(Ep. 61) Student Loan Hacks You Haven't Heard Before with Meagan Landress | Student Loan Planner

In a situation where this strategy could be beneficial is when forgiveness is inevitable for a spouse and when there is a large balance discrepancy between spouses. So, spouse one has a huge balance, spouse two has a lower balance, but both spouses have similar income. Welcome to the Student Loan Planner Podcast. Today, I have our very own Megan Landris on the podcast and she is one of our newest Student Loan Planner Consultants. Megan, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. There's a lot of people out there that are really going to want to get to know you. One of the weird things that happens sometimes is people will send me an email and they'll be like, hey, I know you because you're on the podcast every week, but I don't know Ben or Megan or Rob or Justin or Lauren, right? Because sometimes we don't have them on the podcast. That's definitely something that we hope to change here in 2020 is to have y'all be more regular guests on the show. So just for starters, who are you and how did you get involved into the student loan world? I have always been a finance nerd. I started out doing bookkeeping at a gym facility in high school. That was my first job. And then it drove me to like finance, went to school to study finance with a business degree and figured out through an internship, I really enjoyed personal planning and personal financial planning. I thought there was a more obviously a personal touch there versus doing business spreadsheets and profit and loss documents and all of that good stuff. I fell into that. I really enjoyed the internship I did through college. I worked at a financial planning firm afterwards full-time under two certified financial planners. And that was kind of my residency program of learning the ins and outs of financial planning. But I quickly learned that the clientele I was attracting was younger adults. And younger adults these days have large amounts of student loan debt. And that was not something our firm was equipped to handle or didn't know how to handle. And we kind of treated it like it was a regular debt and just told people to pay it down or take advantage of PSLF. But I felt like there needed to be a more in-depth look at it. And so that's what kind of drove my nerdiness to start investigating a little bit more in the student loan planning world. And I dove in really deep and here we are. My whole career is designed around it now. I know. And you went into business for yourself and you started Financial Coach Megan, where you're working mostly with young attorneys for financial planning. And then we met at this financial planning conference. How did you get in touch with some of the big experts in the student loan world? And what did you learn from them? And how did you become an expert even before I met you? I went out on my own March 2017. One of my first clients through Financial Coach Megan was a chiropractor. And she had ginormous amounts of student loan debt compared to her income and was going to be that way for a long time. And so I really started to get hot and heavy with all the details on the federal student loan system. You know, how it worked, how to attain private sector forgiveness through those maximum repayment periods, if that was going to make sense long term. So I did a lot of homework and digging on my own. And then I found the CSLP program, the Certified Student Loan Professional designation. And I didn't know it was real. At first, I called the phone number for this program. And I think the first question I asked was, Hey, is this real? Is this legitimate? Because I'd never heard about it before. But it was exactly what I was craving for the education. I wanted to learn more about the intricacies of this type of planning. And so I learned everything outside of what I just learned on my own. I learned everything from Jantz Hoffman and Heather Jarvis in the student loan planning world. Went through that program, got obsessed with it even more. And I ran into you. I've been following your information for years, literally years. And I admired it. I loved it. Loved your content. You were the only one out there vocalizing that student loan planning was a practice. It needed to be talked about. There were options available. People could help people with that. So ran into you at the conference. And I'm so glad we did. It was very random, but I wouldn't have changed it for anything. So my favorite memory from that is Jantz Hoffman, Heather Jarvis. For people who don't know who those two people are, they're like some of the OG student loan folks that Heather even helped, I think, write some of the regulations when some of the stuff was coming out. So certainly people that have been at the game for even longer than I have. I think you were there and maybe one or two other people. And Heather had this living room, hotel suite. And we just were sitting there, golly, what was it, like drinking mojitos and just debating student loan rules, like the most arcane stuff in the world. So we're going to go over some of that in today's episode Yeah, we're going to go over some of those conversations because I bet a lot of people would have loved to have been a fly on the ball. In fact, my only regret was I didn't have a mic and I didn't press record in some of those conversations. So good. But you can't teach passion. You can't teach like motivation for deep knowledge. And I could tell that you had that, which is one of the big reasons I wanted you to join our student loan planner team. And you have not only the expertise, but you also have really deep knowledge in just the way that the processes work and the paperwork works and that part of the equation. And that's something that while I encounter it all the time, you had a level of knowledge about that part of things that I'm really excited about having on the team now, because adding Ben, having his CPA background is real helpful for whenever we have a random tax question in terms of how it relates to student loans. So that's probably one of our trends is trying to hire folks that have that passion, but then also fulfill something that we're weaker at so that we can do a better job of helping folks get to the right answers. So let's just dive into some of this stuff. So what challenges have you seen with younger couples who are getting married, who are student loan borrowers? I mean, I think that you mentioned giving a talk at a bridal show at one point. I mean, just what kind of stresses are you seeing for couples in particular? Debt is now a conversation that people have before getting married and how they're going to enter the marriage treating that debt. So I've had many, many clients I've worked with where they enter their marriage with the understanding that, you know, if both of them don't have student loan debt, only the borrower, whichever spouse that was, is responsible for it. And the other spouse, you know, love you, but that was what you took on before our marriage. And so that's your responsibility. And so sometimes that's overwhelming because federal debt, of course, takes into account spousal income, depending on what plan you're on. And it's overwhelming for folks to navigate or understand how to tackle appropriately. That's some of the guidance that people are looking for. And then also just delaying marriage in general. I mean, you'd be surprised how many people have told me, you know, oh, well, we've been waiting to get married until we figure this out, or we're waiting to get married until this is paid off. I think that's fascinating because there are ways we can go about it. You shouldn't delay marriage for student loan purposes. I really don't think you should. Yeah. The PSLF living in sin strategy, right? Just kidding. Putting it the way they might have where I grew up in the South. But I think it's important for each person in the relationship just to be on the same page. I don't think there's any right or wrong answer to this. The two kind of ways that I've seen people approach debt, especially when one person has debt and one doesn't, is some couples are like, and usually it's the borrower who feels this way. They're like, no, it's my debt. I want to pay it. And like, I'll let my spouse cover, you know, living expenses or, you know, a disproportionate share of the bills, but I want to be the one to handle this. And that's definitely a big kind of attitude that a lot of folks have. And then some couples are kind of like, well, no, we're getting married. I don't like these divisions. And so like, I want to co-sign. Sometimes that's an interesting conversation because you got to realize it's not 50% of marriages ended in divorce. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but certainly there's a probability. And if you co-sign, I mean, that could really hurt someone. And so we really generally try to get people not to co-sign, but some people are like, you know what? I'm already in lots of trouble if we get divorced anyway, so I might as well co-sign the loans and get a lower interest rate because that's probably not going to happen, right? So I respect it both ways. And we'd see people that will co-sign, you know, 100, 200,000 or we'll put 50,000 towards one of the spouse's student loans. And I don't know, I don't think there's any wrong answer, but I'm just curious if you've seen some of that kind of stuff and what some of your stranger stories with married couples and student loans might be. Yeah. I mean, there is no right or wrong answer. And I tell people that when we're just talking about cashflow, when a household is brought together, there's no right or wrong answer for if you should have a joint checking account or keep things separate or who's paying what portion of it. I mean, there's no right or wrong answer. It just has to work for the couple. One of the horror stories, not horror stories, could have been horror stories was one of my clients years ago now, but she graduated with huge amounts of student loan debt. They just got married, going into the marriage that she was going to take care of it. She made half the income that her spouse made without student loan debt. And her spouse was adamant about filing taxes joint because they were married. And that's just what married people do. And so I walked through the numbers between, hey, if we're going to keep these loans federal, which we should because of the debt to balance income ratio or ratio altogether, filing joint is really going to crush her financial situation because it's going to factor in your income when you're not helping with the payment. So just walking through the numbers is helpful to lay out all the options available. Again, there's no right or wrong answer, but mathematically there can be a right or wrong answer. So walking through that is easy. Yeah. Yeah. Usually I have some talks with folks. I've had a couple ones that have been real weird. I had one where this couple literally were going to get a divorce based off of what I showed them with just how much less they would pay in taxes and student loans if they were divorced. And they're like, well, if you're telling us that this would save us $5,000 a year, then I don't see a reason rationally why it makes sense to be legally married. A strategic legal divorce. We're just going to still be married mentally. Yeah. Usually we bring that up just to show people everything. And we usually just explain it away. But this couple was one of those extreme rationalists that were like, oh, we want to do either one, whichever costs us the least. What I would probably say to that couple now, which is maybe hopefully they're not listening and I'm going to get in a bunch of trouble. But now I would actually probably say, well, just go ahead and amend your tax returns from separate to joint. Every two-year-old tax return you have, take it from separate joint and get the money back and keep the payment low. That's what I probably would say now. And worst case scenario, that forgiveness gets disallowed. You'll just have to pay it. It's not the end of the world, right? As long as you have a really high savings rate. We've seen people that have had powers of attorney, guardian agreements for children, just all kinds of stuff that have decided not to get legally married because of their student loans. But I agree with you wholeheartedly that if you do want to be married, there's no reason to let your student loans interfere with it because we can generally make the math show why it doesn't need to be that way. I think that that's kind of a misconception that people can't get married if they have student loans. You can absolutely get married if you have student loans. You might just need to have a slightly more complicated financial life. And then to that person that was doing joint instead of separate, that's just a tax strategy, right? I don't know how your thoughts are on this, but I tell people all the time, if it makes you feel more comfortable just doing spiritual marriage instead of legal marriage, there's nothing in any major world religion that I know of that says you're only married if the U.S. government says you are. Right. I can't find that in Proverbs or something or whatever, the Quran or the Talmud or whatever. So I mean, you can get married with secular wedding, religious wedding, whatever you want, and you don't actually have to turn in the paperwork. So that's an option too. I probably wouldn't fool with that for somebody that's doing a 20-year kind of IBR, because that's just way too long, or 20-year pay as you earn. But for somebody that's doing PSLF that's five years away from it, it might be something to consider. But you definitely would want to look into it first. I sure did check my math again a hard second time when that couple was talking about divorcing because of the consult. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. Right. Let me do some due diligence. Exactly. So any stories that you've seen for stressors for borrowers that you've just have been really hurting someone's life and the pre and the post? Any interesting transformation stories come to mind? One of the more interesting cases I had was with student loan planner. This young woman had just graduated. She was a travel nurse living out of a camper, trying to keep expenses very low because she had the intention of paying off her six-figure student loan debt in the next two or three years. She had crunched the numbers, knew how much she was going to make, knew how much her expenses were going to be, and she was going to throw every extra penny towards the student loan debt. She was working for a nonprofit hospital. And so I heard out there, hey, have you thought about public service loan forgiveness? And she kind of brushed it off. I think she had already mentally not included that as an option in her head because she had seen some horror stories about people getting denied and it just not working out. But as we continued through the consult, we talked about just her intentions. If she wanted to continue working in public service and she loves her job, she has no intentions of leaving where she's at or leaving the public service space because that's what she's passionate about. And so we just did the numbers. We did the math. And I compared, you know, if she were to pay it off in a very, very short timeline, pay off all the balance, the entire balance, as to comparing that to going on an income-driven plan, going towards public service loan forgiveness, the cost difference and how much she would have paid was outstanding. It was crazy. And so I think that changed her mind pretty quickly. Just showing her the math again on the benefits of being able to save starting now in conjunction with having a very reasonable monthly payment for her student loans and going towards that longer term forgiveness, you know, it really changed her thought process. And she, you know, she wasn't going to be throwing everything towards the student loan debt anymore. And that was a little freeing, I think, for her because that was, of course, a burden. She didn't want to throw all her money at the student loan debt, but she wanted to be out of it in the best way possible. And that's what she thought was the best way possible. So I thought that one was interesting. Certainly. I mean, the PSLF stories are always interesting. There's so many misconceptions about that, right? People have attitudes they've picked up from just popular personal finance shows out there. They have, I don't want to call it a conservative political bent that causes them not to trust the government. But there's a little bit of that sometimes I see with like some anti-PSLF sentiment. There's various things that you'll see out there. People just feeling like there's sometimes like, I guess, the left of center side of the bias against PSLF is often like, you know, oh, the Republican administration sabotaging the program is not going to be there for me, like basically people let all their own personal biases into the program instead of just looking at the math. That's certainly a case I've seen before where somebody thinks that they need to pay the debt off completely. And a lot of times what will happen is they'll do it for like a year and then they'll come back and say, I've made a horrible mistake. I'm ready to change. Yeah. They get exhausted. Because you can do, I mean, like even Dave Ramsey says this on his show, like he wants people to do rice and beans, no restaurants, no vacations for like six months to a year, which is their emergency state while they're getting rid of all their credit card debt and all those things. And then once they're done with the worst kinds of debt, then they take the foot off the gas a little bit because I think he knows emotionally, he's one of the best emotional personal finance thinkers out there. He knows emotionally that people get exhausted. I mean, there's a reason people don't go to the gym six days a week. Most people, most people might go for like a month at that level of frequency, right? You know, I think that's definitely a important thing to think about is what is your endurance factor? And is that going to cause your student loan strategy to change? And is this something that a strategy that can endure? And that's one reason why I like doing the student loan refinancing ladder strategy where you do, you know, the 20 year, 10 year, five year. So you keep your monthly payment minimized to what's required of you just because it doesn't create undue stress on somebody's life. But yeah, that's a great story. So let's jump into some controversial loopholes. So these are some fun ones. And I think this is a good illustration that there are always things in the student loan world because of how complicated it is that we're learning that you'll probably learn listening to this show, that it just kind of blows my mind that I'm still learning new stuff. And I do this all day, every day, done it for three years with student loan planners, since we started it over three years, and I'm still learning new strategies. So it kind of is mind blowing. So the first one I want to talk about is a strategy where you do married filing separately. And one spouse would do something like the pay as you earn program. And one spouse would do something like the revised pay as you earn program. And somehow this could result in you paying less money than if both spouses filed jointly and did either one of those plans together. So maybe you can walk us through at a very high level, what the heck I'm even talking about. And then we might talk about some applications. Let me see if I can articulate this well. So first and foremost, it's interesting because when you file taxes jointly and you pay your student loans jointly, they look at your household debt and they look at your household income and they subtract the poverty line from your household income to calculate your monthly payment. And then they divide that proportionately between who has the higher balance for their student loan debt, specifically that spouse has the higher monthly payment and the spouse with the lower balance has the lower monthly payment. Now, when you file separately, you are still married. So you still get that two-person household poverty line deduction from your adjusted gross income. And when you're a household still, just financially speaking, you're a household. It's interesting because that poverty line is now subtracted from your household income, technically twice. What I mean by that is you're filing separately. Your payment is going to be based off of your own income. Your own income subtracts the poverty line for two household members. And then that's how they calculate that spouse's monthly payment. Now, same thing goes for spouse two. They file separately. That payment is based off of their own income and that poverty line household size of two is deducted from spouse two as well. So you technically get two household size deductions. Does that make sense so far? It does. And let me just pause there for a second and just say this, right? So just before I get a bunch of angry emails being like, you gave me bad advice. I could have paid less money. The reality is that that might save you like three or four or 500 bucks, right? Yeah. Minimal. Minimal. So- Yeah, it's minimal. So the tax filing costs of doing that would probably overwhelm any savings. And it's way more complicated. And so that's why we don't get into that for our formal advice. But that is certainly one thing that's interesting, but let's, yeah. So then the next part is even more interesting, I think. Yeah. But to expand upon that, going from there, if you're looking at your household balance for your student loan payment, hang on, let me back up. So repay, let me get into some linguistics, revised pay as you earn counts joint income for your payment calculation, regardless of how you file taxes. So if you file taxes separate, it's still going to be based on both you and your spouse's income if it's accessible. So you can't avoid that by filing separately. Why would one spouse jump on revised pay as you earn while they're filing separately if it doesn't separate out income and one spouse jump on a different income driven plan? So this is where it gets really technical. So a reason to do this would be when one spouse gets the short end of the stick. And what I mean by that is when one spouse has a significant amount of debt compared to the other. And when they have their payment based off of just their own income, it can reduce that proportionate monthly payment. Megan, you can go ahead and maybe just give an example. I think that'd make things a little bit easier. Yeah. Let me walk through an example and let me set the stage to where in a situation where this strategy could be beneficial is when forgiveness is inevitable for a spouse and when there is a large balance discrepancy between spouses. So spouse one has a huge balance, spouse two has a lower balance, but both spouses have similar income. So spouse one, let's say, has $40,000 of student loan debt and spouse two has $150,000 of student loan debt. Again, both spouses make about the same income. And so the spouse with the lowest balance repay could make sense to reap the benefit of a proportionate payment allocation. So again, repay only considers joint income. Doesn't matter if you file separately or joint, it's always going to consider joint income. So repay helps spouse with the lowest balance reap the benefit of a proportionate payment allocation. What you're saying it sounds like is that it works both ways. So the spouse that has that smaller $40,000 or $50,000 debt, they could get the benefit of that proportional split of payment. So if they're both, let's say, at $80,000 of income, $160,000 of income total, the calculated repay payment might be like $1,200 a month, right? And then the one spouse owes 4x the debt. And so of that $1,200 payment or so, I mean, these are super rough numbers I'm just doing in my head, but you know, so like maybe $8,900 of that would go towards the other person's debt. And then maybe $2,300 or so would go to the person with the $40,000 of debt. So that person is now paying less than the amount of principal that they have. But instead of having that proportional, you know, $8,900 payment that the person with the $150,000 debt is paying, they instead by filing separately would be able to pay based off of their $80,000 income, which would be a payment under pay as you earn of maybe like $500, $600 a month, which is like a $2,000 or $3,000 per year savings. Is that right? Exactly. So we've reaped the benefit of keeping spouse with the lowest balance, maybe going towards PSLF, for example, with the lowest possible payment because their payment proportion out of both of them is let's say 20%. And so yes, their payment would be like $200 off of this example, potentially. But what that does is it shoots the other spouse in the foot if they were to jump on repay too, because they make the same income, but their payment specifically is going to be two, three times what the other spouse's payment is going to be. So since they filed separately, they can jump on a plan, not repay, but pay or IBR, for example, that bases the payment off of just their own income, reducing their payment as well. And so we've achieved efficiency across the board. I don't need student loan help. I just need to read a couple blog posts. I'm an expert. I read Reddit. I'm smart. I know everything there is to know. I'm getting some self-interested interpretations of redneck accent there. I'm not insinuating that people can't figure this stuff out for themselves. They can. If you go to medical school or dental school or whatever, law school, you're smart enough to figure this out. The question is, do you want to go through the level? Yeah, do you want to? Do you want to get this nerdy? Yeah, I think that's really more what it comes down to the most is we do have these meetings every couple of weeks, and we debate new developments, new strategies, new loopholes that we're hearing. And we try to vet them and make sure they make sense. And we like to put a giant, highlighted, bolded, yellow highlighter rule of thumb as to when this loophole can make sense, if we're going to even entertain it. And so in the case of this loophole, I would specifically think about it for somebody who is probably going to go for pay-as-you-earn forgiveness for 20 years for one spouse, and then probably would do PSLF for the other spouse. And the person who's doing PSLF probably has a relatively smaller balance, like a 40, 50, 60K kind of balance that they could get PSLF on and they wouldn't have gotten PSLF at all if that hadn't happened. Because, you know, repay is a 25-year plan, pay is a 20-year plan. So that causes things to not line up perfectly if you're doing this for more of a long-term strategy. We really do put a lot of thought behind this. It's not sort of like, pay your loans in 20 years, give us $500 or whatever. We do a lot of math. We do, and a lot of prep work and stuff. So I mean, hopefully that's something that at least people will be aware of. Maybe some people that are the do-it-yourselfers that I just compared to, you know, like a good old boy redneck or something, you know, hopefully they won't be too offended and they can use that loophole for their own benefit. So let's talk about some other paperwork issues. We were debating, I think, a while back as to what to say if you've just gotten married, but you were single for your most recent tax return and asked, are you married? We've had a big debate about this. So maybe kind of share why that would be important. In your year of marriage, your student loan plan gets a little hairy in the sense that, you know, if you have to recertify your income after you're married, but before you file a tax return, which is common, you know, you get married in March, let's say, or April after you filed taxes, single, and you have to recertify in November. I mean, yes, you are married. You can't say you're single. And so that's a question on the recertification paperwork. If you're single or married, you'd say married. But what the recertification does is if you do this online, it'll automatically link back to your most recently filed tax return. If your most recently filed tax return was single, you know, you can answer those questions, honestly, that you didn't file joint last year, because you didn't, you weren't married, you are married now. And one of the next questions is to the tune of, you know, do you have access to your spouse's tax return from last year? And I've had a lot of people say, honestly, to that question, no, because they weren't married. So they don't have access to that tax return from the year before. And what that does is it avoids having the spouse's income factored into their payment in that crossover year. So the payment's still based off of their single tax return. They were honest and true. They are married, but they're not providing that tax return information because they weren't married at the time when that was filed, that most recently one was filed. So that's kind of a way around it. I think what we kind of settled on was that there's really no way that you can mess it up unless you give them pay stubs. Is that accurate? Yeah. So the one way you can mess it up is if one of the questions, and we've talked about this before, has changed to after they link the tax return, it asks, has your income decreased since your last tax return? If you say yes to that, and yes, you're married, they're going to ask for pay stubs for both you and your spouse now. But that question's a lot easier to say no to now because most people's income doesn't decrease in a year. Typically, as you go through your career, it increases over time. Right. And that language changed. It used to just be, has your income, is it significantly different? We did backflips and circus acts to try to figure out what the heck that meant. Because what is the meaning of the word significant? Well, depends on the meaning of that word, like from regulatory perspective. So it's just kind of nutso, you know, and at least they made it clear as to what they meant, which is like, has it decreased? But that's a great tip that if you say yes, it's decreased since your last tax return, they'll ask for pay stubs and they're going to ask for your spouses. I mean, I personally feel comfortable checking no to that box just because if you haven't filed a tax return yet, I don't know. I don't feel like you're really married for the purposes of the DOE, you know? I mean, maybe that's incorrect. I mean, I don't think it gets you in trouble either way. So I think that, you know, you just want to always do everything online. If they ever ask for pay stubs and just assume that you messed something up, you know, and just get them the tax return. That's just generally good advice. Yeah. And one way, if you link your tax return and it's not linking correctly, one quick tip would be make sure that your name and your address is exactly how it was spelled out on that tax return that you're trying to link through. Because if you go by Sam, but your real name is Samantha and you put Sam on there, it's not going to link through. So you need to go back and correct that information for it to successfully bring it through. Or if you change your name for marriage, right? I mean, that happens to a lot of people. Yeah. Right. Let's talk about double consolidation. So this is for parent plus borrowers who have loans that they took out for their children's education. And it's a loophole that I became aware of maybe six months to a year ago. It's very involved, but let's just try to keep it high level. So it's really for the folks in their 50s, 60s, 70s out there that are just crushed from a lack of affordable income driven options for parent plus loans. At a high level, kind of tell people what parent plus borrowers can get access to if they just consolidate regularly and what they might get access to if they did this double consolidation loophole. Parent plus loans are different than if a student borrowed for themselves. They do not have access to the same repayment options, even though they're federal loans, which is sometimes confusing for people. So if you were to consolidate your parent plus loans all together, they turn into what's called a direct consolidation loan that consolidated parent plus loans. So that's important. Keep that in mind. That opens the door to have access to one income driven plan, what's called income contingent repayment, which is the oldest income driven plan out there. I think it was available as of 1998, but it's based on 20% of discretionary income. That doesn't provide a lot of relief for folks a lot of times because 20% of discretionary income is a lot. It also doesn't have the 1.5 multiplier off of your poverty line deduction. That's kind of a technicality, but that's also why it's just higher. Yeah, the deduction's lower. It hits your double. Exactly. So the deduction's lower and it's 20% of discretionary income. So oftentimes not a relief for folks. And so traditionally the other alternative was to refinance. And that can cause problems if someone is not able to refinance due to credit or if the balance is just overwhelming to where the payment itself would be overwhelming. There is a legal loophole in the system to where if you implement this process, because it is a process, you can open the door to have access to those lower income driven repayment options. So pay, repay, and IBR. You do two separate consolidation processes. So if you remember, linguistics are important. If you consolidate once, it's a direct consolidation loan that consolidated a Parent PLUS loan. So Parent PLUS is still somewhere in that loan code. But if we do this process twice, meaning if you have, let's say, two Parent PLUS loans, you consolidate those separately. One Parent PLUS loan, you consolidate in and of itself. That turns into a direct consolidation loan. The other Parent PLUS loan you consolidate within itself. Now you have two direct consolidation loans that consolidate a Parent PLUS loan. Now what you do is you consolidate those two together. And what you have is a direct consolidation that consolidated two direct consolidation loans, and we wipe out the Parent PLUS Loan Code. And so direct consolidation loans are eligible for repay, IBR, and pay, and that opens the door there. But the process has to be done correctly. Does that make sense? Yeah, and it's confusing. And just to give an example as to how this can really help somebody, I just decided I would calculate what a payment might be with $50,000 of income for a single person, right? Say you got $100,000 of loans. So if you did the pay as you were in plan with 50,000 of income, that'd be about $266 a month. And if you did that same plan on the ICR plan, which is what Parent PLUS borrowers are stuck with using, then that's 633 a month. So that's obviously a very large difference. You're talking about $3,000 or $4,000 difference there in higher payments if you don't do this. The good news is I think everybody that we told to do ICR consolidations for, like I think that when we tell somebody to do that, it's because most of their income's coming from Social Security, right? It's because that they can really get their AGI very low and their ICR payments and retirement are going to be very manageable. So while you theoretically could use this to lower your payments, I don't think this is something that somebody missed out on should feel terrible about. I don't think that. I think that this is just a way to try to save as much money as possible. And the reason why we became aware of it is somebody pointed out a very obscure part of the PROSPER Act, which was the House GOP's effort to reform student loans about a year or two ago. And I'll actually read the rule just to show you how kind of crazy this stuff gets. In section 468.2b, that's how specific this stuff gets. And it says, an income-based repayment schedule shall not be available to a consolidation loan borrower who, and then it says, use the proceeds of a consolidation loan to discharge the liability of another consolidation loan. So in other words, that was the House Republicans literally identifying that this was a legal loophole by explicitly trying to close it. So that's how you know that this loophole exists. In terms of processing it, you have to use paperwork. And so it is a little bit complicated. And so we have a YouTube video coming out on our channel. And in fact, if you haven't subscribed to us on YouTube, you really should, because we put out pretty cool stuff on that all the time. If you just search student loan planner on YouTube, you'll find it. That's going to have a step-by-step guide that you've put together for us, Megan, on how somebody can do a Parent PLUS double consolidation on their own. Also, people can work with us directly and work with you, and you can explain it to them and show them how to do it. Basically, you have to involve all four loan servicers to make it happen. And you have to use a paper application also to make it happen, because you want to make sure they don't make a mistake. Because if basically, if you consolidate everything, you're stuck with ICR. So like you said, you're just basically sending in two paper applications. Say your loans are at Navient, right? So you'd send it to Great Lakes and Nelnet with two paper applications, and you have to list the loan ID numbers on that application. And then you have to do another consolidation of the two consolidation loans into one loan, and that's the one you can send to the fourth loan servicer that exists. And that's how you get access to Pay-As-You-Earn or Revised Pay-As-You-Earn, because the proceeds of that loan that repaid the consolidation loan was not for Parent PLUS. It was a consolidation loan that repaid Parent PLUS. So this stuff gets super complicated, right? I think the thing that the listeners would care about is if you're 50, 60, 70-something and you have Parent PLUS, you could pay 70% less, right? Or 60% less on your student loans if you're still working and making a significant income. So I think that that's a really interesting policy question, you know? Because I think the reason they didn't do that is because ICR makes paying a little painful. And so if you have no limit on what you could borrow, then I do think there'd be a lot of like 60, 70-something year-old parents that would just say, well, shoot, I'm just going to borrow the maximum, like unlimited sum, because I'm just living on Social Security anyway. And Social Security is not even considered in some of these calculations for the payment either, right? So you could borrow like a million dollars of student loans and buy your kids' cars and maybe even try to buy a house or, you know, something extreme. And then you're just going to be paying back zero and then the loan's forgiven tax-free when you die. So I think that's why they put some of those restrictions on that. But, you know, if the loopholes exist, we're going to help people figure it out to try to maximize their own financial situation. You know, that's our philosophy, is our obligation is to the client. If the rules are broken, they need to be fixed. You know, don't shoot the messenger. So a couple more questions for you. There's community property states, and I'm just going to read them out so listeners know if they're in one. Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. So I feel like that's probably 30% of the American population, maybe. I have been debating this as to whether or not we should say every single borrower with over $100,000 in a community property state needs a student loan plan from us. Why am I saying that, and do you disagree or agree? I would agree initially, but I think you're saying that because community property states, when filing separately, split income down the middle versus keeping income directly proportionate to what you actually made in that year. So for example, if I make $50,000, my spouse makes $100,000. If I filed here in Georgia, for example, I live in Atlanta, Georgia, and filed separately, my payment would be based off of $50,000 or $100,000 if I was the other spouse. Now, in a community property state, you add those together, so it'd be $150,000, split it down the middle, and your payment would then be based off of that $75,000, not whatever your proportionate income was. So it can either hurt you or help you depending on which side of the income spectrum you're on, but there's ways that you can combat how it would hurt you by filing separate alternative documentation for income versus a tax return. Yeah, I think a lot of times somebody might have a state-home spouse and live in California and think that they're a clear refinancing case, and they're not because they're not aware of splitting the income down the middle, which cuts their payment in half. There's people out there that assume they have to refinance that alternative documentation of income cases that actually could be paying on their actual 50,000 incomes instead of half of the household income where you're forced to refinance. There's people that could avoid that. Actually, I think the only maybe one or two bad reviews we've ever gotten with studentloanplanner.com slash reviews, the only bad ones we've ever gotten, I think, were some of these alternative documentation cases in community property states early on when we were starting doing this consulting service, and they're, I mean, incredibly complicated. I mean, I don't think Congress had any clue that this was gonna become a problem because I don't think they really thought that through, right, like nine state-specific laws and the way that that affects federal returns, and they opened this door by not requiring both spouses' incomes to be counted. And if you do require both spouses' income to be counted, it's a perverse incentive to not get married. So that's something to think about. And then if you do allow the filing separately, well, that creates all these loopholes and problems and headaches for people that live in these states that require distribution of income on federal income tax returns in weird ways. I think that if somebody is making 300,000 a year, 150K of student loans, private sector, they live in California, yeah, okay, sure, refinance. If you have 30,000 of student loans, private sector, eventually you're gonna make enough money to not get forgiveness on that, so just pay it back, right? So I mean, most cases, I guess, for the obvious cases, probably don't need a specialist's help, but I think just way more people than realize need help in community property states. So many cases of one-income earner households in places like Texas, the dentist is making 300 grand, they've got 500K in debt, they're feeling crushed with these $2,500 a month student loan payments, and they find out that they could be paying 1,100 a month from this breadwinner loophole. I really feel like people in those states need to have their eyes wide open with their student loan strategy just to make sure they're not messing anything up. Last question I've got for you, studentaid.gov got redesigned. Can you explain just in a couple minutes what they did and do our listeners need to care? This was very recent. They did this over Christmas break, the new year. If you try to go to studentloans.gov now, it's gonna redirect you to studentaid.gov, which is not a big deal. What they're trying to do is consolidate those websites because it was historically very difficult to know where to go to get what information and to do what. Studentloans.gov used to be where you went to do the consolidation application, to submit an income-driven form application, but you had to go get your federal file from the NSLDS website. Studentaid.gov was another site with just information. And so it just got really complicated. You didn't know where to get what information. And so I think it's a good thing that they're consolidating things. I haven't seen any problems arise from it yet. Have you seen any problems yet, Travis? Not as of yet. All the old links for me are actually working still, like the NSLDS website and all that stuff. The studentaid.gov, that's the main website that people are trying to push right now. I'm curious to see what it's gonna end up, like in the next maybe month or so, like what it's gonna look like. But if you go to any one of those sites right now or type in any one of those URLs, it'll tell you that that's what they're doing. They're consolidating these things. It'll probably take a while. So how can our listeners book an appointment with you? What days of the week do you work and how can they schedule you? I specifically work with folks with balances of student loan debt, 200 and under. And I work specifically on Mondays and Fridays. So if you schedule a time on a Monday or Friday, you will wind up on my calendar. So studentloanplanner.com slash book, right? studentloanplanner.com slash book. And then you select the below 200,000, not below $200 of student loan debt. Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, you know, just, I don't know. We can shift with Uber and pay it off, right? But, and obviously all of our consultants, when we bring somebody on, we kind of start them off with the smaller balances just to kind of make sure that they're familiar with the processes and knocking out of the park. And certainly you are right now, Megan. And then we expand people's ability to do consults of all debt levels, right? So as people get more and more experienced, Rob's been with the team the longest. That's why he does the 400K and up consults as well. Lauren and Justin have been on the team, I think a year longer than you and Ben. So they do the 200 to 400K consults. And Lauren also does the below 200K consults sometimes. But you will undoubtedly be getting a wider variety of consult debt levels soon, Megan. So thanks for being on the show today and thanks for sharing some of your loopholes. Thank you. Thanks for letting me nerd out. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to today's show. You can email us your comments at podcasts at studentloanplanner.com. You can also find show notes at studentloanplanner.com forward slash the number of today's episode. If you know that you need a custom student loan plan, schedule one today with one of our team members at studentloanplanner.com forward slash book. Or if you want to learn more, visit forward slash help. 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