gourley: 14:49

Oh my gosh. So I take extreme joy in helping people, though, navigate these student loans, because it's so predatory and you know, whenever you take out a hundred thousand dollars of student loans at a six or eight or 9% interest rate, like you don't, most people don't understand the implications of exactly what that means, and I've seen way too many times almost every time as a matter of fact where they will have taken out, you know, let's say, $70,000 back in 2010. And now it's. They've been making monthly payments on the entire time, and now they're seeing 90 or $100,000 balances and it's like that's not right.

Melissa Joy: 15:25

I just talked to somebody this week and they are in the group, the FFAEL group, I think I emailed you about that. We need to make sure that they're government backed loans and not private loans. But they have had loans for more than 20 years. They actually have graduated their own children from school, just have one kid left in school and still have a balance. So that's a prime example of some of the impact. Tell me a little bit, as we're thinking about that consolidation, because interest rates come into play as well. Student loans, you would assume, would be at a nice subsidized rate, but the rates are eye-popping nowadays, especially for certain types of loans. But when you do the IDR program or consolidation, how do the interest rates get calculated? When you had different interest rates over time?

David Gourley: 16:11

Yeah. So basically, when they do it, it's a weighted average of the consolidation and then, once it's weighted, it's rounded up to the nearest one eighth of a percent. So it's the exact thing that you're paying, more or less before and after the loan. It's just, instead of having a bunch of loans, you have one loan. The other thing that I tell people is if you're going for PSLF, it doesn't matter.

David Gourley: 16:35

I don't care if it's 100% interest rate, because the goal is to get them forgiven at the end, and it doesn't matter how much. So it's a hard thing for a lot of people to understand, but I look at it as like a monthly bill rather than the entire weight of the debt on top of your shoulder. So if we can get your payment down to 100 or $200 a month, I say, okay, you've got a $100 monthly bill or a $200 monthly bill for blank amount of months, and then it's going to be gone after that. And I think it helps people, because student loans are very, very emotional. Yes, they are, yeah, and with the size of debt, I see so many people that say I'm never going to get out from this. I say, well, we're going to come up with a plan and you're going to I love it.

Melissa Joy: 17:19

Well, let's talk about another group of loans and there may be some overlap here that I find my listeners thinking about or dealing with, which are parent plus loans. So many times in financial aid packages, if the family doesn't come in with a bucket of college savings, one of the you know kind of included and required portions of the financial aid package may be loans that the parents are encouraged or told to take out. So what kind of options do you have? If you're sitting with parent plus loans? You're also thinking about your own retirement at the same time that you're like am I going to be making these payments forever?

David Gourley: 17:51

Yeah, so there's again kind of two separate buckets here. But there's the people that could qualify for PSLF and before you mentioned, the family that has the FFEL loans that has also been putting their kids through college. If that family had been taking out Parent PLUS loans along the way, those old FFEL loans might be able to be consolidated with their new Parent PLUS loans and they might be able to get them all wiped out. So that could be a potentially big thing. If they're government-backed loans, which, if they're through, I think we talked actually this is kind of a side tangent but if they're through Navion, most of the time I'm seeing that they are government-backed, privately held. So anyways, that was a little side tangent.

Melissa Joy: 18:34

Into the weeds. But this is exactly why I want David on my team for my clients, versus me going and trying to figure out his three plus years of monthly, weekly, daily knowledge on student loans, and so you need to know your lane. I think we do a great job generally, but I want my client to talk to you, david, when we come into that situation.

David Gourley: 18:52

Well, just so your listeners know, the funniest part about this is people will ask me how did you get so good at loans? And I think this is an important thing for anybody who's I know. You deal with a lot of business or you help a lot of business owners, and the way that I got good is because I did it multiple times. I've done over 500 consultations over the last three years, and that's a lot of consultations, and so, with anybody if you're starting something new, I was so bad at the beginning. Right, I look back at that and I'm just like, oh my gosh, I hope I told them the right advice, and unfortunately, you have to start somewhere and then, once you put the reps in and learn things, now you get a lot better.

David Gourley: 19:30

So, going back to the Parent PLUS stuff, though, so there are ways right now to get you out of the terrible loan repayment options so that most Parent Plus loans go into a standard repayment, and most Parent Plus loans are very large because they're putting kids through college. I see all the time $200,000 plus balances, and so the standard repayment plan is going to put you at a payment that's going to be very high. It's going to take that payment and basically it's like a mortgage annuity chart, basically, where they're going to take it and spread it out over 10 years and at the end of 10 years you're going to pay off all the interest and all the loans. That's the standard repayment.

Melissa Joy: 20:13

But that doesn't make sense for most people because that payment is $1,500, $1,200 a month, hey you got a new mortgage, your kid got graduated and all you got to show for it was a kick in the stomach when it comes to preparing for retirement because you have this big new bill.

David Gourley: 20:31

Exactly so. After July 1st of 2025, the only repayment plan that you will be eligible for, that's an income-driven plan, is going to be that ICR. We talked about it earlier Income contingent repayment. The problem with income contingent repayment is that the terms are awful, and I don't want to get too far into the weeds of this because I'll just confuse everybody, but just know that the terms of the ICR plan are terrible. They're the worst of the five repayment plans under the IDR umbrella From now until July 1st of 2025, so there's a little bit of time.

David Gourley: 21:08

You can do this thing called the double consolidation, but I will tell you it is unbelievably complex, and I don't say that to scare anybody, but it's extremely hard to pull off, and part of it is because we have to do paper consolidations for the first round, because you can only do one online consolidation per 180 days at student aid, and so the first round of this thing has to be paper consolidations of two separate loan servicers, and then you're putting it into their hands to do what they're supposed to do, and the loan servicers are notorious for being awful at their jobs. So that's just. It is a very complicated process. I will even tell people like this is the exact step-by-step playbook that I use and I will give it to them and most I would say 95% of the time they will still hire me because it's just it's ridiculously complicated and finding the information to put into the paper applications is also incredibly complicated. They make these things so hard, which is good job security for me but awful for the regular person that's trying to navigate student loans.

David Gourley: 22:15

So in doing the double consolidation, the whole point of it is is that if you consolidate a first time and you want to do multiple consolidations, so you want to have two consolidations, so you want to do part of your loans at one loan servicer and part of your loans at another loan service. You would then have two direct consolidation loans, but they still have the parent tag with them. Then we consolidate those two separate loans together and by doing that it breaks the parent tag off of the loan and you're eligible for all of the repayment plans, including the new save repayment plan, and what I'll see is that people will go from having a $1,500 monthly payment, but if they've got a $200,000 balance, it's very easy to have that $1,500 monthly payment. The ICR option is that they're going to be about $1,200 or $1,300 for their monthly payment, and then, if they're close to retirement or even in retirement and they switched to the save repayment plan, they may get down to $100 or $200 or $300 for their monthly repayment plan, and then they can ride that out until there's several options, but number one, if they're going for PSLF until they get forgiveness.

David Gourley: 23:20

And then the second option is, if they don't, their loans can actually be forgiven after a 25-year period and being on the save repayment plan. Now to finish that one off if they go down that path and they have the 25-year forgiveness, there will likely unless there's some legislation that changes in the future they will owe taxes on the forgiven amount. This is not for public service loan forgiveness again. So, pslf there's no tax due if you get loan forgiveness. If you just do a regular IDR forgiveness, though, there will be a tax bomb at the end of that and you will owe income tax on whatever was forgiven.

Melissa Joy: 23:56

That's a lot. That's a lot, but that is just showing you optionality. And I'm assuming when you say there's multiple parent plus loans, that's because every year you have to figure out finances for that year, which is creating loans each year that your kids in school Yep, if you only have a single parent plus loan, you can't do the double consolidation.

David Gourley: 24:15

It's not possible to pull off in your situation and the government knows about this, and that's why they are closing this loophole July 1st 2025. They're saying it's done, and now that may be the same kind of hard deadline that we see with everybody else, where they kick the can down the road. I don't know. But I would say if you've got Parent PLUS loans, deal with it now, because there's enough. It would say if you've got Parent PLUS loans, deal with it now because there's enough. It does take probably six plus months to do that double consolidation process, and so I would start looking heavily at it sooner than later if you think that you could qualify for that, because you don't want to wait until next year and then lose out on that option.

Melissa Joy: 24:52

Well, and who wants to make those $1,000 PLUS payments anyway?

David Gourley: 24:55

No, no one should.

Melissa Joy: 24:58

You didn't borrow because you're just rolling in extra cash sitting around in your bank account right Like so. Definitely this is critical either making it easier to pay off student loans or make it easier for them to be paid at a more reasonable rate versus. Is it going to be more difficult? And some of that people tend to think may depend on who is elected. There's definitely, you know, the Biden administration wanted to do student loan forgiveness and met opposition in Congress, but that certainly seems to be one of their main focal points, and not necessarily for other candidates.

David Gourley: 25:40

Yeah, so let's talk about that because that's important. So when you take out student loans, you sign what's called a promissory note, and the promissory note is basically an agreement of everything that you have as part of your agreement. Pslf is written into that. So for any borrower right now who has loans or is currently taking out loans for school, they will be eligible for PSLF. It cannot go away. I shouldn't say cannot. They'd be breaking the contract.

Melissa Joy: 26:07

I guess the government can do whatever they want but it would be it's one of the most likely safest and it also has a lot of institutional.

David Gourley: 26:14

It's been institutionalized at this point right, exactly, I don't see it going away at all and I think it's very, very safe now. Where they could go with it is taking it away from future borrowers. So the high school aged kids that have never taken out a student loan yet, that could be somewhere on the chopping block down the road, but I don't see that as an issue right now. The biggest one that is an issue is the save repayment plan.

Melissa Joy: 26:40

The save repayment plan-, so tell me about that.

David Gourley: 26:42

Yeah, it is not written into any promissory note, it was just a matter of executive action. So the save repayment plan right now again, we're going to go into the weeds a little bit here, but that's okay. The way that the save repayment plan is calculated is they use what's called the federal poverty guidelines and then they take your family size and whatever the number is next to your family size. So you can even Google 2024 federal poverty guideline and then look up your family size and see the number that's next to it. Save is a 2.25 multiplier or 225% multiplier of whatever that federal poverty guideline number is. All of the other repayment plans well, not all of them the IBR, the pay and the repay were all 1.5 times or 150%. So that right there, and you can use that number to deduct off of your adjusted gross income. And you can use that number to deduct off of your adjusted gross income. So what that means is that because of the save repayment plan being a much higher number 2.25 compared to 1.5, you can deduct off a lot more out of your adjusted gross income and therefore pay less on your student loans. So if the save repayment plan goes away, they're going to revert back to the repayment plan kind of a tongue tie there, which would take you from a 2.25 multiplier back down to a 1.5. The other thing is is that, as of july 1st coming up here in just a little bit anybody that has undergrad loans in the save repayment plan is only going to pay five percent of that discretionary income. So when we say discretionary income, they take, they take adjusted gross income and subtract off the federal poverty line times the multiplier, the 2.25 multiplier. I know it gets extremely complicated, but under the save repayment plan, if you have undergrad loans starting in July, they're going to take 5% of that, whereas everybody else has been taking 10%. So all that to say, the save repayment plan is saving you a lot of money.

David Gourley: 28:40

Now, it's not necessarily the best repayment plan for everybody, so I'm not saying go out and get into it right away, Because right now, as of today, they're using 2019 tax data.

David Gourley: 28:50

If you have not done a consolidation and if you have not changed, if you have done nothing with your loans and you had loans back from before COVID, they're using 2019 tax data still.

David Gourley: 29:01

So what that means is that if you've gotten married or you know maybe I know you work with, like we said, a lot of business owners your business has really come along in the last couple of years. They're still using that old tax data, which could mean that switching to save could bump your payment up a lot, and so that's one of those things that I look for during the consultations Is this even a good move for you to do this right now? And it kind of depends on can you bump up your credits quite a bit with that consolidation? If so, I would still push you in that direction, but it's something to be aware of. But save could go away. It's kind of the big thing that a lot of people don't know or don't realize, and I think that's why the Biden administration is doing such a hard push of getting as many people as possible into the repayment plan, just because they're trying to make it more challenging to take it away.

Melissa Joy: 29:54

Interesting. Well, I think one of the things that we know from this episode. First of all, when we were prepping for the episode, we were like there are so many more things we can talk about, like tax strategies. There may be situations where one person earns a lot in a family and the other person has student loans, where they may choose to file differently in order to facilitate a better strategy. They may choose to file differently in order to facilitate a better strategy. Some people are just going to have to, you know, end up paying off their loans, and so that could change the strategy as well, where you may want to end up paying things more quickly.

Melissa Joy: 30:25

All of these are, you know, there's a lot of complexity, and I think the other thing that to me is clear is that this is not the last change. Like, the student loan landscape is dynamic. It is certainly something that everybody has an opinion about. It's an emotional topic, whether you have the loans or you're looking at the forgiveness and saying, well, I paid my own bills, and things like that. So I don't think this will be our last conversation, but we have gone so deep into so much. How can people contact you, david, if they think they need to talk to you, maybe even this month.

David Gourley: 30:59

Yeah. So I think that in the show notes there's going to be a link tree that will get you to all of my links, including where you can sign up for a consultation. As of right now, I would say the consultation would be the best place to start, and as we get closer and closer to the end of the month, I will probably take that option off the table again and just have straight into a student loan plan, just because, if they actually hold that June 30th deadline, I just don't want people to miss anything that they could potentially get significant benefit on. So that's the best way. Benefit on, so that's the best way. And then I'll also give you a link to my X and also LinkedIn accounts, just so you can. If you want to message me on there, that's fine, as well, perfect.

Melissa Joy: 31:45

I encourage people who think they may be impacted to reach out and encourage people who know friends that may benefit from the advice of the discussions that we had to follow up, because, you know, share with your friends, because this is a topic that I have had multiple conversations over the last few months with clients of a variety of income and asset levels who have told me about student loans that they, you know, receive forgiveness on. So do know that it works, but it does take some extra steps and, david, thank you so much for your time.

David Gourley: 32:18

Thank you, and I'll throw one more thing out there, that I do my best work for people working towards public service loan forgiveness or trying to do that double consolidation, and so if they're not in one of those boats there's probably somebody else who does better work Because, as you said, even inside the student loan world there's so much complexity that that's the lanes that I've found that I'm the most beneficial to help people out. So if they're not in that category and need somebody, I know a ton of other people that work with student loans and I can push maybe, towards the right person.

Melissa Joy: 32:49

Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. If you found value in this episode, the best way you can support the podcast is to forward an episode to a friend or leave a review. Go to pearlplancom and the podcast link to get all the resources and links mentioned.