Student Loan Success (and carnage) Stories

I think it's just sort of a parental mindset that for all the parents out there like me, like we just have to be careful of that we're not putting ourselves in huge financial risk for the sake of our children. Welcome to another episode of the Student Loan Planner Podcast. I have another wonderful treat for you all. We've got the entire Channel 4 News team has assembled and we've got Lauren, we've got Rob, and we've got Justin on the call with us. Welcome everybody, let's have a fun show today. So Travis, great to be here. Yeah, good to be here. So before we press the record button, Rob was asking me about something that I had recently done. Rob, why don't you go ahead and ask me that question so our listeners get to hear. Yeah, Travis, so I know you had your performance at Carnegie Hall lately. How did it go? So I was joking that I got a standing ovation, you know, just for me and, you know, the other 200 people on stage and the first tenor section rocked it. So we crushed it. It was amazing. My brother, however, was in the tenor two section and he described it as a war zone. Oh, man, he's being a little overdramatic. But I think I think it went pretty well. It was super fun to get that experience. And like a large portion of my family was actually performing. So it's pretty neat. But I heard a rumor that you are a secret all star performer yourself, Rob. Well, I've been a part of good groups. I performed at Carnegie Hall back in 1998, my freshman year of college, in the National Championship of Collegiate Acapella, believe it or not. That is phenomenal. It was the very first year that they did this competition. But there were a lot of contestants and schools out east. There's like a lot of schools that have a lot of acapella groups. But when I was in college, acapella really, really exploded. And so this was the first year they did like an actual tournament. And so I believe I think we got fourth place. But our vocalist, one of our vocalist got got best lead vocalist for the competition, Jim Daley. He's awesome. He sang time after time like the Cyndi Lauper version, but by Tuck and Patty, which was awesome. And it was just a crazy, crazy experience to be a part of that, too. So I'm glad that that you had that experience, Travis. Is that the one that's like, sometimes you think of me like that one? That's the one. Oh, man, that's the one. You're trying to get me to sing, but I'm not going to do it. Yeah, well, actually, I think you're isn't your wife way more impressive in terms of her performance abilities? Oh, yeah. No, she was a professional in musical theater, and she's a triple threat. She has done all sorts of shows. She's a singer, dancer and actor and can put me all the shame. But now she's a financial professional. So go figure. And speaking of performance, I think Lauren has a couple like gold medals or something like that. Like what if what did she do, Lauren? Can you remind us? You put us all to shame, Lauren. I am just a little bit athletic, or at least I used to be two silver medals and one gold medal in the Olympics. Yeah, just that is incredible. What do you do? Oh, gosh, nothing that changes to the glory of any of these. Yeah, you're supposed to be like, I'm the workhorse of student loan planner. I do more consults than all of you. My claim to fame is that in my high school, I ran track and field, and I was renowned because I have seen with my own eyeballs, two people get speared with a javelin. What? And get killed? No, not killed. They both got hit in the leg. So it was not a big deal, but it was highly unusual and very scary at first. And then it gets kind of funny because it's usually just a bunch of dudes just being idiots. And then everyone's laughing because that guy got hit with a spear in the leg. And it's high school, and that stuff isn't supposed to happen. I could see the first time being scary, but by the second time, it's probably not so scary anymore. Holy cow. You kind of just start to laugh at it eventually. So it's not like an athletic achievement, but I bet Lauren's never seen two people get speared with a javelin. I have not. I've only read about one being recently impaled last week. It was like really big news, but never seen it, nor do I want to see it. I like to think of my sport as relatively safe. When you're a thrower, things get wild. The runners get it easy. Yeah, it's super easy, right? Well, besides talking about getting speared by javelins, we're also going to talk about spearing student loans. So we're going to transition. We're going to transition. You like how I rescued that? So we're going to transition into talking about some of our cases that we've had recently. I think it's going to be really fun just to hear the wide spectrum of stuff that comes up in our business. Maybe some of you listening will kind of identify with some of these. So I asked all the consultants to bring to the table the kind of broad details. Obviously, we're not going to give anything that could ever identify anyone, but the broad details of one super successful story that they had, where we totally transformed somebody's life, and one story that they had where, golly, we wish we had gotten to that person sooner so we could have saved them from making a serious mistake. I'm going to go first, and feel free to jump in if you wanted to say something about these cases. But I had a physician couple recently. So one of them decided to do PSLF, and one of them did not want to. And so one of them had refinanced, and the person was really worried about the PSLF risk that was present, that the government might take it away. And if one of us was on PSLF, then that is less risky, right? So I think that the concern that I have is that people are vastly overestimating the true risk present with the PSLF program, in the sense that the worst-case scenario is the debt is just there, and it would have been there anyway if you'd refinanced, right? So that mistake was a six-figure mistake. And it's just very important that people realize that PSLF is actually not all that risky. The worst-case scenario, you're paying 1% to 3% more interest over five, six years while you're waiting around to see if it happens. And guess what? You can actually put your money into even a high-yield savings account, and it's going to get decent interest to hedge against that risk. So that really smart idea. I don't know. That was rough when I heard that. Yeah. The only good thing about student loan debt and interest is just that it accrues, right? So if someone's loan is going to accrue 20,000 of interest, but they can save 20,000, they're growing their savings right alongside. So it makes it even more compelling to play the PSLF game, even if you're nervous, and just save aggressively on the side as defense just in case. What if I don't trust the government? Well, I mean, I don't trust the government. I'll just come out and say it, but- Just as a resident conspiracy theorist. Well, oh, 100%. But the thing that I point to, and I know, Travis, you've written about this a bit, is the tenor of the conversation in Washington recently with, I think it was Senator Warren's proposal and some of the stuff coming out of the Democratic Party, which has been very progressive and borrower-friendly as it relates to loans. So if there's any shift that's going to take place based on what we see right now, it's going to be a shift towards more leniency, more flexibility, more optionality and not less. How that's going to apply to current borrowers is kind of anybody's guess based on what Congress decides to do, but Congress recognizes this is an issue. And I don't think they recognize what a big issue it is. I think they're just getting a little bit of an idea right now, but ultimately they want to help. And student loans makes for great PR for Congress people. So they want to talk about it and they want to try to at least look like they're doing something. And a lot of the changes that have been discussed have been pretty favorable for borrowers thus far. That's a great point. And I like to think of this as like deal or no deal, with like Howie Mandel, you got the briefcases and they're all in there, you're down to your final two briefcases. And in one briefcase, you've got $10,000, which represents the total amount of interest that you'll lose out on if you don't refinance right now and you just hang out on the government repayment plans just to see what happens. And in the other case, there's 200,000. So basically when you refinance, when you should be doing PSLF or should be gambling on PSLF, then you're kind of like just accepting the $10,000 case without even like getting anything for the option with PSLF. So it's super bad math when folks do that. I get why people do it, because it's really scary to think about something that you have being taken away. So it feels like you have a $300,000 loss that could happen when PSLF is going to go away for you. That's not actually what happens because by refinancing, you're guaranteeing that you have to pay back the debt. So psychologically, it feels like you're losing 300 grand or 200 grand or whatever it is if PSLF goes away, but you're not losing that because you already owe it. If anything, all you're doing is gaining that money. The other one I wanted to talk about was a success situation. So we had these two dentists. They were going somewhere, I think for a residency, and they were going to move back home and their large metro area out west, super happening place, wonderful place to be young, starting a family and starting a career. They were thinking, well, we have to refinance our loans right now. We got to get ahead of it. Tons of interest that's accumulating. We got to shop around all the different lenders and just really get on our loans right away. The problem was, is that they both wanted to operate businesses that had enormous ability to write off income, which dental practices have a ton of ability to write off taxable income to get your AGI lower. And remember, your student loan payment's based on your AGI. So in this case, we identified, or identified, this was my client consult, identified that the probability that they were going to have a taxable income over a certain level was just very, very low. And if you ran the numbers, then going for forgiveness actually saved them over $100,000, which they could have put into their retirement and other goals like starting a family, buying a house, things like that. So that's one of those really difficult things where you're trying to decide, do you go for refinancing or forgiveness? And I think why it's helpful to have the context that we have compared to maybe a financial advisor who's super knowledgeable, maybe does five of them every year in terms of student loan plans, just because it's really important to have a really good idea of what the salaries for a specific occupation are in, say, the metro Kansas City area or the metro Miami area for a specific degree. And that has huge implications for whether or not you think that you're going to hit a certain debt to income ratio to refinance or go for forgiveness. So I was super excited about that, showed them a lot about how that money could be used for retirement and other things. So I think that we probably knocked off a couple of years off of their required working career just by virtue of showing that they didn't have to refinance when they were assuming that they needed to. That's fantastic. So enough about me. Let's hear more from our team here. Justin or Rob, I think maybe we'll pick on Justin first. Does that sound okay? Yeah, great. Justin, tell us a really amazing success story that you've had recently, what the issue was, and then tell us one that may we wish we could have gotten to them sooner. Okay. I have a success story that actually happened just this weekend. And Travis, I didn't tell you about this. This might put me in running for the student loan planner consultant of the month. You can tell me what you think. There's only four of us, so I hope you get the award occasionally. I got this on short notice. Somebody had reached out and said, hey, I'm in bad trouble, scheduled a call. This was on Thursday for just last week. They scheduled it for Friday. They said, here's the situation. We got a bunch of loans. It was about 230K. They had been sitting for almost 15 years. They hadn't made any payments. They were on the verge of default. The call came and went. I wasn't able to get ahold of them. And I emailed them. I said, hey, if you want help, I can help you, but we're going to have to do it next week. And they said, oh my gosh, Tuesday is the day we're going to default. We're going to default on Tuesday. We need something stat. And I was traveling on Saturday, yada, yada. I was down in DC. So I was like, okay, listen, I'll be on the road. Let's make this work. I was down in DC seeing one of my financial planning clients on Saturday, which went way long. So I'm on the way back during the time of the call. So I had to park on the side of 95, pop out the laptop, get out my phone and call in. And I did this call with these people who were two days away from defaulting on their loans. They had FFEL consolidation loans, and they were on the precipice of really financial disaster. They had a bunch of tax liens. They had no free cashflow. They were really up against a wall. And what we were able to discover was that if they consolidate these FFEL loans that were on the verge of default, they can turn them into federal direct loans and then can pursue forbearance for a period of time because they owed tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes that they were working on paying off with their somewhat meager income. So what they needed to do was buy time. So we were able to consolidate the loans, turn them into direct loans, buy some time, and then they were going to be able to get on revised pay on the back end of that and have income-driven payments that were going to be reasonable based on their income. And it was going to allow them to save actually 80 or 90K versus a full repayment strategy in the long run, even going for taxable forgiveness and making payments for two and a half decades. So they went from almost defaulting to being able to have a lot more free cashflow, and then after a period of time, have a monthly payment that they were going to be able to stomach all while I was sitting on the side of 95 North, which I thought was an awesome Saturday. That's really badass. Justin, do you get like hazard pay or something? Shoot. I don't know. I feel like I should. After this podcast, I'm going to get hit up for hazard pay. Maybe you deserve it. Shoot. Well, I mean, that's just an amazing story. So they had loans that FFEL loans or loans that were from before 2010, right? Yeah. A lot of their loans were, it was actually from the late 90s, and then they had done one consolidation to FFEL consolidation loans in like 04 or 05. Wow. That's just amazing. And instead of defaulting and like wrecking their credit, you know, having all these negative, like, yeah, I think there's like collection fees that are assessed to where it's like 16% up to that they can add on or so. I don't know. I have to look up the exact number, but instead of having that happen on just thousands and thousands of dollars, they're now getting into a situation where we'll be able to make a payment based on their income they can afford and have all those bad things not happen. Yeah. You know what else is great about that story, Justin, is, you know, a lot of times people, they just don't want to look at it and they don't want to face it because they feel like there's no way out. It took them to being on the verge of default two days away to schedule the consult and talk with you. And at the end of the day, it's like a totally manageable plan. You know, and had they done that sooner, they could have been there already, right? They could have been debt-free in the not too distant future. So it just kind of speaks to, even if you feel like your situation is hopeless, there is a way out, you know, so like get help as soon as you can and figure out what the best path forward is. Yeah, totally. That's really fascinating though. That's a great story. Wow. And it was one of those ones too, where I was like, Oh, is this like a real person? Cause you know, we get a lot of emails from people and I wasn't sure, like, do I really want to reorient my Saturday? Cause I I've done some, you know, some plan. I've accommodated outside of my normal time to schedule to have people like not show up or whatever. Cause they figure, well, I'm a random guy on the internet and I may or may not be the real deal. So, and that's understandable obviously, but it was, it was a great moment of like, I saw the humanity in their plight and I was like, you know, I'm going to try to do this just because I can and something in my, I don't know, in my soul was telling me I should just try to help these people because they need it. And it was great. I don't say that to toot my own horn, but it was just a really great thing to be able to address a need at just the right time and get people to help. They were really looking for. Yeah. But that's, I just wanted to say something real quick that speaks really highly. I think of all of y'all's character, just because all three of you could be making money and doing something else. Not to say that you don't make good money working for student loan player. Hope you feel that way. Nervous laughter. But one of the things I try to look for when we were deciding to work together was just somebody who was passionate about people and helping them. And when you're looking back at your career being like, wow, I transformed a lot of lives. And look, I think that there's a wonderful thing to be said for having a small group of people. You're having a massive impact for, you know, running your own financial planning firm, but I'm super grateful that y'all care enough to do something like that. Yeah, totally. And honestly, this is really impactful work and that's why I love it. And that's why I keep doing it because in an hour in my car on the side of 95, I literally changed these people's lives. And there's not a lot of jobs we can say that. So let's talk about a situation where you did not change their life because you didn't get to the best enough. Yeah, I had one. It was a middle-aged lady who had taken out a bunch of parent plus loans, like $200,000 worth for her daughter. And they had some kind of deal where the mother was going to take out the loans and then the daughter was going to take them on upon graduation. And what happened was, you know, of course, what 22-year-old understands the real financial impact of $200,000 of debt at the beginning of your career, like hardly any of them. I mean, that's why we all have jobs right now. This mother was really strapped for cash. She was scraping by. She had several other kids in college and trying to pay the bills and she needed to offload this debt to her daughter. But her daughter was living in a major metro area on the East Coast and was making like $32,000 a year. That barely covered her rent, let alone all the other expenses that she was going to have. So because the mother had a significant income, her required payments on the parent plus loans were high, were a four-figure number, like $1,100. She was torn. So her options are A, mom can pay the loans herself and basically fall on the sword. B, mom can try to have her daughter help out on the payments. Or C, mom can refinance the debt to her daughter and just totally shove everything off and pile this massive burden onto her daughter, which, I mean, you can sort of figure out what's the least terrible of those answers. Those are all not great alternatives. The fact is, if the daughter had known upfront, well, maybe we shouldn't do parent plus loans. Maybe we should do just direct loans that the daughter can have in her own name all along. Then all of a sudden, instead of mom facing either paying a huge amount or refinancing to the daughter and having the daughter pay a huge amount, daughter can get on revised pay-as-you-earn or something like that with an income-driven mechanism that allows her to make payments based on $32,000 of income. And she's paying, I don't know, $100 a month instead of $1,100 a month. And it would have saved a ton of stress and heartache and family tension. But instead, they've got this huge problem. And I'm honestly still not sure how they're going to be able to deal with it. Let me dig a little deeper there, though, Justin. So $200,000 of parent plus debt, it's in the mom's name. Are we saying that the mom was making too much income to benefit from consolidating it and using the income contingent repayment plan? Well, so her payments were still going to be very high. Because they were in California, the household income was still considerable. And it was such that the income-driven options for them weren't going to meaningfully reduce their payments. So I'm going to play devil's advocate. What if we convinced them that there's no time like the present to walk away from all your creature comforts and retire in five years so we could get your student loan payment to be really low? Was there anything that could be done, like, for example, maybe using forbearance or perhaps to delay payments or perhaps to really throw tons of money or filing separately for taxes? Or was it just a situation where this person was making six figures, really high income? It was six figures. And it was a situation where we did do forbearance for a period of time. And they were essentially trying to figure it out. They had high fixed costs. And they just did not have a lot of financial flexibility. So what age range would this person be in, broadly? She was probably 50. That young? Early 50s or late 50s? Yeah, early 50s. That's a tough one. I mean, I think that the approach that I would maybe try to take is if you're married, then you could both try to delay your social security to get those higher payments. And then you could try to use as much forbearance as possible. So try to use forbearance on your existing parent plus loans and consolidate. You get an extra three years of forbearance. And you need to try to focus on, while you're doing that forbearance, shovel gobs of money into your retirement accounts, like 25K per year if you're over 50. And then maybe, just maybe, you would have enough money in your retirement account to retire at 60 and then also simultaneously sell your house and the things that are causing the big fixed expenses in California, and then move to a lower cost of living place, and then just make very modest payments by filing taxes separately on ICR. But I don't know. I mean, that's a tough one, though. Yeah. And the challenge was, mom's agreement with daughter was, daughter's taking these on. And that was the understanding because mom didn't have the capacity because they had no retirement savings and other kids coming up through college. And there was very little ability to even make those payments. Even, you know, there was forbearance for a little while, but that was only a Band-Aid. Wow. So, wow. Any thoughts about that team? Does Justin's extreme scenarios just blow the mind? Wish I would have been able to help more is pretty similar. And I think it's really tough when you end up in a Parent PLUS Loan situation, and they've already taken out all the Parent PLUS Loans because, kind of from my viewpoint, Parent PLUS Loans come into play because there's income in the household, and the parents chose maybe not to save for the child's education. And then it came time for education, and they said, well, I can't leave my child hanging. So, like I said, they fell on the floor, metaphorically, by taking out these loans. But then it was time to deal with the loans. And it's like, oh, wait, wait, wait, I really don't want to do this. But, you know, I could not send my child to school. And so, there's a lot of back and forth and a lot of emotion tied up into the Parent PLUS Loan borrowing. And, you know, when you get to a Parent PLUS Loan situation, people kind of have their financial habits. So, it's a little bit harder to undo. When I talk to someone in their 20s that is not making the best budgetary decisions and is really stressed out about their student loans, it's a lot easier to correct them and, you know, show them the future. Whereas someone in their 50s that's making, you know, bad decisions for quite a long time, while it's never too late, they're usually a lot more apprehensive to make big changes to their budget. Like you said, sell the house, sell the car, you know, go buy a vehicle that's a lot more affordable for the family and give up that lifestyle and that perception. You know, one thing that I thought about when you were saying that was a lot of the Parent PLUS borrowers that have massive, massive sums that I've seen, I don't think I can think of a single one that we've seen that has more than 200K of Parent PLUS Loans that has not been in a very high cost-of-living area. Like, for example, I've seen a lot of people like this in, like, New York, in Massachusetts, in Hawaii, in California, but I almost never see huge Parent PLUS borrowers in places like Nebraska. And I don't know if that's just because, you know, there's not a loaded gun to your head financially in Nebraska, like there's no $50,000 a year places there, or maybe it's kind of like a keeping up with the Joneses effect, or maybe it's, you know, there's not really any good prepaid tuition plans in some of these places, or like, you know, housing costs are just out of control expensive and taxes are high, so you don't really have the ability to save long term. I don't know. Do y'all have any thoughts about that? Yeah, I've had a couple, I mean, Parent PLUS Loans, they're just, they're just killers. I mean, I've had a couple that are in more rural parts of the country. I'm the only parent of the consultants, right? So just me and I got three of them. And as a parent, we want to do what we think is best for our kids. But sometimes what we think is best for our kids is actually going to hurt us financially or hurt them financially, right? And so it's really important, especially parents who have established a life somewhere in the house, and they have all these memories of all their kids growing up. And it may not be keeping up with the Joneses as much as I'm dedicated to my family at all costs. But when they figure out how difficult it is to pay back Parent PLUS Loans, they sort of regret the decision. And it's really, really tough at that point. There are things that can be done, like you said, Lauren, like it's never too late. But I think it's just sort of a parental mindset that for all the parents out there, like me, like we just have to be careful of that we're not putting ourselves in huge financial risk for the sake of our children. I have one case where this dad actually just broke down in tears and just started crying on the call with his kids on the call. And he was just like, I was supposed to be able to handle this. I was supposed to be able to provide. And then life happened and I was an executive and suddenly I wasn't an executive because I got laid off and I feel guilty as hell. And they just started, it was amazing to see because the kids were just so supportive and such good people to try to get their dad out of that place psychologically. But anyhow, let's transition to Lauren. So Lauren, you mentioned a little bit of a teaser there about one of your cases that you weren't helped. So maybe if you wanted to elaborate on that a little bit and then maybe also share one of the cases that you were able to have a big impact with. Yeah, the one I wish I would have gotten to sooner was a young lady that reached out with around $165K of parent plus loans and had a household income of $245K. So initially, I'm looking at the consult form and I'm thinking like, oh, this is, you know, should be relatively easy refinance situation. And then you get down to the nitty gritty of the details and you learn this is one of three children that she's intending to put through school. There are quite a few high expenses. There's a $4,500 mortgage. They're saving about $600 a month for retirement, but they have a car payment that is $800 a month. You know, you see quite a few different things in the budget. And so when we get to chatting through the call, it was kind of similar to what I described earlier, where sometimes our job is, especially as certified financial planners, is nailing down areas in the budget that you can cut back in order to be able to afford the other things in life. And it's a matter of prioritizing and being able to say like, OK, this is what this looks like. But this is also, you know, this is not the most fun thing to pay, but it is one of the things that you agreed to pay. And so we've got to fit this into the budget. And this family was looking sort of for more of a magic wand. And there was no magic wand because there should be, from a discretionary standpoint, the ability to pay those loans. So we did end up coming up with a strategy for the 166, knowing that there's going to be an additional $250,000 of loans. And I talked extensively about the idea that for the next two children coming along down the pipe is instead of, you know, like you said, there's an intense obligation as a parent that no matter what, I'm going to have to take care of them the same way I took care of the first one. But to be really, really aggressive about grants and scholarships and really investing the time because it's so easy to fill out the paperwork, send it in and know that you're going to get these loans. But, you know, it seems a little bit more tedious to jump through the hoops of getting the different scholarships, finding out where the financial aid options are and considering other schools that are more affordable, because like you said, once again, you want to give your kids everything. So it was a very emotional conversation about nailing down the budget. They didn't like the recommendations of getting rid of the $800 a month car payment. But one of the things I've learned from Travis, and I think three of the four of us have physician spouses, you know, I have a really hard time telling people that they should make some changes. You can see these big red glaring lights saying, don't do this, don't do this. But Travis, you know, had a talk with me at one point and said, Lauren, it's similar to what our spouses do as physicians. If I don't tell you the God's honest truth, then, you know, your life could be on the line. And we need to be thinking of that as like, if this is your one chance that you're walking into this doctor's office, i.e. having a student loan call, and this is your one time that you're going to speak to somebody that's a certified financial planner, even though you're only calling about your student loans, which is really intertwined with various parts of your financial life, that we need to be incredibly honest about the other gaping holes that we're seeing and the changes that need to be made, whether you like it or not, because it can be life altering. If we do, or we don't tell you that. So this was one of those conversations that wasn't fun for me to have. But I knew at the end of the day, whether they liked me or not, at the end of the call, that I was doing the right thing, and helping them being able to change their financial future. Can I just share like a funny story. So I was driving my wife to work recently. And we saw this woman, she looked like she was like 90 years old. And she was walking around outside in the courtyard in front of the hospital, not like a protected courtyard, like a wide open, like anybody in the public can walk around here. And she's walking around with her hospital gown with the little drip thing, like IV fluids connected, still in her arm. And she's just walking around chain smoking. I was just thinking, I get the Hippocratic Oath, you have to treat everyone regardless of people's personal choices and everything. But at that point, why aren't you even at the hospital? Just go home and live your life. And I don't know, I thought that was just so fascinating. I'm very passionate that if I think somebody is doing something that's really foolish, I'm going to tell you that and if you don't like us because of it, like, yeah, we've had a couple people not pay us out of 2000 that have been making some really foolish decisions with their finances. But I would much rather have a couple people just get mad at me and not pay, rather than have potentially dozens or maybe even hundreds of people that are making a very foolish choice, make that choice and then regret it later. So thanks so much for saying that, Lauren. What about the situation where you changed someone's life? Yes, yes, yes. On a lot more positive note, there was a couple that reached out. This young lady was very stressed because she was carrying the student loan burden. And she wanted to stay at home. So she had just recently started staying at home and had about 175k of student loan debt. And the spouse was making about 80k. From a value standpoint, it was very important for their family that, you know, they just had their first child, they're planning on having two more. The husband had, you know, pretty decent income projected out into the future. And they lived in a low cost of living city. She felt like it was her job to carry the burden that she was going to have to go back to work. And she was really upset because child care was around 1500 bucks a month. And she was like, by the time I go to work, I'm just going to be paying for child care. And I'd really love to be able to stay at home my children. That's what we discussed. That's what we want to be able to do. But we just can't figure it out with these loans. And I don't really like my husband having to carry this burden. So what we ended up talking through was we looked at Mary filing joint versus Mary filing separately and what that would look like, because that was something they had heard about, read about, and the reason they reached out initially. But they'd be looking at 25 years of being married, filing separate in order to get the 25 zero payment based on, you know, her not working. And from a tax standpoint, that was not going to be the most advantageous way to go about it. So we talked extensively extensively about their budget, and they were living pretty modestly. But to really nail down their budget and start piling money, like, you know, one of the things that makes Travis really excited when people start putting money into their retirement, which I mean, it makes all of us excited. We showed them how to pile money in in such a way that he said, we're going to lower the student loan payment. So it was almost nothing. It was like, I believe it was like 60 bucks a month. They're going to stack money another hundred, maybe 60 bucks or something away in their retirement in the brokerage account and get ready for the tax bomb. And it was going to be feasible from a student loan standpoint for them from a monthly cost standpoint was going to allow her to stay at home and look after her family. And it was also going to allow them to max out their retirement and still live a normal life. Like we still found discretionary funds after doing all those different things. And a lot of people are just like, where do you find the money? And it's really about, like you said, committing yourself to, you know, not living within your means and committing to financial freedom. So they felt great after they got off the call because she could stay at home. They were stacking money away for retirement. And they felt that they had a clear plan for how they were going to be able to afford to have two more children. I love that. Wow. So you might literally be partially responsible for two additional lives in the world. Yes. Two productive citizens hopefully joining because I had such a great mom caring for them. Sorry, I said that probably a little weird, right? Oops. You know, I'm great at putting my foot in my mouth. So anyways, on that note, Rob, let's bring you into the fray. What are some couple of cases that you want to share with our listeners? Yeah, sure. So one that I wish I wish would have reached out sooner, I could have gotten to sooner. I was going to talk about another parent plus situation, but we've had a lot of those. And those are really, really tough conversations in general. I did have a really tough one where it was a doctor with over $300,000 student loans, graduated from medical school. And it was either 2011 or 2012 and had been working for a nonprofit and was on IBR. So they thought that they were on track for PSLF. I took a look at their NSLDS file, which tells, for those of you who don't know, it tells you all the loans you've ever taken out, like if they're direct, if they're FFEL loans and all that stuff. And also their loans weren't at FedLoan. So this was maybe a clue that they had not actually been eligible for the PSLF program. So anyway, they had been on IBR for seven years. And it turns out that only like 80,000 of the $300,000 of student loan debt was on track. And the other 220 were FFEL loans that if they wanted to go for PSLF, they had to consolidate to make the loans direct and basically start the 10-year period today on their higher salary. So I felt really horrible for them because here they thought all of them were going to be forgiven in three years. And it was either 10 more years on PSLF or just aggressively pay them back in five years or less. It was a really, really tough conversation. Man, that's really rough. What'd you end up saying? Their income was too high to qualify. They were already above the cap. So it ended up being just pay off the loans and let the ones that are the 80,000 that were eligible, file the employment certification form, have them move over to FedLoan, see if you can get the seven years of because there's no guarantee that FedLoan is going to get it right. But then the other loans, it's refinance and pay them off aggressively because they were above the payment cap and they weren't eligible for pay as you earn. So repay would have put them well over the 10-year standard plan. It's one of those things where they thought they didn't have very long to go, and it turns out they had a long time to go. Yeah. One of the most common questions I get via email from people is like, when should we work with you? And the best answer is as soon as possible, because even if something wasn't going wrong with your situation, there's a great chance that it could have been going wrong. And a few hundred bucks to be confident that there isn't something terrible that's broken with your situation, I feel like it's a no-brainer. But not to get too salesy or anything, Rob, tell me about the one that you were able to change. Yeah, the one that I was able to change was pretty great. It was an optometrist who owed about $325,000 in debt at 6.5%. And he was on the extended plan, the 20-year extended plan, making payments of, I don't know, I think it was like $2,500 a month or something like that. So the loans were going to be paid off in full in 20 years, and he didn't realize that he could go on to pay as you earn and go on income-driven repayment for 20 years and have the loans forgiven and just pay the taxes on it. So if he would have seen the extended plan through, I think he would have ended up paying close to $600,000, including principal and interest, to pay off the loans in full. But pay as you earn, the payments were only going to be about $175,000 over the next 20 years, and then with a $225,000 tax bomb. So $400,000 all in to pay off $325,000 of loans over 20 years versus $600,000, I think it was like 580,000 actually. They were just like, wow, I'll be debt-free in the same amount of time and I'll get to save $180,000 paying back my loans. I mean, that's an incredible difference in money, paying back loans for sure. That's so funny. I actually have a friend who went to pharmacy school about the same time that I was in undergrad, and then we knew each other kind of vaguely. And then at some point, he reached out to get help with his loans because he was paying like $2,000 a month. And this guy also did stand-up comedy. So he was a pretty funny guy. And so he was paying $2,000 a month. And I was like, hey, you're working for a community pharmacy that's not-for-profit. You could pay $600 a month instead and qualify for PSLF after seven more years because you made payments for three years on the standard plan, which counted in his case. So instead of paying $2,000 a month for the next seven years, you'll pay $600 and have $150K forgiven. And there was this really long pause, like really, really long pause from the other side of the phone. I thought I lost him or lost the connection. And he goes, Travis, I do believe that I'm going to have to buy you a very nice beer. It wasn't me. It was the government that passed this. But yeah, that's just amazing. Sometimes people see that huge amount that's staring back at them in savings. And they're like, holy cow, this was such a big opportunity, such a big mistake, right? Golly, that's a great one, Rob. So what did they do with all the money? Did they buy a Tesla? What did they do? Well, I told them that if we looked at the net worth calculator on the spreadsheet too, and I said, imagine if you took the difference in the payments, which I think pay-as-you-earn was going to be like $800 a month. So it would lower their payments by like $1,700 a month. So maxing out the 401k and all that stuff and how that would change the payments. And their net worth was, I forget the exact number, but their net worth in 20 years was going to be just astronomical because of that, because they're investing the difference in payment rather than paying off the loan. It was just incredible. You said they were an optometrist, right? So to circle back, I can see clearly now my loans are gone. I can see all the tax bums in my way. I like all this singing. You're still in the Carnegie Hall mode. That's awesome. I'm trying to do funny singing, not legit singing. I try to do that sometimes. My wife's like, wow, your voice really stinks, Travis. I can't believe it lets you sing there. And I'm like, hey, my choral voice is different from my joke voice. On the email list, when you sent out that about email list that you were going to do that and you sent that video highlights of you, I thought that was pretty awesome. So if you aren't on the email list for student loan planner, you got to check out Travis's highlight video. Maybe you could put in like the show notes or something so everyone can watch it. We don't want people seeing that. I actually had somebody reply. That was funny. And I'm in St. Louis and you're in St. Louis. This is going to be super weird. Let's get lunch because you seem like an interesting person or like a funny enough person to like not be super serious. I was like, OK, let's do it. And then we actually invited them out to karaoke. So that was really weird because we were sitting around after karaoke, like at this place, a bunch of friends and stuff. They're like, oh, how'd you guys meet? And we're like, oh, you know, we're Internet friends. He's he's on my email list. Yeah, it was it was pretty funny. Yeah. Well, you know, St. Louis is actually a hotbed for barbershop music. I don't know if you know that there's like an international championship barbershop chorus. I used to sing in here called the Ambassadors of Harmony. So if you're looking to sing, it's one hundred and sixty people barbershop chorus with plenty of subset quartets that have also won international championships. Justin, we need to get a hobby. I know. No kidding. It's going to be our thing, Justin, like Rob and Trevor going back and forth here. And I feel pretty low. Lauren, weren't you didn't you just get off a plane? I think it's just me from Japan or something. I did. I was volunteering, but that's not like a superpower. Volunteering is something everyone should do. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Tell us more about this, though. Tell us more. What did you do in Japan? I was helping elite athletes for Team USA at the World Relay. So it is a two day event where Team USA rocked it. There were nine different relays and we got seven medals. Wow. Great. And my job was like all the logistics stuff behind the scenes. And I mean, it's just kind of really like the sport gave a lot to me and really helped me get going. And I'm really grateful for that part of my life. So anything I can do to make it easier for athletes that are currently competing, I'm happy to volunteer my time to do so. Yes. So student loan planner community, please send your suggestions for what Justin's hobby should be to podcast at studentloanplanner.com. Perhaps the next episode, we will do a top 10 hobbies that Justin could adopt. Does that sound OK, Justin? Sounds great. Yeah. See, Lauren, I was going to say the problem with you is that, you know, you just accomplish your goals so fast, becoming a silver medalist in the Olympic bobsledding, but only training for six months to make that happen. I mean, you just did it too quickly. Well, I try to pack as much into life as I possibly can. So they say you can sleep when you're dead. And that's kind of the theory I'm running with here. Yeah. That podcast episode, if you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to Lauren's episode, because that was unbelievable. Basically, Lauren just like woke up one day. I was like, wouldn't it be funny for the lols if I just medaled in some sport I've never done before in like six months? I'm like, what? Thanks for listening to today's show. 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