March 2023 Student Loan Updates

March Madness! And also, College Basketball.

This seems a fitting title for this month’s newsletter, given the amount of activity we’ve seen in student loans recently. For those following the NCAA tourney, however, you’ll probably note that the amount of upsets we’ve seen are more surprising than anything we’ll discuss here…

Before we begin, we want to wish all of you who matched to a residency program this month! We wish you the best in the next phase of your journey.

Ok, now let’s talk student loans:

Extensions to IDR One-Time Account Adjustment

We’ve covered this in previous newsletters and in our dedicated blog posting. To summarize, borrowers who held non-direct loans, or made payments outside of IDR payment plans, will receive a one-time account adjustment giving them credit towards IDR or PSLF forgiveness. Here are the specific updates to the timeline:

• If you have commercially-managed FFEL, Perkins, Health Education Assistance Loan (HEAL) Program, or other non-Direct Loan loans, apply for a Direct Consolidation Loan by the end of 2023 to get the full benefits of the one-time account adjustment.
• If you’ve reached 240 or 300 months of payments for IDR forgiveness, you’ll start to see their loans forgiven in the spring of 2023. All other borrowers will see their accounts update in 2024.
• These adjustments also apply to those pursing Public Service Loan Forgiveness, The deadline to consolidate under the PSLF Waiver was 10/31/22, and this 12/31/23 consolidation option was not included in the original press release back in April. PSLF candidates who do not need to consolidate should begin seeing discharges on their account very soon.

Legal and Legislative Activity

• The Supreme Court recently began hearing the case for the broad loan cancellation of up to $20k for borrowers under certain income thresholds. We’ve been updating borrowers of this activity on our blog and social media, and we invite you to check us out there to follow more closely!
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• You may have recently seen a headline that a private lender, Sofi, recently sued the Department of Education. If you’d like to learn more about the reasoning and our expectations, check out our blog posting.
• If that’s not enough legal action for ya, there was also movement in the borrower defense to repayment case with positive impacts to our Devry readers. We’re keeping this blog up to date here.

PSLF Granted Continues to Grow Exponentially

From our own client base, we’ve seen several million dollars of tax-free loan forgiveness with record setting portfolios of over $600k and $700k being discharged just this week! 

Overall, here’s how much forgiveness has grown as of Jan 31^st:

Our advisors work diligently to help borrowers not only achieve PSLF, but also maximize the savings at every possible turn. Check out this recent feedback a client sent in last week:

After multiple issues with payment counts and servicer errors, I have received Public Service Loan Forgiveness after initially starting my payments almost 11 years ago. Doctors without Quarters was instrumental in facilitating corrections to servicer errors multiple times during the past decade. One servicer retroactively cancelled 2 years’ worth of IDR payments when they implemented my Residency forbearance during the final year of Residency. Subsequently, my employer used the wrong tax identification number on one of my annual Employer Certification Forms and thus caused several payments to be inappropriately deducted. Doctors without Quarters was able to help me get these issues resolved through behind the scenes conversations with the servicers. I have referred several colleagues to the DWOQ organization over the years after seeing the benefits of being a client. 

Webinar Schedule for 2023 Graduates

As we’ve done every year, we’re hosting webinars for this year’s graduates. We hope you’ll join us and share the details with your peers where appropriate, as we seek to cast our net as wide as possible to ensure borrowers get strategic advice from a true advocate (yep, that’s us) at this critical time. We’ll be scheduling sessions for residents and practitioners in June, once we come up for air after this busy graduation season.

Ok, that’s enough for now…. Indeed, it’s a bit of March Madness in the student loan world too. We hope you’re enjoying your Spring. Until next time…

Brandon Barfield

Brandon Barfield is the President and Co-Founder of Student Loan Professor, and is nationally known as student loan expert for graduate health professions. Since 2011, Brandon has given hundreds of loan repayment presentations for schools, hospitals, and medical conferences across the country. With his diverse background in financial aid, financial planning and student loan advisory, Brandon has a broad understanding of the intricacies surrounding student loans, loan repayment strategies, and how they should be considered when graduates make other financial decisions.