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Dad Joke
What’s a ninja’s favorite type of shoes?
Sneakers.
Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile
Check the letter, not the headline
Over all my years, one of the messiest money problems I’ve watched obliterate people is student loans. They’ve become so political that every change bounces borrowers somewhere new, with little chance of a clean outcome. And the tsunami of confusing changes keeps coming.
This week’s wave is the SAVE plan. An MS NOW opinion piece yesterday talked about “this week’s deadline for some student borrowers” to leave SAVE “before their bills could double or triple.” That’s real. But it’s not the whole story.
Here’s the rest of it. After a court ended SAVE in March, the Education Department said servicers would start sending notices on July 1, and that each borrower gets 90 days from their own notice to pick a new plan. July 1 plus 90 days is today. So today is the first group’s deadline. It isn’t everybody’s. Newsweek reports the notices have been going out in waves, and the Department says 7.5 million people were enrolled in SAVE. The date that matters is the one on your own letter.
The part the headlines skip is what happens if you do nothing. The Department says you get moved automatically into the Standard plan or the new Tiered Standard plan. Both set your payment by how much you owe, not by what you earn. That’s where “double or triple” comes from. The plan built on income is the new Repayment Assistance Plan, where the Department says the payment is based on your “income and number of dependents.” And you don’t have to wait for your letter. The Department says you can call your servicer and switch any time.
Deadlines like this bring out people selling help. Nobody needs to pay a company to change a repayment plan, and I wrote about the ones who charge a fee for it this summer. If you want the whole map, my SAVE deadline guide walks through each plan.
Somebody you love has a student loan and a pile of mail they haven’t opened. I’d forward this to them today. Their deadline is on their own servicer notice, not in the news, and if it passes, the new payment is set by what they owe instead of what they earn.
The cost moved into the price
Fox Business reported last week that mortgage rates topped 7% for the first time since early 2025. Freddie Mac’s weekly survey put the 30-year average at 7.03%, up from 6.30% a year ago. That’s real too. But it’s not the whole story.
What a headline can’t show you is the kitchen table. On a $350,000 loan, 7.03% works out to about $2,336 a month in principal and interest. At last year’s 6.30%, it was about $2,166. That’s roughly $169 a month for the same house, a little over $2,000 a year, every year of the loan.
A number like that rarely shows up as a feeling. It shows up as the house somebody quietly stops looking at. And the average in the news is a starting point, not a quote. The rate a lender offers you depends on your credit, your down payment, and whether you asked more than one lender.
But let’s not lose sight of the fact that in my lifetime, mortgage rates were at 14% or more for people with the best credit. Freddie Mac’s weekly survey sat at 14% or higher for 140 weeks between 1980 and 1984, and peaked at 18.63% in October 1981. Rates are high now but not historically high.
Here’s the part that gets lost. Low rates didn’t make houses cheaper. They made them more expensive, because people shop for the monthly payment, not the price. In 1984 the median new home sold for about $80,000, around three and a half times the median household income. Today it’s $410,700, closer to five times. Back in my day homes were much cheaper but rates were much higher. With 20% down, the payment on that 1984 home took about 40% of a typical household’s income. Today it’s about 30%. The cost never went away. It just moved from the rate into the price.
Two claim deadlines worth a minute
If you live in California and visited Forbes’ website, you may be in a $10 million tracking settlement. Claims are due November 9.
American Vision Partners, which runs eye care practices, settled a data breach for $1.75 million. Claims are due November 12.
Also on the site since yesterday
I Just Got Out and There Are Judgments Against Me I Didn’t Know About
I Have a Lot of Equity in My Home and Still Can’t Get a Loan Until It Sells
ClearOne Advantage Sued Over Debt Consolidation Text Messages
If any of this was new to you, somebody you know hasn’t heard it either. It’s free at yourmoneyactually.com, and I don’t sell the list. The places I actually use for my own money, and what I get out of telling you, are on one page where they’ll always be.
Nothing here is advice for your specific situation. It’s what I’d tell a friend over coffee, and I’d tell the same friend that the details of their own life outrank anything I’ve written here.
One more thing. If student loans have knocked you sideways, that says nothing about your character. The rules changed under a lot of good people, more than once. What still works is plain and a little boring: open the letter, make the call, pick the plan that fits your real life. People do come back from this, and it usually starts with one ordinary phone call. I’ll be back tomorrow.
— Steve