(Ep. 248) The Student Loan Pause Has Ended. Now What?

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Student Loan Planner Podcast. Today, the student loan interest pause is over. This is a day that many have dreaded and I want to help support you through this with ways that you could save money that you may or may not have thought about. So, in the first time in more than three and a half years, interest is no longer zero on federal student loans. So, how does the current interest rate that you might have in your federal student loans compare to what else is out there? And, you know, what can you do with all the different repayment plans that have come out and different options that have come out to minimize the pain of the amount of money that you're paying on your student loans so you can have more money for other stuff. So, I just want to call out this save and repay plan. The save plan is really highly touted right now by the Biden administration. There's some real truth to that. There's also some stuff that's not so true about it. So, we're going to talk about what is and isn't in terms of how this plan might save you money and we're just going to talk about interest rates in general and where student loan interest is at right now and kind of what if you know who if anybody in the world should still consider paying off their student loans with all this all these changes that have happened. So, let me make one suggestion right away. First, I think you should go to studentloanplanner.com calculator and you don't have to put anything in to use it. You just put your information in and it will calculate for you what we expect your save repayment plan to be. So, if you put your information in there what it's also going to do besides calculating your repayment amount is it's also going to calculate what your effective interest rate is with the save plan given your current income from the prior tax year. So, that's really really helpful. So, there's a bunch of different drop downs below the calculator. A lot of people don't realize how powerful it is. If you scroll down to the effective interest rate section which you'll be able to do is look for the current year and see what would my effective interest rate be on the save plan if I had to recertify using that plan right now. But a lot of people are going to find is that their payment and interest could be as low as zero dollars a month. So, for a lot of people the interest pause is just going to keep going. Now, some people might have a payment of two, three, four hundred a month, right? Let's say you're a resident or something like that, a resident physician. You might have a payment of 200 a month and everything else above that is subsidized. So, you would take 200 times 12. It's about 2400 and divide it by your total balance. Let's say it's about 200,000 and then your effective interest rate there would be about one percent. Imagine if you could get a one percent rate from a student loan refinancing company. People would be beside themselves with joy, right? So, a whole lot of people out there could get an amazing rate with the save plan. Now, you know, I saw a cancellation group recently that was really mad on Twitter about, you know, someone applying for the save plan and getting their payment recalculated from, you know, 200 a month to where it was at before COVID to a thousand a month based off of their most recent tax return. So, again, you've got to think about what is going on and how politicians work and what all the incentives are here, right? Department of Ed, you know, can't do a bunch of fancy logic, right? They can't, they don't have the money and time for saying, you know, if payment is lower than current amount and this person applied and submitted their new tax return to us, then don't use this number, right? It's just, it's too much going on. So, what they're going to do is if you apply for something, they're going to ask you for your current tax return and they're going to use it, right? So, that's what you've got to know. And so, that's why this studentloanplanner.com slash calculator, it's the most popular page in our entire website right now. It gets thousands of views a day. And the reason why this is so popular is because what you can do is you can calculate what that save plan payment should be and compare it to your current payment. So, if you use that and you calculate, okay, my current save plan payment is a thousand dollars a month according to this calculator on the SLP website, then if my current payment is lower than that, then I shouldn't do anything. I should actively wait until my servicer forces me to recertify my income. Now, when they do ask you to recertify your income, they're going to ask you if you want to give authorization for them to pull your data every year from the IRS. If you live in a common law state, which is 41 states around the country, then I would probably say that's fine to do. However, if you live in a community property state, you want to be real careful about this because if you give authorization to the IRS to send your data to the servicer every year, that's kind of taking stuff out of your hands a little bit, right? One kind of interesting nuance we found in the rules last week is if you use alternative documentation of income, instead of using a family size that excludes your spouse, they'll use a family size that includes your spouse. So, if you have a family size of five, you file separately and use tax returns, they'll give you a deduction based on a family size of four. But if you use alternative documentation of income, they'll use a family size of five. So, it's really, there's a lot of nuance with this, right? In terms of should you give authorization for the IRS to certify your payment for you automatically every year on these IDR plans, for most people, yes, but for a sizable group, no. Now, think about how things work in politics, right? Politicians love to sell their programs. Every single politician, no matter what party is going to talk about, I created this new program, I cut taxes in my state, I was there when this disaster struck, right? Student loans is the same thing. So, because the save plan is Biden's big thing that he's actually been able to accomplish on student loans, he's touting this from the rooftops. He's trying to get all of these sort of consumer advocate and progressive leaning groups on board with promoting it, and most of them are doing so. Now, for most people, for a lot of people, it is the best plan, there's no question, right? For low income and moderate income people, yes, the save plan is really amazing, right? But it may or may not benefit you, right? Save is great for a lot of people. I'll give you an example of who it's not good for. If somebody borrowed between 2007 and 2014, and you're on the pay repayment plan, then if you're a high income earner, like high five figures, low six figures, cutting off those final five years of payments on a 25-year plan is a huge deal. It's a much bigger savings than saving about 100 a month on your save repayment plan amount. So, is a politician going to get up and go through the nuances of what's this program good for, and the occasional groups of people that it's not good for? No, they're going to say, everybody sign up for my plan, right? I remember servicers once telling people that the repay plan is always the best choice. This was real popular back in the 2017, 2018, 2019 range when people would call up their servicer, and the servicer reps would confidently tell everyone that the repay plan was the best plan. It's not, not by a long shot, right? Because you couldn't file separately, it was 25 years. There's a lot of misinformation out there about student loans, and this is the case anytime something is super complex, right? And I will say this, if I had to bet right now, I'm going to make a bold prediction, I do not think that Biden's save repayment plan will still be here in its current form in 10 years. Why? Eventually, we will have a Republican president, right? Or there's a new party, right? I think the Whigs or something fell apart in the 1840s or something like that, so that could happen, right? We have a two-party system, right? So, eventually we're going to have a president that is not as sympathetic to student loan programs as the one currently in the White House with President Biden, right? A couple of thoughts. Fitch downgraded the US credit rating recently. That's because of problems with spending and future debt. We've got big issues with social security and Medicare as the baby boomers age into those programs. It's going to be enormously expensive, and we're going to have costs to those programs that far outstrip the revenues of those programs. The cost of loans is not going to jump immediately necessarily, but with the IDR count adjustment, moving a lot of people much closer to forgiveness, the cost of student loans is going to show up much sooner than it would have prior, before these programs got put in place. So, with all these issues, I do think that as soon as we have a Republican president, if that Republican president is not Trump, because I think that Trump would probably just ignore student loans again the way he did in 2016 to 2020, but if we have a Republican president not named Trump, then I think that they would do negotiated rulemaking. It would take them about two or three years for that policy to be implemented. And I think what they would probably most likely try to do is just take the current save plan and replace it again with the repay plan and keeping all of those restrictions on plan switching and blocking the plan that Biden put in place himself. So, what that would mean is there's a lot of people that before 2029 will need to sign up for the new IBR plan because it'll be better than the save plan for folks that need to get forgiveness after 20 years instead of 25. So, there will be people that will need to make that switch. And so, if we have a Republican win in 2028, then a lot of people will probably want to switch before that new president is inaugurated just to be on the safe side. If you have a Republican win in 2024, it kind of depends. If I was not on the pay plan or if I was kind of on save but was worried about getting onto the new IBR plan, it's just going to depend on exactly what happens. Now, if Biden wins, then we're just going to see a continuation of the save plan. And that's probably the main thing that'll happen in his second term would be save. And maybe there would be some, you know, sort of policy bills that are sort of introduced on student loans to try to kind of stake out a flag on something, but probably not a lot would change. So, what does that mean if you're on the save plan? Should you worry about it? No. Now, I said I would bet it's not here in its current form in 10 years. There's a couple reasons for that. Think about a bell curve. There's a lot of things that could happen around that bell curve. We might see, now, think about this, student loans have been on a one-way direction towards becoming more and more generous, right? So, when I say that I don't think the current plan will be in place in 10 years, the three different things that could happen is save could still be around or policy might get more conservative and you might see a reinstatement of something like the repay plan or policy might get more progressive, which has been the trend the past really 20 years on student loans, and you might have the save plan replaced by more grants, more Pell grants, more extreme, you know, beneficial forgiveness programs, right? So, we don't know. We don't know. So, what can you do about it in terms of, you know, this save plan? Is it for me, like with interest beginning, you know, what should I do? You know, what if you're worried, right? I think there's a great verse in the book of Matthew that says, do not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. I think that's great wisdom for approaching student loans too because, you know, the question is what's good for you today? What is good for you to do today? Do that. So, if you can get an interest subsidy, they're not going to call back the interest subsidies on save. So, go ahead and get that interest subsidy if you can qualify for one. If you're building up credit for a 20-year forgiveness program, one thing that they did that did kind of protect the pay plan is they said that, you know, we're going to block new people from signing up for it starting in July of 2024, but they didn't repeal it, right? And they tried to make very careful determinations, you know, in the law. Like, for example, the double consolidation loophole, they did not take that away from anybody. They said that rather than take that away, they're going to block it for new people after July 2025 for that double consolidation. So, does that make sense? So, you know, if you think about what's most likely to happen, what you're doing today is going to help you tomorrow. And if there is something that changes tomorrow, then do that instead. And the way you protect yourself is make sure you've got excellent investing and savings going on so that if you're not paying down your debt, you're still growing your net worth. And we, you know, you know this if you listen to this podcast, do not put off your goals and dreams just because of loans. It's not what's needed at all. You do not have to be a part of an anti-debt cult. I don't mean that in a rude way. I'm just going to say this. I'm going to say that, you know, my personal belief is that religious faith should be reserved for religious faith. And, you know, if somebody has a sort of a belief in something that there's only one way to do things, then that's probably not a rational approach, right? You, sure, paying down debt is sometimes really good thing to do. Don't get me wrong. And yeah, getting encouragement, psychological encouragement to get rid of debt is a wonderful thing. I mean, if it's the right thing to do. But if, you know, if your debt could be, you know, if your debt could be forgiven, if your debt could be discharged, if you have a hundred thousand of credit card debt, and the right thing to do is negotiate a settlement, you know, do what the rational thing to do is. We have laws and rules in this country for a reason, and you should, you know, use them up to the extent the law allows, right? There's nothing immoral about following what the rules are when it comes to finances. Now, you know, if you have a different view, that's okay. I've had a lot of people over the years, even people that have 500,000 of debt with $100,000 incomes tell me, sorry, I want to live on rice and beans and pay off my full loans, and I'm going to live on 15,000 a year, and I'm going to live at home, and I'm going to pay, you know, 65,000 a year towards my loans, and I'm going to be done in eight years. And some of them do end up being successful, and they have a lot of success in their life, but it's not because of them paying off their loans, it's because of their seriousness about their savings rate. So just remember that. What matters in your overall finances is not your approach to debt, it's your savings rate. So if you go for forgiveness, the worst case scenario, right, is if you should be paying 2,000 a month, but you're saving 3,000 a month in investments, well, you could just take a lot of that money that you've been saving and pay it down towards your debt if it really came down to it. So let's talk about interest for a second. How do you verify? How do you verify that you do not have to worry about, you know, interest, or how do you even figure out what your interest is? So once the dust has settled, I would not do this this week. The servicers are going to be completely swarmed. They're not going to have any room for talking to people, really, probably. I mean, you probably will have two, three, four-hour hold times, would be what I would guess. So I certainly wouldn't waste my time verifying my interest accrual. One of the things you could do if you want to just log into your account, you could maybe do this just by logging in, right? Just look at what it is on one day, look at what it is the next day. That's your daily interest accrual multiplied by 365. That's your yearly interest accrual divided by your balance. That's your effective interest rate. Now, that should match what you see on studentloanplanner.com slash calculator, right? And, you know, if it does, that's good. That's what we want. Now, if you're still getting your full interest accrual and your save plan, you're like, what's going on? I'm not seeing it work. Well, then, yeah, call your servicer or message your servicer. And by the way, I don't want to insult anybody who likes certain types of anti-debt messaging. A lot of it's very entertaining and it's fun to listen to. Don't get me wrong, right? I support anything that helps anybody, right? But I also want to call out advice that's horrifically wrong, right? So if you listen to a lot of personal finance talking heads from, you know, famous people that are way more successful than me to aunts and uncles, right, have really poo-pooed this idea of income-driven repayment and forgiveness. I've heard people on podcasts, you know, say, you know, you're stupid for trusting the government's going to forgive your loans as a public servant. Well, you know what? Like people were told public sector, you know, I've heard shows where public sector pharmacists have been told that they have no choice but to pay back their 250K of student debt when they could have paid about 30 or 40 and gotten the rest forgiven for public service loan forgiveness. I mean, that's borderline malpractice in my opinion. So you really got to say, you know, what is the right thing for you and your family? That's what really all this stuff should be filtered through. You know, there's not one way to do things. If anybody says there's one way to do things, then, you know, hopefully they're a preacher and not a personal finance personality, right? So anyways, is refinancing too risky right now? Should anybody alive in the world refinance their student loans? For most people, refinancing is definitely a bad decision, okay? And I will tell you this, I have been, I think I say this arrogantly, but I think I've been one of the loudest voices, hey, do not refinance your student loans unless X and Y and Z are true out there that has any kind of advertising relationship at all with these student loans refinancing companies. So a lot of people on Twitter like to rip me a new one because they see those ads for refinancing companies on our website and they think, hey, this guy's a scumbag, you know, nobody should listen to him. Look, he's, you know, he's in bed with these private student loan companies. Let me tell you my philosophy of things, right? I want people that need to go for forgiveness to go for forgiveness. I want people that need to go for refinancing to pay their loans off aggressively. And do you need to go for refinancing if you need to pay your loans off? Of course not. It's not nearly as big of a savings as it used to be, but it is still savings. So I'll give you a couple of examples, right? So what we've been saying at Student Loan Planner for years, much sooner than anybody else, is if your income is bigger than your debt and you're in the private sector with no chance you'll ever return to the public sector and your finances are rock solid, meaning you've got disability insurance, you've got an emergency fund, you've got term life insurance. If all of those things are true and you have a very low, you know, risk in your job, then yes, go ahead and refinance if you can save at least 1% on your interest rate, right? If all those things are not true, then you should not be refinancing. So an example here is let's say you're a big law attorney, you're making $200,000 a year, you've got $100,000 of law school loans, should you refinance? No, not if you're a recent grad because you could certify your income with the prior tax return, get a $0 a month payment on the save plan and get zero interest your first year. The second year, you're going to recertify with income that's probably only from two or three months and also get a super low interest rate for the second year. So the third year you're out, that could be the first time where it's justified to potentially refinance your loans. Now, you don't have to not make any payments. Now, keep in mind, we expect the save subsidy is going to work the same as the repay subsidy, meaning that if you want to pay extra on your loans, even though your rate or your payment is low, all of that extra payment will go towards paying down your balance and will not affect your interest subsidy for that year that you've certified your income for, right? So that big law attorney could certainly make extra prepayments with bonuses or something like that while enjoying the subsidy on the save plan. So that would be a smart move potentially to make. You know, what about a dentist who is launching a startup and is expecting that startup to make them 500,000 of income a year and they've got 200,000 of debt? Should they refinance? Answer is, it depends. So if you quit your job, you can recertify your income on studentaid.gov slash IDR, right? So you can go there and you can get your payment recalculated to zero a month and your interest would be zero a month too. Now, in the first year, a lot of people who do startup practices have a lots of paper losses that lower their income to a very modest amount. So your second year out in practice could also very likely be a very low income year. So with all the uncertainties around having, you know, big expenses in a practice, you know, you probably want to wait and make sure that loan is federal to make sure you get the max subsidy, right? So the soonest somebody that's doing this startup practice should consider refinancing is when the practice is humming, it's doing really well, they've got a ton of AGI to show on their tax return, and they're going to be able to use that very large tax return in underwriting with a refi deal to get a better rate. Now, how should that private practice dentist approach paying down their loans? Something called the refinancing ladder. So I fully expect that short-term interest rates are not always going to be this high. Why? Because what does the Fed do in recessions? It lowers short-term interest rates. And so what will probably happen in the next several years is we will have a recession. And when that happens, the Fed will lower the Fed funds rate from the very high level it's at now to a lower level. And so the refinancing ladder strategy I think still works really well. And so the way this works is you start off with a 15 or a 20-year refi. So in this case, this dentist would refi 200k to a 20-year term, and that payment would be about $1,200 a month, give or take, maybe $1,300 a month because interest rates are a little higher. Let's say they get a 5.5%. So then they refinance again, maybe when they paid down half the balance. Let's say they pay it down from $200 to $100. So keep in mind our break points for those $1,000 bonuses we have at studentloanplanner.com.refi. Those break points are about $100,000 and above, you get a $1,000 cash bonus. It's usually $500 from them and $500 from us. And you got to email us to let us know that you applied before you signed the docs just to make sure no funny business happened with the way they attributed the loan credit and everything. Because that comes out of our advertising income that we make. That's why we have to do it that way. So anyways, you refinance at the 200k amount for a 20-year term. And why do you do that? It's because cash flow is extremely important. So you want to keep that cash flow coming out that's required very low, especially if you're not getting highly compensated for it. So for example, if you have a 10-year that's 5%, a 20-year that's 5.5, that's not a lot of compensation to go down to a 10-year at all. That's not a good reason to do a 10-year instead of a 20-year, because what could happen is you have a big crash in the stock market and, oh, you have to pay $2,200 a month instead of $1,200 a month. Well, that thousand a month difference that you'd much rather that be going into investing in the market than being forced to use it to pay down your loans. And then what probably will happen is eventually the Fed will lower that short-term interest rate, and then what you'll have is a steeper yield curve. So what does that mean, a steeper yield curve? The vast majority of the time I've been doing this, 5-year loans are much cheaper than 20-year loans, because variable rates and the short-term curves basically are more based off what the Fed's doing. So that's why right now if you apply to refinance, the short-term rates are basically awful, and the long-term rates are the only ones that save you any money. And what'll probably happen at some point is those rates will come down a little bit, and so maybe you have a 5.5 on your 20-year, say rates come down a little bit because the economy cools off some, so maybe you could go from 5.5 to 4 for a 10-year, because rates calm down a little bit. So you refinance again to a 10-year. Then you pay off some more extra prepayments when you have them. Now you refinance one last time to a 5-year variable. So a lot of times what people would do back in the day is people would have like 300, they'd refi it with a 20-year term, pay down a bunch, refi with a 10-year term, pay down a bunch, and then refi one more time when they've got 100K left to get another thousand bonus, and then they'd pay that off really aggressively. Because if you do a variable rate on a 5-year, there's not a lot of risk there, because it's just a 100K loan. And the goal is to get rid of your student loans if you refinance very quickly, because it's an inefficient type of debt, because the interest is not deductible. For people that refinance, you're making too much money to deduct anything. So you want to get rid of it, if that's what you're doing. Now, think about inefficient debt in general. What's inefficient debt? If you've got interest on a mortgage for principal above 750, that's not deductible, so that's inefficient, especially if you got that mortgage in the last several years, or last several months is what I meant to say there. And then privacy loan debt, very inefficient, great to get rid of it. Now, you might say, oh my gosh, this guy's a scumbag, he's telling people to refinance. No, I'm not. The vast majority, probably 80% of people should not refinance, four in five, four in five should not refinance. I mean, the reason we created everything the way we did back in the day is I wanted to have the minimal conflict of interest possible in refinancing to make sure that we didn't write stuff that hyped it too much, right? So if we have a minimal conflict of interest by having the best bonuses on the internet by rebidding more money to our folks through these cash bonuses than anybody else, that mitigates our conflict of interest. And then if we also charge for student loan advice, we have the incentive to give you the best advice possible, which is almost... People that work with us on the advice side, obviously are even more likely to go for forgiveness than four in five, because the people who are 100% sure they should refinance have already done so on our website, right? So a lot of people, they're going for forgiveness on that side of things. Now, there are places out there that will give you free student loan advice. Did you know that? There's places they'll give you free student loan advice. Your servicer will, but it's going to be provided by somebody making $15 or $20 an hour. No offense to those individuals, right? But they are not paid to give you advice. And if they're not paid to give you advice, as a general rule, you can't trust that advice unless you're a very moderate income worker, 30,000 of income, 10K of debt. Yes, obviously. Use the free option because it's pretty simple. Just use the save plan and your payment zero and your interest is zero. They've saved you some money, right? But if your situation is complex, obviously you know that you can't trust the student loan servicer people. Now, if you are trusting some other group that will give you free student loan advice, what does that mean? Should you trust them? Well, I'll tell you what their model is. Their model is to give no cash refinancing bonuses whatsoever on student loan refinancing, and then to basically recommend student loan refinancing to a subset of all the people that work with them on the free advice side of things and make money that way. Now, there are some places that have been very successful doing this. I don't think it's unethical or evil or anything. It's just a different business model that I disagree with. So why do I disagree with it? Because if you have a free service that is only successful if you tell people to do something specific, you're going to be highly incentivized to increase the rate of which you tell people to refinance their student loans, right? So that's such a bad conflict of interest. In my view, that's not a tenable way to get advice unless you're completely unable to pay for advice yourself. And there's other groups out there that charge less money than us for student loan advice. Should you use them? Ultimately, I think that what you want is value. You want results, right? If you're talking about the difference between $595, $495 if you're an existing client, or $100 or $200 less than that, the price, and if you're talking about numbers like that, right, doesn't really matter that much compared Is your advice backed up by a big group that collectively has a responsibility to give the right advice? So a lot of people don't know this, but we have over 20 consultants now. And we have a bunch of meetings every week where we're bringing in cases, we're bringing in different examples. We've got a very deep brain trust here. And even if somebody's a newer consultant, a client is still getting the entire group of us that we go through cases to make sure that the advice is quality and correct. And so if there's a group out there that's starting doing student loan advice, a lot of them are doing student loan advice for lead gen for other things. A lot of them are doing it because they see us doing it. I think that's good. It keeps us on our toes. It keeps our prices in check. It's capitalism, right? It's fine. But I would just say to make sure that it's not, like I said, a lead gen opportunity or something like that, because it probably is. So I don't know. Anyways, this sounds like tooting my own horn. So I'll just say this. What are some horror stories about refinancing because people are worried about interest rates? Consider this. A lot of people refinanced to places like Kaiser Permanente. Lots of physicians refinanced because they didn't qualify for PSLF because of a technicality, right? What happened? Biden administration changed the technicality. Now all those physicians can get PSLF. And a lot of people refinanced in that case with First Republic Bank. Back in the day, they were given rates of 2.95. Fast forward to today and Kaiser physicians can get PSLF and First Republic is bankrupt and selling off their corporate jet. So is refinancing worth the risk? Some people would say, no, it's not. But I think a lot of people will be able to save what I would say is a few thousand dollars a year on interest. If you are confident that you need to pay off your loans, saving a few thousand dollars a year of interest for a lot of people will be like saving a week's worth of work a year. So that is meaningful. That does matter. Would you open a checking account for $5,000? You probably would. So that's why the limited amount of people that should refinance should. And if you want to get again those best cash bonuses on the internet, studentloanplanner.com slash refi, I would suggest at least applying to three or four different lenders because people's rate tables are really volatile right now. I think they're trying to figure out what should they even offer after three and a half years of not having that much volume. So anyways, I think if we think about refinancing the context of what might happen in the future with student loan interest rates, could stuff happen? One of my team members just this past week asked me about the Student Loan Interest Elimination Act and how should borrowers think about this? Because after three and a half years of zero interest, there's a movement now to just completely and permanently eliminate student loan interest or at least make it much lower. And I looked at the bill sponsors and it's two very progressive lawmakers, no bipartisan people on the bill. So it doesn't have any chance. And why does it not have any chance? Because giving no student loan interest is a direct budgetary impact every year that is subject to the rules of having to have pay-fors and things like that if you do it legislatively, which is why all this student loan stuff has all been done through executive order. That's exactly why President Biden did it the way he did it. Because if you go through executive order and you're able to get away with it and avoid legal challenges, then you don't have to worry about things like coming up with money to pay for it and having it scored by the CBO and things like that. Not the same way at least. So if you think about the level of debt we have, all the spending that happened during the pandemic, debt to GDP ratio, all the stuff that has to happen structurally with Medicare and social security for that to survive. Will student loans always be like this? No. But will our country be a dynamic country with a strong economy, with a solid return on the stock market and a solid place in the world? Yes, I think it will be. I think it's a lot more likely that the economy and the country will do very well long-term and that you going to get your education was one of the best decisions you've ever made. I tell our folks that we have rock solid clients. And I don't mean that just personally, at a personal level. I also mean from the security of your education and your profession. So what I mean by that is if you look at the 2008 recession, people with master's professional and graduate degrees had an unemployment rate maybe of about 3%, maybe three or four. People with high school degrees were more like 15% unemployment. Right now, we've got unemployment rates with professional degrees in the nature of like 1.8%. And people with high school degrees, I think are like at eight or something like that. And then undergrad only is like four, five, something along those lines. So what does this mean? It means that you are really, really likely to keep your job and keep earning the income you're earning, thanks to you having a lot more education than other people. Not a lot of people have graduate and professional degrees. You are actually quite special in that regard. Not a lot of people have that education. Now, should this education have been expensive? Should it have been able to be just repaid with a much smaller balance at a lower interest rate? Yes, it should have, but that's not the world we live in. And so what are the positives of your situation? Well, one thing that you'll find with dollar cost averaging is the more volatility in the markets. If you keep investing, if you keep putting money away, the richer you become. What happens to most people that are more subject to the business cycle on their incomes and their job security is when the economy tanks, they have to stop making contributions. So they get a much higher average cost on the investments they're putting in than you can, because you can afford to keep investing and keep making good financial decisions, even in bad markets. So does it matter what the Fed does for you? Does it matter what the student loans? Does it matter what happens to the tax cuts when they expire in 2025, the Trump tax cuts? Do any of these things matter for you? Not nearly as much as taking care of yourself, living your best life, taking the trips you want to take, renovating your house if you want to, or buying your dream house if you want to, and you've run the numbers and it's responsible. The stuff internally and the taking care of your mental health and your physical health, that's what matters, right? Student loans, I've done thousands of student loan plans. I have yet to find one example of a student loan situation that was the reason somebody's life was being torpedoed, right? Because there's always solutions and sometimes it's not pleasant solutions. I'm not going to pretend that, but there's always solutions that are much, much less unpleasant than some other things in life that people have to go through, right? So student loans never need to be the reason that your life is being messed up. So with interest starting again, double check the save plan, studentloanplanner.com slash calculator. See if that payment is higher than what you're currently paying. If it's higher than what you're currently paying, don't change anything, right? Do you need to consolidate to get the IDR account adjustment? You've got until the end of the year for that. Studentloanplanner.com slash book is the place to go to get a plan scheduled before the end of the year. You want to do it now because we're running out of availability as we get closer to the end of the year. So just double check to make sure that maybe there's nothing you need to do, but what happens more often is yes, there is something you need to do. And this is helpful for people with undergrad debt, grad debt, and parent plus debt too. So anybody can benefit from this, as long as you have more than, let's say more than 30K of debt, it's worth taking a look at. And just stay positive, right? Remember that the glass is half full and it's more than half full. It's probably close to the brim, but you didn't even realize it. And why? Because of your protection you have in your job, because of the protection you have in your income, because of the education that you have that can never be taken away from you. And remember this, if you really hate your job, you made a big mistake, you can always make a change. You are not stuck. Thank goodness we don't live in, you know, the 1950 Soviet Union where, you know, sorry, you've got to be a minor the rest of your life because, you know, too bad that's just the way it is, right? You can right now, if you wanted to, go back and get a different career completely with a new degree and borrow the full amount, even if you already have 200K of loans, you could load up on another 200K for a totally different degree if you wanted to. And you could even do that at the age of 90, if you felt like it. I'm not saying you should, I'm not saying that I would encourage that, but you can. So remember, you always have options. The restart of interest has happened. The first payment comes out at the beginning of October, but you always have choices. So if you have any questions, things you're observing about the end of the student loan pause, we'd love to hear it, studentloanplanner.com slash voicemail. If you want to leave a message, we'll get back to that on a future episode. And then also, again, if you need a plan, studentloanplanner.com slash book, go ahead and set up an appointment with one of our more than 20 consultants now, which is a crazy number for me to say. Thank you everyone for listening to the Student Loan Planner Podcast. I look forward to getting some listener questions on future episodes in, and thank you and have a wonderful week.