Occupational Therapist Student Loan Forgiveness Options | Student Loan Planner

We've been helping a lot of occupational therapists lately with their student loan debt to figure out exactly what to do when you owe more than a lot of people's mortgage. Our typical occupational therapist client has about $180,000 of student loan debt, which when you think about the salaries of an OT, maybe being in that $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 range, that's really, really challenging to pay something like that back. What we have typically seen with occupational therapists is it really spans the gamut. You'll have people that are graduating with master's degrees that might only have $100,000 of student loan debt to people who have their OTD who are leaving with $150,000 or more. What we've seen with the doctorate is that it doesn't necessarily enhance income potential a ton to justify the increased tuition. Contrast occupational therapists with physical therapists. In the physical therapy world, getting your doctorate is pretty much a requirement now to practice at all. In occupational therapy, I think that we're moving towards that direction. Certainly having a doctorate is going to be the preference at some point soon. The concern is I think that that's primarily to benefit, honestly, the universities and the colleges rather than the actual student because if you can talk about earning money sooner and also not coming out with an additional $30,000 to $50,000 of student loan debt, maybe more, then that would work out really well economically to have less debt for probably similar amounts of earnings. I'm not saying that doctorates aren't better trained. That's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the extra education is probably not worth the additional cost. Now, let's say, let's throw our hands up and say, well, you know what? I already have occupational therapy student loans from a doctorate program or from some other master's program and I am struggling to figure out how to pay it back. Luckily, that's what we're experts in at Student Loan Planner is navigating student loan debt in the six figures is what our average client comes to us with. If you're an occupational therapist, there's a few things that you could do. You could, if you have a low loan balance relative to your income, refinance with a private lender, pay it back with a lower interest rate and get out of debt sooner. We love that path for people that it makes sense for. The problem is is fewer and fewer occupational therapists are in that boat every year as tuition continues to rise faster than the rate of income growth. Now, for occupational therapists who owe maybe over 1.5 times their income in debt, so for example, the occupational therapist with 60 grand who's got 180 grand in student loan debt. What do you do? Well, the first step is to get onto a forgiveness strategy where you're paying maybe 10% of your discretionary income and do that for 20 to 25 years. At the end of that period, you'll have a big tax bomb that you'll have to pay because forgiveness in the private sector is taxable income compared to the not-for-profit sector where public service loan forgiveness wipes it away tax-free after just 10 years of payments. So if you are going to do the PSLF program, you are fine. You're in good shape. Just make sure you certify your credit every year. Pay on an income-based option as little as you can, and you'll be okay. But many occupational therapists are working in these private sector employers, and they're not qualifying for PSLF in a lot of cases. Maybe you're not working full-time. Maybe you are working at a non-qualifying employer. There's a lot of reasons. If that's the case, you just want to make sure you pay as little as possible. We see occupational therapists love to throw an additional couple hundred dollars a month in their student loans. That's typically a mistake. You want to pay as little as you can and put a lot of money away into investments, in an investment account, and into retirement as well. If you do that, then the present value cost, in other words the cost in today's dollars in your occupational therapy student loans, could be drastically lower than what you would be paying if you tried to full-frontal attack this directly. That's not necessarily what you want to do if you have more than two times your income in student loan debt from occupational therapy school. If you owe less than that, it's really kind of a toss-up in a lot of cases. If you only owe one times or less, refinancing is often a good path. So if you have a lot of occupational therapy student loans, we would love to help here at Student Loan Planner. Just visit our article or click on the Contact Us button in the bottom right-hand corner. Reach out to us and let us know your story. Or if you're all ready to book a call, just click on that Hire Us page, read whether or not it's for you, and then just book a consult with one of our consultants. We would love to make a low-cost, flat-fee plan. It's going to be the best plan that you're going to get anywhere on how to get out of student debt from your occupational therapy program. Thanks for watching, and let us know if you have questions in the comments.