If you work in public service, your years of student loan payments can now count toward forgiveness.
Your Daily Dad Joke
Why couldn’t the leopard play hide and seek?
Because he was always spotted.
Your years still count
If you teach, nurse, work for a city or a county, serve in the military or work at a nonprofit, and you’ve been making student loan payments for years toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, last year may have put a knot in your stomach. A new rule said the government could decide that some employers no longer counted. A lot of people quietly wondered whether their years were about to disappear.
That’s why I wanted to pass this along.
You may have seen a headline this week that the administration dropped its legal fight over that rule. Here’s what it means for you.
Do my years still count? Yes. Two federal courts threw the rule out in June. Yahoo News reported that the government’s appeals in those cases have now been dropped, and California’s attorney general says it also dropped its appeal in the case brought by 22 states. So the old rules are still the rules. If your employer qualified before, this fight didn’t change that.
You may also have heard that the program never really forgives anybody. For a long time that was close to true. Yahoo reported that by 2021 only about 7,000 borrowers had been forgiven. It also reported that the program has now written off loans for more than 1 million people.
I know. Nobody needs a court fight hanging over the one promise that made a smaller paycheck easier to take.
The one small thing I’d do this week: log in to the PSLF Help Tool at studentaid.gov and certify your current employer, if you haven’t in a while. It puts your count on record now, instead of finding a problem in year ten. You don’t need anybody’s help to do it, and I wouldn’t pay anybody to do it for you. If someone calls offering to “protect your forgiveness” for a fee, hang up.
If you want to go deeper on what the judges said in June, I wrote about it here.
Anyway, I wanted to make sure you heard about it, especially if you’ve been carrying that worry since last year.
How many years of payments do you have in, or who in your life is counting theirs? Share it in the comments so we can all learn from it. I read every comment.
If you’ve been carrying this one around, you can set it down for the weekend. Years of showing up for other people still count, and so does the time you just spent checking. I’ll see you Monday.
— Steve
Also on the site since yesterday: why age alone won’t end old federal student loans, the court ban on the Accelerated Debt Settlement operation, who can claim in the Coast Dental calls and texts settlement, the ViaPath (Telmate) data breach settlement, and Damon Day’s first Instacart shop and the math on it.
A longer video from me: Can ChatGPT Really Fix Your Credit? I Graded It. I typed eight credit questions into ChatGPT the way a worried person types them at midnight, then graded every answer against the law.
The newest podcast episode is Still Paying for Last Christmas? The Holiday Debt Trap, if you’d like something to listen to before the shopping starts.
SEE A SCAM? SAY SOMETHING. If one has landed on you or someone you love, tell me at tips@getoutofdebt.org. The ones that can warn other people may show up here. Leave out account numbers and passwords.
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.
This is what I’m telling friends like you over coffee. But remember, you do you.