What a Student Loan Consultation From Student Loan Planner Entails

What's up, everybody? It's Megan Landris, one of Student Loan Planners, Senior Student Loan Consultants, and I'm going to be walking through how to schedule a consultation with us and what that all entails. So let's jump into it. You'll be able to schedule your custom plan directly through our website in two separate places. You'll see a Get Your Custom Plan button on our home page, or you can go to the Get Help section at the top of our browser or our web page. And if you already have student loans, you'll want to schedule through this after you have Student Loan Debt tab. If you have not borrowed yet or if you're still in the midst of school, not close to graduation yet, but still in the midst of school borrowing, you could select this before you have Student Loan Debt section. This will take you to a calendar where you'll be able to book a time that works well for you. It'll put it on our calendar and send you a calendar invite, putting it on your calendar, and we meet via Zoom. So you will have a Zoom meeting link for our meeting time where you could sign in. Ideally, you sign in on a computer or an iPad for a better viewing experience. While we don't have video on in our call, we will be using screen share to show you our planning documents that we're working you through. Now, when you book that consultation, you'll have a couple pieces of information you'll plug in initially. So, of course, your name, phone number in case Zoom is down or we're not able to connect on Zoom specifically. Also, the name of whoever might be joining you on the call. So this could be a spouse or a parent and you could put in your cell phone number too if you would like to receive text message reminders about our meeting time. Now, who are you going to be paired with? Well, it could be one of our lovely student loan consultants. We have a team. All of us are within the financial planning space, highly qualified. We're either CFAs, CFPs or CSLP, which stands for Certified Student Loan Professionals. So we have dedicated our practice areas to helping people navigate student loan debt specifically. Also, take a peek at our reviews. We have been rated five stars out of five. So 99% of our customers have given us a five-star review after a consultation with us. These are all verified. They've all worked with us specifically. You can take a scroll through to see what someone had said about the process itself or a specific consultant that they worked with, the result that they got, you know, after working with us. So this could be helpful in your decision as well if you are unsure. Once you schedule your consultation, you'll be prompted to do a brief questionnaire that'll give us some data that goes into our number crunching and analysis for your planning, such as your balance, interest rate, a little bit details about your family. So if you're married, if your spouse has loans, what your, you know, career or income aspirations are. So all the numbers that go into our planning. And the second piece of information you'll be asked to send us prior to our call is a text file of your federal student loan information or what's called the NSLDS file. This is gathered from studentaid.gov. Now this is if you have federal student loans, which the majority of people out there do. So if you have federal student loans, you'll be able to download this file. You'll have instructions and your calendar invite on how to do this to be able to download this text file and send that over to us. That helps give us the raw details of your loan types, interest rates, a little bit about your repayment history or forbearance history, and really just gives us all the ammo we need to be able to to get and get right into the planning as soon as we start our call. Our consultations are 60 minutes long and we jump in with talking about the goals, the objectives that you have, biggest concerns that you have with your student loans, and we clarify some of the information that you had sent in advance if there's any clarifying needed to be done and make sure that we have everything we need to start jumping into the planning. So we start actually with looking at the data, really laying out the the details of your loans and that text file that you're able to download and send us in advance, we plug into one of our file converters. This you will get as something deliverable after our call. This is an example of a file that Travis built. It helps us view what types of loans you have and a little bit about the payment history. So it goes in and it counts up how many months of payment payments you've had, how many months of forbearance, consecutive forbearance you've had, or aggregate forbearance. This helps us start to map out the timeline to either a forgiveness threshold like public service loan forgiveness or income-driven loan forgiveness or really just where you're at in your journey. That helps paint the picture a little bit more and also tells us some details about what repayment plan you're on and how many maybe PSLF qualified payments they've counted up for you, what your monthly payment is, and when you're going to have to update that payment. So it really helps give us an idea of where are we at right now. That way we could skip into our next planning document to talk about where we're going to be going. Next we jump into our planning document. This is also a deliverable that you'll receive after our call and we plug in all the personal information. So your balance, your interest rate, when we started repayment, a little bit about your family size, your income information. That's needed to help project income-driven repayment plans for you and model that out. Next tab you'll see our calculations where we start to walk through what each repayment plan might look like when it comes to your monthly payment. Then we start to model out really every which way you could look at your student loan repayment journey on any of the plans that you're eligible for. We really pretend like you go that direction and stack those up against each other to hone in on what the most optimal plan is going to be for you specifically. And we can stress test this as well if we have different ideas about what income projections might look like. We can go back in and do a couple different scenarios if need be. And we can model out public service loan forgiveness, refinancing, the different income-driven plans. We have another worksheet that we help model out another plan called income contingent repayment for parent plus loans. So this really helps us bring together the plan itself but paint the picture with numbers that that will help you make good decisions on what you want to do next with your student loan situation. Now our goal is at the end of our call we have a plan of action and we talk through how you can implement that plan of action, where to go, what website you need to go to, what applications you need to complete. We can even go through a demo of exactly how to how to go through the forms or how to you know really take that next step. And from there you receive a follow-up email with a digest of our conversation with resources, links to things that we had discussed, and of course the worksheets that we walked through on our call. That way you can refer back to them as time goes on or when things become relevant to do like when you need to recertify income or when you need to submit forms in the future. The consultation comes with 12 months of email correspondence if you have follow-up questions after our call. Payment is prompted right after our consultation. We'll send you our recap email with the deliverables and we'll send you an invoice that you can pay through our secure portal. Working with Student Loan Planner to help navigate your student loan situation, not only do you have the consultant that you're working with, but you have the whole team behind your back. And we've worked on collaboratively thousands of student loan cases. So we'll be able to help you get to where you're going and make sure you're getting there in the most efficient way possible. So I look forward to working with you or I look forward to hearing about your success stories with your student loan consultant. And thanks for choosing Student Loan Planner.