10 Grants to Pay Off Student Loans Faster

I'm going to show you 10 grants that you could use to get your student loans paid off faster. At the end of this video, I'm going to show you a bonus grant program in addition to the 10 that I'm going to show you that's probably even better than all 10 of them combined, to be honest. So number one is the National Health Service Corps, NHSC. This program is really great for health professionals. You can get up to $50,000 forgiven for two years of service, and then in some situations they might even renew that if you continue to serve in that area. This is a good program. It's not for everyone. We'll show you why a little bit later in the video, but you just need to look for a high need area, a critical shortage area for health professionals, and then apply. This is a program that if you want it is relatively easy to get compared to some of the others on this list. Number two is the Nurse Corps Loan Repayment Program. This will give you up to 85% of your loans canceled and forgiven if you're a registered nurse or advanced nurse practitioner for serving in a high need area. Great program for people in nursing to consider. Number three is the NIH Loan Forgiveness Program. The NIH Loan Forgiveness Programs come in two varieties. There's the intramural program, which is for NIH employees, and then there's the more popular extramural programs, which would qualify to anyone outside of the NIH. This program will give you up to $50,000 annually for researchers in high need areas. They have a variety of programs and some of these programs include a loan repayment program for clinical researchers, one for pediatric researchers, one for health disparities research, as well as one for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. So there's a lot of acronym soup when it comes to NIH Loan Forgiveness Programs, but they are very generous, especially for physician scientists and others that are pursuing research questions. You should certainly look into the NIH program because it is really quite generous if you can qualify for it. Number four is Teacher Perkins Cancellation. So Perkins loans are not as common as they used to be, but if you do happen to have them, you can get cancellation of Perkins loans by being a teacher, so it's a pretty nice benefit to have. Number five is Teacher Loan Forgiveness. Teacher Loan Forgiveness will give you up to $17,500 of canceled student loan debt in exchange for five years of service. The high amount is typically for people in special education or secondary math or science education. However, you can still get about $5,000 for other areas as well. Teacher Loan Forgiveness is actually not a great program compared to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, in my opinion. If you have a very modest amount of student loan debt as a teacher, then by all means, use the Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program. It's a wonderful program, but there's some other reasons why you might not want to use that program I'll talk about at the end. Number six is the Department of Justice Attorney Student Loan Repayment Program. This will give you up to $6,000 for a maximum of three years as a match while you're paying back your student loans. Number seven is the John R. Justice Student Loan Repayment Program. This gives prosecutors and public defenders up to $10,000 a year for a lifetime maximum of $60,000 to help you pay back your student loans. Number eight is Congress' College Military Loan Repayment Program. This allows any branch of the military to provide up to $65,000 to non-prior enlistees as a student loan repayment benefit. Now, I've seen really a lot of variations of this kind of a program out there. You might see different ones with the National Guard. There might be programs for health professionals at different branches. It really does depend. There's three-year health profession scholarships, sometimes four-year scholarships depending on the branch of the military. So there's all kinds of grant programs for the military. You just need to decide which one is best for you if you decide to pursue a career in the armed forces. Number nine is the Iraq and Afghanistan Service Grant. This is for helping children and parents who lost their lives serving our country in Iraq and Afghanistan to help pay back their student loans. It's certainly a really, really important program, and if you know anyone that could benefit from that or if you could benefit from that, certainly you want to reach out and see if you could qualify. Finally, number 10 is the Veterinary Medicine Loan Repayment Program. This will give you up to $25,000 annually for paying back your student loans in exchange for a commitment of three years in a high-need area. Now, this is often going to go to people involved in veterinary medicine for the food supply, for rural areas. I think it's a program that's run through the Department of Agriculture, I believe. So this is a program for veterinarians specifically to get help paying back their student loans. It's a great program if you have a passion for working in food service or rural areas, you should definitely look into it. Now for a bonus program, Public Service Loan Forgiveness. Here's the reality. A lot of these programs that exist for helping people pay back their student loan debt are not designed around the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, and they should be. The reason is because with Public Service Loan Forgiveness, you pay 10% of your income for 10 years, and anything left over is forgiven. So that means if you are going to pay more than 10% of your income towards your student loans, then that's money that's wasted if you're planning for a career in the public service. And a lot of these programs are set up and designed to give you a specific dollar amount towards your loans instead of just paying whatever your income-driven repayment amount is, which would bureaucratically be a lot more complicated. So one thing that we would hope to see in future reforms of student loans is a simplification of all these many different programs. There's a whole lot of them out there, and they don't always play nicely with one another, and they're not necessarily always compatible. I will say this. If you're planning on a temporary career in the public service, one of these 10 grant programs might be great for you. If you're planning on more of a long-term career in the public service, you're probably better off pursuing loan forgiveness through the biggest grant of all time, which is the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. That's what we do is help people figure out what program to use for their situation and what strategy they should use for paying back their student loan debt. So if you need help with figuring out what to do with your student loans, reach out to studentloanplanner.com slash help. We can really help you come up with a customized plan, and we've done so for thousands of borrowers with well over $1.3 billion in loans. I'm Travis with Student Loan Planner. Thank you for watching the 10 top grants to get your student loans paid off. If you know of another grant program that could help other people in our YouTube community, put that in the comments below. We would love for people to share their own resources so that we can know about all the grants that are out there. Thanks for watching.