(Ep. 285) What Really Happens at a Consultation? The Truth Behind Our Student Loan Advice

Welcome to another episode of the Student Loan Planner Podcast. I'm Lauren Williams, one of the senior consultants at SLP, and today I come to you with a team member that typically stays behind the scenes. In fact, today's episode is all about getting a better understanding of who we are and how to make the most of your interactions with us as the SLP team. So let me provide a little bit of context. Travis Hornsby is our fearless leader who started this company back in 2016 after getting into the weeds trying to figure out how to find the best solution for his wife's student loans. Then we have Rob Burtman join the team who, if you've been listening for a while, you've probably heard him and I do quite a few episodes together, but he was Travis's first hire back in December of 2017. And I, cute little Lauren, was the second member to join the team in October of 2018. So fast forward to 2024, where we currently are, and we are a team of 26 consultants and 13 other members, which are admins, other staff, writers, you name it, we pretty much have it. We are a large team and it's been such a pleasure to watch us grow into a thriving community that's doing good in the world. Like I genuinely believe that we are doing good in the world and I never would have imagined that I'd be around five years later as a senior member that is now training other members on how to change people's lives in just 60 minutes. That's a real thing. We actually do that. I can attest to it. Okay. So to get back to the point, today's episode is all about sharing a different perspective on how to look at your student loan consultation and to make the most of your experience. And I said that there was a secret member that's from behind the scenes. So let's welcome Justin Kim Hummel to the show. Justin, hello. Hey, thanks, Lauren. Hi, everyone. I'm Justin Kim Hummel. I've been with SLP now for just over six months, but I still remember when I did a consult way back in 2016 with Travis. I could have been consult number less than 100 and had an awesome experience. I really enjoyed the expertise and I'd always hung around the emails and found this great opportunity, helping and being on the other side of it. I'm originally from Florida and really enjoy working with people, helping them, led to kind of my schooling and undergrad with PR, doing some graduate studies in DC, worked on the Hill for a bit with some congressional members, and now still traveling around, work mostly out of Florida and enjoy spending time with my wife, who actually also works for SLP, and helping everyone here and applying some of what I learned and know from my time in Congress dealing with that side of the loans to now actually making that work for the people and working with you and everyone has been a real honor so far and we have made a lot of change. It's been great. Oh my goodness. So the thing that I didn't know is that you were one of the OG clients. You worked with Travis way back in 2016? Yeah, it was one of those. I had just finished grad school and was working and Congress has a lot of weird programs that I had no idea how to navigate. Gave him a call, booked a console, and he really set me in the right direction. And when you meet someone like that, you really keep that kind of in your mind and follow the emails. He actually reached out to me one time over the years and was like, give me feedback on my business. How am I doing? And it was something that I felt real value to give input with and that's really just how he treats everybody. He's always asking, as you all know if you get the emails, what can he do better? How can he improve? How can we all do better? And he asks us too, business side, consultant side, and it's nice to be part of something that really matters. I love this story. I really had no idea that you were, like you said, an OG client, but I think it speaks to, like you said, what we're trying to accomplish at Student Loan Planner. This idea that every member of our team truly cares. We're here for a reason. We don't just show up to collect a paycheck. Everybody has some sort of personal connection to how their lives have either been changed via SLP or how student loans have affected their lives and so how they're dedicated to being able to help others. And like you said, you also have a family member on the team. Did Sue learn about it from you or how did her story go that helped her like join the, decide she wanted to be a member of the SLP team? Yeah, it was a combination of a lot. You know, one thing it's important to remember about like, you know, our admins and our staff is that, you know, this isn't the like Mohella call center, right, that everyone talked about last week where no one's trained, no one knows even the basic rules of student loans. Like we all have really deep academic backgrounds, right? My wife's a nurse practitioner, right? I work for Congress. We have someone who's a podiatrist on our team. Like we're all doing this out of passion and have a deep background of working with people, have education and understand the regulations, right? When we work with everyone and, you know, my wife was just very interested in learning more about how finances work from this regulatory side, you know, something that she's learned a ton about through everyone here. And it was something that made more sense to make a greater impact in what she was doing on a day-to-day thing. Plus we get to work together. So Justin and I started to work together on Mondays and Thursdays as a part of a regularly scheduled admin meeting where we talk about tough questions that are coming up in the inboxes. So, you know, we just talked about how awesome this team is, but not everybody stays around forever. So we have an admin team that is managing the inbox of people that are either on maternity or paternity leave, people who have, you know, left to go on to greater things. And, you know, just in general, we have a help box. They try to manage those questions as well. So we started to see that there's, you know, some complex questions coming in. We don't necessarily always have a consultant available to answer those questions. So now we have office hours where we kind of work together to figure out, like I said, what's the best way to respond to someone's need. And during the course of our time together, we've come up with a few things that just like kind of repeatedly happen over the course of interacting with these emails. And like, so our commonly, our FAQs, if you will, is what we're going to go through today, but it's not just the FAQs. It's the FAQs of the things that make people upset or why they might be dissatisfied. So, you know, occasionally we get people who are upset or dissatisfied with our service. And I know it's hard to believe because we are awesome at SLP. I'm always shocked and appalled when someone is, you know, up in arms or a little bit grumpy. But I think that's a part of growing. We're helping more people and not everyone is going to come with the same expectations. So, like I said, today is all about addressing some of the concerns that we've seen to help you, if you're on the other end of thinking about getting a consultation, understand, you know, what happens behind the scenes with SLP and what is the work that they're doing? How do I know that I can trust this team? And we want you to have good expectations. So, today, Justin and I are going to walk through some scenarios that we've encountered from the, we've encountered from a few unhappy people to provide some context and help you better understand our perspective and, like I said, manage your expectations. So, let's jump in, Justin. We've, you finally booked the call. So, let's just walk through, like, some of the things that happened during the time that, you know, you're booking a call and you're going through a Student Loan Console or you're thinking about, you're getting ready for your Student Loan Console. What happens for a client? Yeah. So, you know, one thing, I love what you said, Lauren, about, right, we're all people, we're all trying to help each other. And the thing I always keep in the back of my mind through all the steps is really, right, the golden rule that we're taught, right, in elementary school, right, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And I think as long as we always keep that in the back of our mind, then everyone's going to be happy. So, as far as, right, the steps of booking, right, a consultation, you know, first, a lot of our clients do a ton of research because I think a lot of us are very interested in learning, right, why are things the way that they are. And after you do the research and you build the confidence that, right, Student Loan Planner is the place to go for your information, then you're going to click, hey, I want to book a console. You're going to pick your time, it's going to assign you to an advisor. And from there, you're going to be asked to fill out an answer, about a 10, 15-minute intake form with a bunch of questions that range from asking about your income and your loans to what your goals are. And once you've completed that, you go through the rest of the steps, connecting with your advisor, provide them with your student loan data so that they're able to formulate a plan and be prepared in advance of the call. And then once the call happens, you'll be able to have a deeper understanding in a one-on-one custom console to be able to know exactly about what plans you have, how the consultant can help you, and where you should go from there to execute on the goals that were set during that call. I could not have said it better myself. That is a perfect summary of what happens and how you walk through the process. There's a few things that I want to, like, back up and kind of break down a little bit, though. So one of the things that happens on a call, you know, I'm the consultant, like I said, he's coming at it from the admin standpoint, so he's got to, like, downpack the processes. But when we get in that call, we'll walk through what we call your NSLDS file. So that is something that your consultant is absolutely going to ask you to provide. You'll go to studentaid.gov to get it. It comes in this ugly format. It's called a TXT file. You'll send that over your consultant. It's imperative that we get that on the front end so that we can interpret your information. So during the call, we're going to walk through that, and it's kind of like your credit report for student loans. So it's going to tell us, like, what payment plan you're on right now, when is your IDRE certification date. Those things are all going to be in that file, and we're going to walk through that information and kind of, you know, build with you what your student loan history looks like and, you know, where we can go from there based on the information we have, what you're eligible for, what you're not eligible for. The other thing that's important about a consultation is once we've completed the NSLDS analysis, we'll move to talking through a calculator and information that we would have asked for on the front end is going to be your income, and that's important because we're doing all these projections. So our calculator is projecting into the future what will happen for your student loans and which plan is going to be the best plan for you based on the information that you provide to us. So like I said, we ask about that income. We're going to ask about how you think your income will grow over the next few years, and we know it's not black and white, which to that point, you know, as we talk about setting expectations, it's the idea that the information we're providing to you is based on the information you provided to us, and when life changes, that information might change. So you might have to book a follow-up consultation to get a better understanding. The dates that you took out the loans are also going to be something. When you started repaying, we have been seeing quite frequently recently that NSLDS files are not 100% accurate. So one big thing we've seen is someone's loans are marked as in the grace period as of 2018. And, you know, here we are in 2024, and they're still in the grace period. It's like, well, where's all the loan history? Like, we all just had COVID. All of the COVID forbearance should count. There's nothing that we can do to change that, and we have to make, you know, kind of build your history based on what we know and what you tell us. So I just bring it up to say that, like, a lot of the information that we're going through as we walk through that calculator and getting the answers that we're going to, for the recommendation that we're going to provide are based on the information you provide. So your spouse's income. Sometimes people don't want to provide that. They're like, my spouse is not a part of this. We handle our stuff separately. Well, let me just tell you that if you're married, your student loans will be taken into consideration, and your tax filing status will matter as well. So you've got to be thinking through, hey, you know, maybe me and my spouse don't do this thing together, but I need to know how much my spouse makes. So let me get that information prior to the call. Family size is another thing, and this is one I always just, like, kind of qualify when I'm talking to my clients. They're like, wait, Lauren, you're getting a little bit nosy. How many kids am I going to have, like, and what year am I going to have these kids? Well, it matters for your family size because they use the federal poverty line based on your family size to calculate your student loan payment. So those are some of the things that we're thinking about, like, hey, if you're going to have a kid next year, your family size is going to change. That's going to change your student loan payment, and we want to be as accurate as possible in projecting out what your next upcoming payment will be. So that's why we're asking those questions. It's not just because we're nosy. And then last but not least, you know, go ahead. I think you hit on a really great point there. A lot of this information, right, we're asking just like if you went to your doctor, we need that baseline information, that family history, per se, to be able to give you the best, you know, outcome, right? Your best diagnosis, per se. And it's not that, you know, we're being nosy and we don't know how many kids you're going to have. We want to just understand the full picture so we can make the best use of the time on the call. And you're right. A lot of people, you know, will say, I don't feel comfortable sharing this or that. And, you know, that's okay. Have that ready for the call. But the more we have in advance, the better the time that you will have on the call with your consultant to talk about not only your loans but other advanced topics that they also cover. Yeah. I love the doctor analogy as well. It's like you can't tell the doctor, you know, my head hurts, but you forgot to say that like you ran into the wall and also fell down the stairs and expect them to give you, you know, a proper diagnosis. So the more information you share, the better will be. And so the last point I'll bring up, you know, there's tons of other things that are on our consultation intake form, but that people sometimes have a little bit of hesitancy about sharing is with your expenses. So we ask about whether or not you have credit card debt, you know, what your housing costs look like, what your car payments look like. And that's for us to better deduce, you know, what other obligations you have going on. So when we come up with a student loan payment, it's going to be based on math. It's going to be based on the regulations that the federal government has set. However, you know, sometimes you have extenuating circumstances that are not going to allow you to be able to make a payment, or you have some things, you know, you come into the emergency room and it's like, what do we treat your toe that has a hangnail or your gunshot wound? We've got to focus on the gunshot wound. So you come to us and because we have so much financial expertise, we realize, hey, you've got a gunshot wound in the form of $50,000 of credit card debt. You know, yes, we are going to help you understand what your student loan situation is and how to best attack that. But we're also going to look at you, a whole person that has other things going on outside of the student loan debt and tell you, hey, you've got a gunshot wound. And I actually have a few things I can stitch you up and get you going in the right direction, even though you came to me for, like I said, your hangnail on your toes. So your expenses and the way that you're living your life are a factor as a part of your overall student loan scenario. And we want to take into consideration the things that are going on, even though the government doesn't necessarily take those things into consideration when they calculate your student loan payment. Yeah, Lauren, and it's, you know, good you mentioned that, because sometimes the most important pieces of information, I feel, are at the very end where they ask, like, what are your goals for this call? And, you know, sometimes it might be something someone might think is a little, you know, embarrassing. I lost my job or, you know, I just had a health issue. But knowing those things is something that can be super powerful, right, when building your plan that you could see, right, your payment amounts lower drastically, or at least be part of a combination of things that could allow us to come up with something tailored more to what you need at that specific time. So the more information that we understand, even if you think it's not super relevant, you'd be surprised how that's helped a lot of clients save a lot of money. Absolutely. One other thing I'm thinking about is, like, while we're, when you're finally on the call, you, you know, jump on and it's Zoom. And we all live in this virtual world now. And it's been one of the best parts about being an SLP is, like you said, we're able to help people all over the country. And in fact, all over the world, because technology allows us not to have to make a long distance call or, you know, make it really ineffective for us to be able to reach each other. And so, like I said, being an OG member, we started just using our regular telephone and talking to a person for an hour, never having the opportunity to share screen, we would manually email you the calculators and the NSLDS files that we're talking about. And then we would say, okay, open it up, look here in column C, are you following me? And if I had to make any changes, I'd make those changes, then I'd send another spreadsheet over. Now, because of technology, we're able to just do a screen share. And so that just brings up the point of, you know, we're sharing screen as part of the Zoom meeting, we don't generally have our cameras on as an SLP team. Why? Because, like I said, majority of the call is in screen share mode. But also, like, we're not always in a situation where you have the beautiful background. So we work from all over the country, like I said, all over the world, we are digital nomads, you know, everybody has a different kind of setup. And it doesn't change the student-only advice that we're providing to you, just because we don't have our camera on. So you're not going to find a big, fancy, beautiful background. We're not even going to go through the, the, the hoop, I guess, if you will, of putting up the fake, you know, people put make it like, oh, I'm in a nice office area, and they cut the camera on. It's like, right now, Justin and I are recording and my hair is not like, yeah, you guys don't want to see me looking like this. Don't be alarmed is my point is, if you get on your Zoom call, and the camera is off, that is pretty much our default as student loan planner. If you prefer to see your consultant, you absolutely can send an email in advance and say, hey, I'd love to have the cameras on. You know, sometimes people just want to say like, I just want to see that you're real. And I'll cut my camera on and I'll show them like, hey, I'm a real person. I'm here. And then I'll cut it back off. But a part another part of our overall process is, you know, that our default is having the cameras off. Okay, so that brings me to my next point is the length of the consultation. So we jump on a consultation, I said, the cameras are off, we talked to what happens in a consultation. As I mentioned, I really love this work. I'm in my, I'm approaching my sixth year as student loan planner. And I'm here because I know that the knowledge that we have can literally change somebody's life in 60 minutes or less. And so let me emphasize the or less part. Because sometimes people feel that they've paid for a 60 minute call. And they feel like they've been cheated if it's 50 minutes, or, you know, they're like, okay, what do we do for the next 10 minutes? And, you know, I have to say like, hmm, do you really, really need the 60 minutes, just to say that you got the 60 minutes? Or did you get everything that you you needed during the call? Justin, have you ever encountered anything like this in the way that you interact with people in service industries? Yeah, I think, right, rightly so, you know, some people believe, hey, I paid X amount of dollars. And this was for, you know, an hour session, whatever. And they don't look at it in practicality, where a lot of times, right, you paid for, you know, a visit with your doctor to get a diagnosis. And you paid your co insurance or whatever premium you get to pay. And they figured out your issue, and it may have taken them five minutes, right? So, you know, with student loans, I think it can be quite similar. And in addition to the student loan plan, right, you will give a lot of other advice as well, that can, you know, fill up some other time. But sometimes, you know exactly what's going on, because Lauren, how many how many consults have you done? So far? Yeah, I think I'm at around 2000. I lost count at this point, I should have looked that up. So at that point, right, you've seen, you know, that the majority of scenarios, probably hundreds of times that people encounter, and you know, within right, through your preparation within getting some basic information from the beginning of the call, you know, the main path you're going down. And from there, you'll be able to branch off and share the great information. Whereas sometimes maybe people have never done this, that it's going to take them a ton of time just to figure out, well, where do I start? 100%. And so to that point, it's like, you know, we set aside 60 minutes, 99% of our calls are done in 60 minutes. Like I said, sometimes they're done a little bit sooner. But sometimes they run over. And like I said, because everybody loves the work that they're doing, we're not going to just be like, okay, it's 60 minutes now, we're hanging up on you. Bye. Who cares if we got to the answer or not. We're very, very diligent about making sure that you understand everything, and that we get you the right answer in a sufficient amount of time. But you know, as we think about, like you said, setting expectations, remember that the consultant might have another call right behind you. And so you want to be mindful of that. But also like to your point about being a doctor, I think of always like the plumber, you know, they're like, it comes in a like rattles your, your washing machine, and it starts working again, you're like, what, like, but knowing where where to rattle the washing machine to get it to go again, is like you said, the result of the time and the expertise that he's put in over the course of years, in order to be able to fix your problem. So I really, really take pride in like I said, being able to help people in such a short period of time. But it's not so much about the time, it's about being able to help the people. The benefit from that is also right once, what you know, let's say you get the core plan down and get them on the right path, you know, during the let's say, first half of the call, that allows a lot of other time, or what I see a lot of people ask is basically what I call a game scenarios, right? Well, what if I get married in three years? Or what if I have four kids instead of two kids? Or what if I decide to get a public sector job instead of a private sector job? Or what if my kid goes back to school? Right, that because of your, you know, knowledge in that first part, we're allowed to take that time, plan out a lot of different scenarios for you, and then continue on. And I think a lot of clients value that a lot, because most a lot of our email communications from clients from what I see is being able to ask those types of scenario based questions afterwards, which honestly, are a lot harder to respond to via email than live on the call a lot of times. Yeah, I think that is an excellent point to lead us to, you know, the the final part of the the consultation experience. And it's, you know, what happens after the consultation. So we provide email support after the call. But this is to make sure that you can implement the strategy that we've laid out. So our intent during a consultation is to educate you and to empower you so that you feel confident about the plan that you have, and navigating those next steps. So you should be ready to rock and roll after you said you had time to throw out additional scenarios. And I know that sometimes it's scary to kind of walk through, oh my goodness, I don't want to mess this up. I don't want to have to pay more, you know, the government has already made me not feel so great about this. But the point of email support is not necessarily to, you know, give you handholding where it's like, what should I click next? And then you wait for email. And then you're grumpy, because maybe it takes us two days to get back to your email, you didn't know what to click next. And then you click that, and then you send another email about what I click. You all every single one of you, I know it because I interact with you on a day to day basis are smart, college educated, and the majority of our clients have two degrees. So you absolutely can walk through the information that we give you. And there's a lot of other services out there that will say you need to pay us monthly or quarterly, and we'll handle it for you. And they make it seem like it's so complex, that you need to pay 999 a month or $99 a month, whatever the case may be. We don't do that as student loan planner. Because like I said, we believe that we can help you in that 60 minutes, we provide you with a great summary of information that's necessary so that you can go on and be empowered to kind of start handling your student loans on your own going forward. Right. And sometimes right, you know, all those websites can be terrible, FSAs, you know, guidance can change on a whim. And it's difficult to kind of keep track of that and understand. And right, SLP does a great job of sending out newsletters and updates with all of that information. And as questions come up, right, we answer all that we can. But being able to kind of navigate and understand, right, your original plan and review it right at the end of your call is something that is super powerful. And along the way, right, we're here for you, no matter what. And we'll help you get your answers to the questions. But you know, it's very much a two way street, as is with most communication and relationships. And it's important to be aware that, you know, at any time, right, one of us is going through something, and make sure you remember, right there, we are all human at the end of the day. And, you know, drawing on that something that that I hear about a lot, either in emails or post email support is the concept of a guarantee, right? We all really want to know, hey, I'm paying this money for a consultation or a service. What's my guarantee that I can save money or that this is worth it. And I always think back to, you know, since we're drawn a lot on the doctor's visits, right? If I have a fever, and I decide I need to see a doctor, and I go there, and I tell the doctor, hey, I'm not feeling well, they're going to, you know, do a once over, see what's going on, possibly refer you to a specialist. But there's no guarantee the doctor is going to find out what's wrong with me completely. And there may be follow up visits required, or further information will be need to be gathered tests. And that may result in me paying more money, right to see those other specialists. So, you know, you never really know what can happen until you start because I've seen many times, right? You think that, hey, my student loan case is straightforward, I need to be on the save plan. And the clients come to us and say, hey, I need to be on save. That's what my friend told me. And you dig into it, right? And it's actually something flipped upside down, total opposite. And we think we actually need to pay off your loans as aggressively as you can, because in five years, you're going to be making, you know, a large high income salary. So what may seem simple to someone that doesn't really understand the full wealth of details may actually extremely complicated, because those quick question emails sometimes can be the hardest one. So whatever takes a few days for us to get back to a quick question email, just know that it's sometimes more difficult to answer those than it is the very detailed questions. But nonetheless, Lauren, maybe you can speak to a little bit more like, you know, where do those guarantees kind of come into play when you're on calls? Or how do you talk through that with some of your clients? A lot of times people come to us and they're, they're, you know, worked up a good bit. And they said during the call, like, the only thing I can promise you is that we are going to do our best. And I feel like by the end of the majority of the calls that we do, a client feels so much less stressed about their student loan situation, simply because they're educated. Not knowing what's going on gives people a lot of angst. And so I can see exactly why someone would want, I need you to guarantee you're going to save me money, I need you to guarantee that, you know, I can talk to you whenever I want, I need you to guarantee, you know, fill in the blank with whatever it is. But if you just let us walk through the process and help you understand, like what is actually happening with your loans, you know, I said, we're never going to make you a guarantee. But I think you will definitely I can promise you that you will feel better at the end of a call and have a better understanding of how to proceed going forward. Yeah, and I can attest to that, right? Like, personally, when I started, you know, did my consult with SLP way back, right? With Travis, I was someone who felt I kind of knew what was going on with student loan regulations. And I was going to do a lot about finances. But I knew that I didn't know everything. So although I had what I felt was a solid plan, I did a ton of research, right landed on kind of on Travis's, you know, website and said to myself, all right, I want to talk to someone who I researched and thought was the best, and just kind of get that stamp of approval. And yeah, I learned a lot, there were definitely changes to my plan that came from the call. At the end of it, I knew that if nothing had changed, I was going to be very satisfied with knowing, hey, an expert that is going to support me, you know, through email, to answer my questions, gave me that stamp of approval, and I can move forward even more confident. 100%. But let's jump into actually some scenarios that kind of like might better describe to people, you know, what, like you said, what might be a situation where you could be unhappy, but like I said, we can't make you a guarantee. And also like this is your particular situation. So, you know, one that I've seen, we've come up with quite a few times is the high earner. So right now, we're in these periods where all these changes have been made because of COVID. There's lots of news about people getting forgiveness. And a lot of people book a call hoping that they're going to also immediately get forgiveness and that their student loans are going to be wiped away. But what we see as a person who's, like I said, not super happy sometimes is someone who's earning quite a bit of money. So you make maybe two and a half times what you owe. You're unlikely to be having a conversation about forgiveness, you earn gargantuanly more than what you bought, what you borrowed. And even if you have a six-figure debt. So I see that sometimes. Someone comes and they owe $200,000. It is not a little bit of money. You know, we feel you on the fact that that's not a little bit of money. That's a home. That's a really fancy car. That's, you know, four years of salary for somebody who makes 50 grand. 200K is significant student loan debt. But in my example, like two and a half times, you make 500K. So while it's not fun to have to pay off 200K of debt, you're in a higher tax bracket. You might maybe live in California. I feel you. I absolutely do as the consultant, you know. But my job is to give you the information that is relevant to your particular situation. And, you know, you're just coming out of school. Your first job is making 500K with your 200K of debt. You know, we're not having a conversation about forgiveness. We're having a conversation about what's going to be the best way to pay these loans off. So it is not lost on us that, like you said, people have other things going on. Life, home buying, children. You know, maybe someone in your family has special needs. And, you know, whatever the payment is on that $200,000 a month could be a significant expenditure. And, you know, 200K is just not going to disappear overnight. It doesn't change that the analysis may say that there is no in your future and you're going to have to come up with a way to pay it off. So to anyone who's ever been grumpy about the fact that we had to tell them that you make too much and that you're not eligible for forgiveness, please accept this big hug on behalf, knowing that we did our best for you and that that is the right answer still. All right. So as I'm thinking about this, actually, let's circle back to the emails because we were kind of talking about like what happens after a call. I know I jumped into a scenario, but two other things that stand out to me about email support. One is when your scenario changes gargantuanly. So as I just mentioned, you know, we just talked about a high earner situation. Sometimes you come to us as a lower earner, but your scenario changes. You get a $50,000 raise and now your situation is different. So one of the things that comes up in emails is like, hey, I just got married. I had twins. I got a $100,000 raise. Like what should I do now with my student loans? Because, you know, that's I'm still within the range of the email support you guys are providing. And yeah, I need to know the answer to this. So Justin, how would you frame up why we can't do that via email? So the way I always look at it is probably from a client perspective. You know, they're thinking, hey, I have email support. I need my questions answered. And as someone now on the other side, thinking about it, talking to consultants about it, it's really a disservice to answer these questions for you because they a lot of times aren't that simple. And here's why. If a regulatory change happens or in this case, right, you make a lot more money suddenly, we don't know what your partner may or may not be making, right? Did you just have a baby perhaps? Or did you actually have a three-week unpaid time off between the jobs that may result into a different scenario? Did you end up having, you know, any medical issues in between that period? Did one of your kids end up going back to school and you had to take out debt for them? We don't know anything else that's happened. So while we get one piece of information that says, hey, I'm making 50,000 more dollars, which is something that you could put into a calculator, any of Travis's calculators and get an idea of, hey, this is what will happen to my payment, if we don't know the full context of every other single thing that's happened in your financial picture since the last time that we spoke, that's really a disservice. And it's something that could change really everything if we haven't given the dedicated time and kind of care to understand what is going on. So you could say, hey, do this. Let's say you follow that advice and switch your plan because of the information you gave us. And then six months down the line, you say, hey, why did you tell me to do this? This was something that resulted in a higher payment because, hey, actually my partner ended up doubling their income too. Well, we didn't know that. And it's better to have that whole picture so that you're getting the best advice the first time. I couldn't agree with that more. The other thing that comes up for me as I think about emails is, oh my goodness, like you said, what should I do? And you kind of brought this up earlier, the idea of the various scenarios you have time, if you have extra time during the consultation to walk through various scenarios. But what I see a lot of emails about is politics. And so Travis loves politics. He follows politics closely. And they matter a lot for student loan policy. You as well, Justin, have been, like you said, a member of the, I don't know how you describe what your previous work was, but you are deeply involved in politics as well. But can you spend all day, every day responding to questions related to politics? What do you think about the questions that we sometimes see in our inbox related to the politics of student loans? I think we could have an entirely one-hour podcast just on this topic. And it probably deserves that someday. But when you see a change or you hear about a proposed change either on TV or Facebook or, you know, in passing by with one of your friends, right, it's always important to remember the details. What is in the details of the change is what matters the most. Because, right, from a political side, from, you know, I spent time working with congressmen, senators, writing these laws. Coming from that side of this, it's important to remember why these laws are made, right? We all like to think it's, they're always made to help people. And most of the time that's true. But sometimes it's meant to, right, like, fulfill people's agendas or other greater goals of other, you know, politicians or potentially lobbyists. And within this, when a change has happened, you could call something, you know, the great forgiveness program. But within it, it may actually end up raising the majority of people's student loan payments because the details is what matters. And within that, always question kind of what you hear in broad statements. Like, we'll get emails all the time, Lauren, hey, how can I get my loans forgiven? Oh, I heard about this great forgiveness plan that the president's talking about. Why can I not qualify for that? Well, there are a lot of people that could, depending on which one you're talking about. And there are a lot of people that it might not qualify. But again, right, it's all in the details. And a lot of the times we see the language is very vague, or from some people's perspectives, not complete. And that's done on purpose a lot of times to allow like the Department of Education or other agencies really drill down into how do we want to implement this to meet our objective, right, which may be to make more people get their loans forgiven, or in some cases, maybe to make people pay more money on their student loans. So depending on the flavor of the day, you never really know. But the clear language in a lot of these, it's all in the details. 100% Same thing, Lauren, people asking you those questions on calls, too. Yeah, 100%. And I think the summary of this is, you know, we're headed into an election season. We all know that everybody gets worked up during this timeframe. What is not realistic is for us to tell you who to vote for, or for us to be able to tell you who is actually going to implement whatever it is that they're saying they're going to do about student loans. You know, all of it is projections into the future, you know, politicians are going to say what they think you want to hear. And you've got to be able to decipher who is telling the truth, who's going to make the best policy based on, you know, the information that they're providing to you. But the reality of it all is, is that we're not going to know what the rules are until we actually know what the rules are. And we're not going to know who the president is until we actually know who the president is. So regardless of what side of the fence you're on, or who our next president is, doesn't mean that necessarily they're going to, you know, blow up the whole student loan system or forgive all the loans, you know, as the, you know, kind of far extreme sides of what we usually hear about, we all have to wait and see. And so we can't spend, like I said, our day in our inbox answering like the coulda, woulda, shoulda, what might happen related to that. But we absolutely feel your pain in like, we just want to know what's going to happen next. Yeah. And one thing I always share to a lot of these like replies and a lot of these emails that we get, because right, it is something that's really important. And something that we all need to be aware of so we can all make the best plans. But any congressperson can write a bill and file it. So if you have one congressperson that feels, you know, the Department of Education should forgive all student loans, they can file that bill. Now, will there be enough people to side with that person to actually pass it, they get passed through the Senate and then signed by the president? Who knows, right? And then the reverse could also be true, right? Someone could say we want to totally, you know, remove all payment plans. Everyone just has to pay back all that, all their money and even payments. Will that actually make it through all the way through and get executed by the president? Probably not. So it's important to know that just because you hear or see something right in the media doesn't always mean that's going to happen, right? So stay tuned to our newsletters. And you know, Travis does a really great job of breaking it all down into bite-sized pieces. And it's something that I really applaud him on and his knowledge is way up there and something that can help break down help you understand what you need to do now and what you more importantly don't need to do now. All right, so we got two more scenarios of grumpy customers that I want to run through before we wrap it up today. And the next one is when we have to tell someone to kind of keep doing what they're doing. So we really do give away a bunch of our knowledge. It is absolutely free in the form of this podcast. We've got blogs. There's comments on social medias that we make sure that we try to answer as many questions as possible there. We do webinars. We're in the media frequently. So if you want to invest the time to create your own plan, you absolutely can. And if you've been an avid listener for quite a while and you finally decide to book a call, there is a higher likelihood that you will be doing all the things right because we are really doing our best to give everybody as much information as possible for free 99. But when you do decide to book a call, it is an investment in yourself. And there was something that you were uneasy about that made you decide to book the call in the first place. And I'll also say that we generally do find something that you didn't know or were able to clarify something that you weren't 100 percent sure about. In either scenario, I truly believe that peace of mind is worth paying for. And so when you go ahead and you hit that send button and you book the call and you have the consultation, even if our advice is to keep doing what you're doing and we only confirm that you are on the right path, I think there is value in seeing the value of having talked to an expert about your situation and knowing that you're going the right way. That's huge. And having that kind of mindset going in, especially if you're one of those over-preparers, definitely I'm one of those people. I'm sitting there questioning, do I really need to pay someone money for this information? But seeing that somebody has studied this for years and years and done more than over 2,000 consults, odds are I will at least get one piece of information that can save me X amount of dollars. And the way I look at it, I just did a call with someone on our team to talk through some financial stuff the other day and he told me about a piece of information that I had no idea you could do in depreciating stuff with rental properties. And while I reviewed the plan and a lot of my information was something that mostly reaffirming, hey, keep doing what you're doing, that one piece literally will save me tens of thousands of dollars over the next few years. So any fee that I paid is worth 10, 20, 30 X that over years of time. So I always try to reframe it like that once I walk away to really understand the value that I've captured because I would have never known that otherwise. Yeah, 100%. Like you said, this idea that it's not always you saved 100,000 right here on the spot or you, like you said, you got immediate forgiveness sort of thing. It could be something as simple as knowing that your credit card debt, you shouldn't keep a balance on your credit card, is something I frequently talk to people about during student loan consultations. People are like, oh, I'm improving my credit score and I just leave the balance there so I can make my credit better every month. And I'm like, no, you can absolutely afford to pay your credit card off every month. Please do that. And that's going to also give you good credit and you're not going to be paying interest to credit card companies. But simple things like that do save you a lot of money over time. So I think it's important just to be thinking about, like you said, the overall value that you've received from even, like you said, being able to sleep at night, even if our answer doesn't save you tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars. One other way to look at it as well is the value of time, right? A lot of our clients are working tons of hours or have families, have a lot of other responsibilities in their lives, opening practices. And if you can get on a call with somebody on our team and get a quick, you know, this is your plan, this is what you need to do, or at least even have yours verified. And let's say the answer is keep doing what you're doing. You don't have to spend those hours going down YouTube and Reddit posts and other things doubting their validity. And how many hours did you just save that now you can do with your kids or work on that practice or get a little more sleep, right? That could be invaluable for many people. All right. So this leads to the last thing that I want to address that sometimes people are grumpy about. They're just like, wait, you guys are supposed to be experts and you don't know the answer to my question. So to that, I would say occasionally there is something that we do not know or we can just like not provide any advice on whatsoever. And so as you've probably learned, if you've been listening for quite a while, is that there's a lot of nuance to this world. And now more than ever with the updates and these extraordinary circumstances and all of us having just survived all the different COVID changes, we just don't always know the answer. And it's generally because the Department of Education has left, to your point, you mentioned it earlier, Justin, some ambiguity in the language. So, you know, we are just as angry and outraged as you about Mohila's egregious behavior and the results of the miscounted PSLF payments, the unwarranted changes, the recertification dates that are being forced. And then now they're like, oh, OK, never mind. Sorry about that. And we understand, too, that it's hard to have faith in anything when our government is actually outsourcing something as important as this to companies that would just ignore the mandates and abuse their power. Like, it's awful. It is absolutely awful. But sometimes, like I said, so the Mohila thing is an example. People are saying, well, they're telling me to recertify. I'm like, we're looking at the Department of Education website and it says you don't have to. And they're like, but they're telling me they're going to put me on a standard plan if I don't. And it's like, all we have is this information that's strictly here and the Department of Education is telling us this thing that is directly conflicting with what you're being told to do. We absolutely get it. But also, like, you know, our hands feel tied sometimes. So we just I just want to acknowledge that we know it's sometimes hard to pay for a consultation, you know, get these detailed follow instructions from us only to call your servicer and get advice that conflicts with ours. They should absolutely be able to help you in a meaningful way. You know, we shouldn't maybe even have a job at SOP because the system is so easy to navigate. But that's just not the reality. The staff at the various servicers are frequently underpaid, undertrained. We know the studentaid.gov website inside out. And so we can frequently point to something that is the answer to your question, which is why we gave that detailed advice. And yes, your servicer may say something exactly conflicting, but we have a lot of confidence in what we're providing at Student Loan Planner. And when we don't know the answer, it's it's simply sometimes because there's just a lot of ambiguity. So, Justin, I'll default to you on what you think about, you know, what it is when when you come to me and ask me during our little office hours. Hey, what? And I'm like, yeah, that is one of the nuanced people that they definitely have a tricky situation and how it's made you feel. Yeah, a lot of a lot of those, you know, I said earlier, the ambiguity is there on purpose. Right. So that the Department of Education can kind of flex the rules to meet whoever the president's whoever the president is at the time's initiative or right in this case, the current administration forgiveness. Right. So you may see things worded very generously or vaguely. So that way, Department of Education, like the staff that actually implements the laws, can sit down and say, all right, we're going to do it this crafty way so that we know we can do this thing that the president wants us to do. And sometimes it's really hard to understand or explain to people, because in most cases, we're used to understanding exactly what a law or, you know, in my case, like with criminal law, right? What is legal or what is illegal? And in the world of student loans, like probably most of the time I spend spend with you, Lauren is asking questions about. So when does this period kick in or why did this change? And, you know, sometimes it's well, they just decided to change it. Or first they said this, then three months later, they changed it to the opposite. And that can happen because they're trying to meet their their goals and initiatives. And yeah, it may affect us, may affect borrowers. But at the end of the day, that's why it's so important to have people like us here to help understand that. And that's kind of what we eat, sleep and breathe to be able to share it. And hopefully the best of our abilities predict it for later times so that we can offer multiple scenarios on calls so that you have an inkling of what may or may not change based on political events or regulatory changes. Yeah, absolutely. I just can't drive home the point enough. Like, it makes me so sad when like, I'm just like, I don't know the answer to this. You know, I'm not sure how this is going to be treated. And I just know what the frustration is for the client on the other end. And, you know, even just like to tell a little bit of a story about how people get messed over and how not the government not sharing good information can really harm you. Like, I am so aware I was at a barbecue with my family in 2022. And I'm not even sure still how student loans ended up coming up. But my relative mentioned that she had over $200,000 of student loan debt, and had never made a payment. She had been paying, she had been working at a nonprofit hospital for over 20 years. And she started with only undergraduate debt. So the reason that I bring up the point is only undergraduate debt, you can only borrow about 30 grand, a little bit less than 30 grand for undergraduate degree federally. She had at the point at which I was talking to her $200,000 of student loan debt. Like, it just should not be possible to even accumulate turn a $30,000 debt into a $200,000 debt. It just should not be possible to not ever make a payment on your loans for over 20 years. It is beyond me sometimes how someone, you know, she's called the servicers, she's talked to the servicers, no one ever told her consolidate your loans because you qualify for public service loan forgiveness. No one ever said, hey, you don't earn a whole lot, you can be on an income driven repayment plan and your payment could be zero. Basic, basic information that could have helped this woman pay pretty much nothing on her loans, you know, pay what she could have afforded over 10 years. And these loans could have been gone 10 years ago, because she's been working at a public service place for 20 years. Like, it is mind blowing to me that we have people on the other end that I said are there to getting paid to answer your calls. And a situation like this could unfold. But it is also like the best thing on the planet for me to realize that I have the information to be able to help her. Yes, I did bust out my computer at a barbecue on the fourth of July, help her consolidate her loans. And, you know, when she called me a few months later, like I had no idea this was a thing. Thank you so much. Like, I literally changed someone's life because of the information that we have available. And we are always trying to use the information that we do have available to change your life. So it is very, very painful for us as consultants when we don't have the information available. And we just have so many of those stories to where, you know, I always call it the, the things that you don't know that you don't know. Right. And that happened so many times where I'll read an email or, you know, a client who filled out like their intake form. And within it, I'm like, wow, this person is going to save a lot of money because they don't know this weird, nuanced loophole that they can take advantage of. And I get excited. I know you get excited, Lauren. And it's something that really gives you purpose, right. And what you do. And I think it's always important to remember, we're not some like huge corporation right behind this, right? Like, we are a group of really passionate people that want to do this because we know it's worth our time because of the impact that we can make. And if you were working in a corporation, right, we may be turning into the same thing that Mohella is. So it's, it's awesome to know that, you know, someone like us exists that can give the real info and make sure we follow through and make it right and help you keep updated on the things that can as well. A hundred percent. And so as we wrap up today, like I said, I know sometimes you're afraid, you're confused, you've been scammed a time or two. All I ask is that you give us a chance to treat you right. We are doing our best on the front end and the back end of Student Loan Planner. We have reviews. You can find us on social media, LinkedIn. Many of us run our own businesses. So you can also just like find people online. We are real people with real reputations, values and families. And I can attest that every member of this team is someone who cares about you and your student loans deeply. If we've ever come across anybody who wasn't, they were immediately extricated from the team. We do a lot to make sure that our company culture stays intact and that everybody here is, like I said, with great intentions in mind. So Justin, is there anything you want to share as we kind of wrap up? No, I agree with you a hundred percent. And like, I mean, people can actually Google you, right? And find out about what you're up to, like far from a scam, I'd say. Exactly. That is true. I'm actually Google-able and I'm not going to be working for a company that's like scammy or participating in anything that like trash my reputation. I definitely don't want to see Olympian turned scammer as a headline ever as something in my life. So please, please know that we are not going to be doing that over here at SLP. We really want to truly make sure that we can help change your life and save you money. So we will wrap it up for today by saying, if you're looking for us, if you're ready to book a consultation, you can go to studentloanplanner.com. If you are looking for more information, you know, this podcast, you've already listened to it. We can come to your university, your place of employment and do a webinar for free 99, something else that we offer for free, just to further educate people about the basics of student loans. But we are ready to serve you in the best way that we know how. And we would love to see you as one of our clients. And we hope that we've done a job of peeling back some of the layers and helping you understand what you can expect when you work with us at Student Loan Planner. Ciao for now.