The Next 4 Years of Student Loans: Major Changes Are Coming

Hey y'all, welcome to another episode of the Student Loan Planner Podcast. I want to break down everything that happened with the election for you, and I wanna talk about student loans over the next four years during the second Trump administration and what you can expect. There's obviously a whole lot to discuss, a lot of things just to think about in terms of what does it mean for you, what does it mean for your finances, what does it mean for your loans. So I'm gonna talk about all this today. I think it's gonna be a really helpful episode. I think you're gonna get a lot out of it. I think that you're gonna hopefully feel a lot less stressed at the end of today's episode. So I'm excited to jump in. So let's just get right to it, right? This was not expected. This was, in the betting markets, I think this was something like a 25% chance that President Trump would win the popular vote and all seven swing states. I mean, that was also kind of very unexpected, right? And as I record this, they haven't technically called the House yet, but both sides kind of agreed that the House is probably gonna be called for Republicans very shortly. And they won in the Senate, and they won in the Senate really in a way that makes the two moderate members of the Republican caucus, frankly, irrelevant in the sense that they do not need the moderate votes to confirm appointees. They don't need the moderates for budget reconciliation either. So anyways, what does this mean, right? What does this mean that you've got a unified Republican Congress with a Republican White House and a Republican majority Supreme Court? Now, I should, I guess technically say conservative majority Supreme Court, but you get the point, right? So what does that mean? So one thing that I'll say is the range of things that they can do on student loans is very large, but it is not massive. So for example, public service loan forgiveness cannot be repealed without 60 votes in the Senate. Public service loan forgiveness could be tightened up. We could see reduced eligibility around the edges. So for example, the PSLF rule that President Biden put out in 2023 allowed people to do things like expanded some access for folks like at Kaiser Permanente positions, right? Sort of expanded access with the employer's definition of full-time was no longer the requirement. It just became 30 hours a week or more. There was a lot of things where forbearances and certain kinds of forbearances could count towards public service loan forgiveness. So if Trump's Department of Ed wanted to, they could do negotiated rulemaking session and they could completely eliminate all those PSLF executive action rules. Now that would mean the rules for PSLF would go back to what they were during Trump's first term. And those rules were okay for people pursuing forgiveness. So remember that the reason the rejection rate for PSLF was 99% was because Congress wrote the bill that way. So yes, it was a broken program, but I know some of the people that actually helped write the bill for PSLF. And the reason they wrote it so that fell loans did not count as part of what could get forgiven under PSLF, the reason they wrote it that way was because they needed the CBO cost to be low. And if they had included fell loans, which were the vast majority of the loans at the time in that bill, then the projection for the cost would have been too high. They couldn't have passed the bill in the first place. So they wrote an intentionally defective bill because they knew that there was this backdoor for consolidating fell loans to get PSLF. And then when the bill they wrote failed in terms of helping borrowers, because borrowers are not gonna know that there's this weird technicality that they don't qualify. And obviously the servicers are awful and that should they have told people they need to consolidate, of course, but servicers are gonna service her, you know what I mean? So anyways, that was the reason for the 99% rejection rate. It was not because of anything that Trump did specifically. Now, I guess one thing that you could say is he also didn't proactively help anything, right? Like they didn't necessarily go to the servicers and say, hey, you gotta make sure you tell borrowers that they are eligible for PSLF. You've gotta make sure you tell borrowers they can consolidate. They didn't do that, right? So in other words, what I would expect in a second Trump term pursue loan borrowers is stuff that's in the law, like PSLF, IBR, old and new IBR, by the way, that can't be touched. Stuff that is not in the law, like the SAVE plan, right, could be touched and the SAVE plan in particular will absolutely be touched. And I think that the SAVE plan's almost surely gonna be eliminated. And the question of how the SAVE plan gets eliminated is very specific on what path they choose to kill it. So there's two paths to eliminate the SAVE plan that I can think of. One is a typical negotiated rulemaking process where the Republicans would make their own version of an income driven plan. And because Biden replaced the repay plan with the SAVE plan, they could presumably replace the SAVE plan with whatever they want to make. And I'll talk about that a little bit more because there is a plan that they want to make. Alternatively, if the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, this conservative appeals court, decides to eliminate the ability to forgive any loans through the ICR statute, then that is something that would kill it way faster. So if they do it through this negotiated rulemaking session, it would take quite a long time. If they do it through the courts, that decision could happen in a matter of weeks. And then if you strike down the ability to forgive any debt via the ICR statute, that means Department of Ed would not be able to create any new programs under that statute. It would be only IBR for new and old IBR. And then it would be ICR for Parent PLUS borrowers. And if you did the double consolidation, Parent PLUS people could get access to the IBR program. But then the problem with that is if the courts strike down SAVE, then that would also imperil the pay program potentially. So it really depends about how this Eighth Circuit makes this ruling because this is a panel of three Republican-appointed judges and zero Democratic-appointed judges. It's more conservative than the Supreme Court, actually. And so if they decide that the ICR statute does not allow for forgiveness, then that takes down the pay plan, that takes down the SAVE plan, that stops repay from coming back as well. And that's a very serious concern. So if somebody's on the pay plan, what I would think about here is, well, if you are eligible for new IBR, actually, that's the same exact thing, just a different name. If you're eligible for only old IBR, then you're gonna be paying more, right? And in very extreme cases, people would maybe not have a partial financial hardship, would not be able to sign up for the old IBR program because it's 15% of income instead of 10 with the pay plan. 150% of the poverty line either way. And let me say, too, that there are some potential upsides to how the court could strike this down. I know you might say I'm crazy, but the potential upside is the SAVE plan's in like 400 pages of regulations. When they came out with it, that affect the IDR plans. And if they just wipe out the whole rule that the Biden administration did, then like all the stuff around family size definitions and all those sorts of things get thrown out the window too, which means you could do some hacks where they would double count family size for people with kids and things that were legal before the new IDR rule the Biden administration came out with. So in terms of the SAVE plan, right? SAVE plan's toast. If you're on the SAVE plan for parents right now, who should stay on it? If you have a interest subsidy going on that you're gonna eventually pay off your loans and you're getting 0% and you're not gonna go for forgiveness, then stick with the SAVE plan. If you are very, very close to PSLF, and that means that the buyback rule will not be able to be repealed by the time you'll need and want to use it, so I would stay on the SAVE plan for parents if you're only a few months away or less from PSLF so you can use that buyback rule and be done. If you are anything else, though, and I guess the third scenario would be you're cash-strapped, you don't have a lot of money right now, you've got credit card debt, you really need a forbearance, right? And you can't really afford much of a payment, so then stay on the SAVE for parents. But anybody else, if you're going for forgiveness and you're a couple years out or more, if you're wanting to get private sector forgiveness, PSLF, whatever it is, you need to switch off of the SAVE plan for parents right now and go into the IBR program, probably. The IBR program counts for forgiveness. It's the only open option at the moment. They might open up the pay program between now and January 20th when the new administration comes in. And if they do, you can certainly look at that plan if you don't have a partial financial hardship, for example. But this is what's gonna need to happen is really a lot of people are gonna need to go to studentaid.gov slash IDR and get off of the SAVE plan for parents to get onto the old and new IBR programs because that's something that's written into law, it's protected, can't be gotten rid of without 60 votes in the Senate. So I do wanna talk about the potential bingo card that's got Republicans making their own IDR plan either through legislation where they get buy-in from Democrats or through a executive action kind of thing where they would replace the SAVE and repay plans with the, you know, my joke sometimes is the huge plan, Y-U-G-E, right? I mean, I'm not sure what acronym they would choose for the GOP version of the income-based plan, but that's, you know, let's call it the House GOP plan because it was originated in the House and it is very similar and consistent to what Republicans have done long-term except it's way more generous than what they've done in the past. So in 2017, Republicans had unified control in the first two years of Trump's term and they tried to pass something called the PROSPER Act. The PROSPER Act would have been a disaster for most borrowers pursuing forgiveness because this act would have been IBR, 15% of income, 150% of the poverty line, but it would have been you pay until you've paid back the standard tenure plus interest on that standard tenure. So let's say you have 100K, then let's say over 10 years you would have paid 120K of principal plus interest. Well, you would have had to be paying on the IBR program in this case until you fully pay 120K even if it took you, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years, right, and so this would have really hurt a lot of borrowers. There was no interest subsidies or anything like that. Now, what the House GOP did in 2024 is they took that PROSPER Act bill and they changed out IBR for basically repay instead. So they said, well, let's make it 10% of income instead of 15, and then let's also add this very unique interest subsidy and principal subsidy, which has never been done before. It's really actually extremely generous for higher income borrowers, because what it would do is it would have the same treatment as the SAVE plan where, you know, interest doesn't accrue if you're paying less than the interest amount. They would just forgive that remainder. And then the other crazy thing, which is really shocking to me, is if your payment is no greater than two times your accruing interest, then they would give you a subsidy basically of I think half of what you're paying roughly. So, I mean, that's like, that's kind of crazy. I mean, if you think about what that, we ran some numbers here. So let's just say somebody's got 200K of income and 400K of debt, you know, so they have a significant payment in that example, right? Their payment is somewhat significant because their income's kind of high. So they're getting a subsidy of something like 10, 12, 10 to 12 grand a year on their principal balance. So they've got no interest accrual, right? And you're getting a free basically government 401K match, you know, 50 cents on the dollar, right? That's just going straight to your principal, knocking your principal down. And so what that does is it rapidly pays down your debt. And then what happens is you don't actually have any more tax bomb because you have to pay the loan until it's actually paid off. But because of that principal assistance that you're getting what it does is it pays down that balance pretty quick. And so you take that standard 10 year principal plus interest number, but you stretch it out over a longer period of time. And you also throw on like government chipping in on that. And I've run the numbers on this and it's actually very similar in the present value, which is like the cost in today's dollars as the save plan, which is nuts. The Republicans are saying we hate the save plan so much. It's so terrible, right? It's so expensive. We're gonna sue to block it. It's $500 billion. And yet they literally go turn around and produce a plan that in terms of cost is freaking the same. So it's just like, clearly in my mind, like student loans are kind of like the back burner and the policy action front. Like people don't pay attention to this stuff. They don't run the models well. And like, even the CBO doesn't really think about dynamic modeling on this at all, right? They don't think about like, well, okay, if you create a giant principal subsidy, like groups like us are gonna help people take advantage of that to the max. And it's gonna be a lot more expensive than what you're modeling. Like, duh, right? I mean, it's kind of like, okay, if you, you know, remodel your 1970s kitchen, like, yeah, like you're gonna add, oh, wow, look at that backsplash for the Marvel. Oh, look at the, you know, nice lighting. Oh, look at the, you know, I mean, look at the appliances that we can replace. Oh, let's redo the wiring, right? It just sort of built, right? I mean, so, I mean, you know, thoughts for anybody going through any remodels in your life, I've been through stressful ones for that. I mean, so, so anyways, so like, so the thought is, what's gonna happen with this, like, GOP plan? Like, would they try to get it done through legislation? I mean, let me be honest for a second. The GOP's version of income-driven repayment is so generous. I actually think it could attract democratic support potentially, because it is that generous. They would probably have to put a maximum limit on like, how long you would be in repayment for lower-income borrowers, probably 25 years or something like that. But if they did, they really might get some bipartisan support, as crazy as that sounds. Because one of the things I've seen, I've been looking at all the different news channels to see what people's hot takes are from the election. I've looked at MSNBC, Fox, CNN, like, I wanna get the full range of what people are saying, right? And one thing people are saying a lot of on the more progressive stations is like, hey, you know what, we screwed up on student loans. We leaned in way too heavily, and with our coalition of higher-educated borrowers, and we made these working-class folks of all different ethnic backgrounds feel like we're not doing anything for them. This is what I'm parroting from what some of these shows that I've been watching have been saying. So I actually do think the Democrats will be less interested in these broad, very generous student loan programs going forward. I actually really do think that, because I think that they are really feeling it in terms of this election, just really not going the way they thought it was gonna go. And I mean, I do think that you will still see progressives in the party still be super strong advocates for student loan borrowers in a way they weren't four years ago. I do think that's true. But I think that the core middle of the party is gonna be very nervous about doing major stuff on student loans unless they've got the cover of having a huge bipartisan bill or something like that, or some sort of at least moderate sort of agreement, right? Now, we're waiting around on this Eighth Circuit ruling, and that's gonna be a big moment when we have that ruling. I'll definitely do a big pot on that. So in terms of some of these other things that could happen, right? So if they don't take out the ICR statute in this Eighth Circuit ruling, we're gonna see, maybe we might see like this House GOP plan instead of repay, and IBR would still be around. Maybe they wouldn't touch the pay plan, right? It's possible Department of Ed will open up the pay in the ICR plans between now and the inauguration day too, just to try to help borrowers basically get access to something to get credit for forgiveness right now. There's a lot to talk about. There's another thought that I've got for you here is remember that Trump tax cuts expire at the end of 2025. That's not the only thing that expires. Also the American Rescue Plan provisions for the tax code also expire at the end of 2025. And that provision, the key provision for student loan borrowers and that American Rescue Plan that Biden did in 2021 is the tax-free forgiveness treatment of student loans. So that expires, which means that if you get IDR forgiveness, not PSLF, that's still tax-free, but if you get income-driven repayment forgiveness, like through 20-year pay, 20-year new IBR, 25-year IBR, then that becomes taxable income starting in 2026. And with unified Republican control, what incentive do they have to extend that at all? And I don't know what the answer is to that, just being honest. So there maybe is a chance, I'm not saying a very large chance, but there is some chance that you might see some, if Democrats realize this House GOP plan is as generous as the SAVE plan is, then why not try to lock that in and give some of the things Republicans want, maybe a little bit more regulation on unlimited borrowing for Grad Plus or something, but in exchange, maybe you get tax-free forgiveness treatment. But I guess that probably won't happen because the more I think about that, I guess if you create an IBR plan that results in no forgiveness anyway, then there's no reason to care about student loan forgiveness being tax-free or not. So I guess on the counterpoint there, maybe I've changed my mind. Maybe I don't think they're gonna compromise on anything. So a couple other things you'll see that are a little bit more niche that may or may not apply to you. Borrower defense, this is something that has been a big focus for the Biden administration to help forgive students' loans from private schools, or sorry, for-profit schools mostly. There's all this stuff with that Sweet Bee Cardona. It's a court settlement, right, where the courts have to forgive all this debt for people that went to these for-profit schools. And they're supposed to make decisions by certain dates, right? Otherwise, it's automatically forgiven. I think what's gonna happen is the Department of Ed, Biden administration folks are just gonna say, can we forgive as much borrower defense as we possibly can between now and January 20th, right? I think they're just gonna have a boom, boom, boom, boom, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp kind of approach to it because they know based off of the way the first Trump administration went that all these borrower defense claims are just gonna languish probably for four years. So I think that the Trump administration, one of the things they're really not friendly towards is some of the borrower defense, like discharging loans for people that went to certain kinds of schools kind of thing. So I think that that's something to know. I also think, just to be honest too about this, I think that Republicans treat high-income student loan borrowers very differently from low-income student loan borrowers in terms of the policies they support. So John Cornyn, one of the, I think the senior senator in Texas, he's on track to potentially be the Senate majority leader to replace Mitch McConnell. There's another guy too, John Thune. And so the reason I'm mentioning Cornyn is because he's really kind of like the core middle of the Republican Senate caucus. And he was like praising the student loan pause to the heavens, like at one point when they were talking about extending it. He's like, I think it's working great. It's helping a lot of people. It's wonderful, right? And the student loan pause was something that vastly disproportionately benefited people with higher debt, who not always, but usually also tend to have higher incomes, right? And at the same time, Republican policymakers are very deeply skeptical of things like the SAVE plan, which provide all this accelerated debt for people with small debt amounts, 10 years till forgiveness, right? That was something that was really, 5% of your income for undergrad loans. This was something, that was the thing that triggered them to file the lawsuit. Really, I mean, those were the things that the people that filed the lawsuit had the most problem with, right? And I guess it maybe makes sense. I think maybe the assumption would be that higher income borrowers would be maybe more likely to potentially be swing voters or vote Republican because they have higher incomes, maybe higher taxes that they're paying. Maybe they're more fiscally conservative or something, right? This is just me speculating as to why it is that way. But I don't know. I mean, but what I'm saying there is like, if you are a veterinarian, dentist, physician, pharmacist or lawyer or something, I think a lot of the student loan forgiveness stuff could surprise us on the upside. In other words, I think it might be more generous than you might think, even though it would be perfectly reasonable for you to feel super skeptical of that. I think that some of these programs, right? Like this house GOP plan, some of the things that they might be talking about proposing again, or maybe even some of the rules that they do not end up repealing from the Biden administration, some of the PSLF rulemaking stuff, right? That could very well surprise us to the upside. And I want really people to be aware of that, right? We can't just assume that it's all gonna be anti-student loan forgiveness because it might not be. In some ways it might even be, you know, more favorable to do certain things with student loan forgiveness, such as if they repeal the whole save plan rule, all 400 pages, that older definition of family size goes back into play and you could double count, you know, your kids and your spouse with your family size if you file separately, for example. Another thought on a couple other things. So married filing separate, that's the thing that people, a lot of people do, right? IBR specifically allows this. You know, if you're on the old IBR plan in particular, like if you're on the save plan, the 225% of the poverty line is such a large percentage of discretionary income that, you know, sometimes, not always, sometimes we see there not being a huge benefit, maybe a few thousand bucks, 3,000 bucks. But when you're saving payments on old IBR, your discretionary income is lower, 150% of the poverty line that they protect until they charge you on it, on the rest. And then the 15% of your income figure is much higher than 10. So, you know, if we think about that, that is, you know, I mean, the filing separately stuff is gonna be extremely important, extremely important for a lot of people. Not everybody should do it, but a whole lot more people need to do it now than before. Why? Because remember all that sort of, you know, messing around with the recertification dates the Biden administration did, right? It was like every, you know, every time you turned around, there was another extension of the IBR recertification date. It kind of felt like the student loan pause almost, right? Like initially it was like, oh, like obviously there's these major crisises. And then it was like, well, we're not out of the woods yet. And then it was sort of like, you know, oh, the temperature in, you know, Milwaukee is below 70 degrees today. We need to extend the pause, right? I mean, like, I think even borrowers that really love the pause can kind of admit that like the student loan pause rationales as they did it, like each marginal one they did had was more and more obvious that they were, you know, doing it because they just wanted to do it because they thought it was a good idea politically, frankly, right? Now, if we think about the IDR recertification, I think that they did that for kind of similar reasons, right? Initially it was like, we are absolutely not ready to recertify. This is impossible. And then it was like, well, we want to, you know, make sure we've got our stuff together. We want to make sure we've got all our systems in place so that when, you know, payments start, we're actually ready to do the recertifications. And then it became similar to the way Trump extended the pause right before the election in 2020, right? Biden, right before the election in 2024, it was sort of like, let's just extend that IDR recertification date yet again, you know, into basically into June of 2025, right? Now, will Trump respect that? Absolutely not. I think that everybody needs to be ready to recertify their incomes ASAP. I think everybody needs to be ready to recertify their monthly payments and their income driven repayments right away when Trump takes office. Now it won't happen immediately. Day one, he's not going to have somebody in place at Department of Ed to go do this, right? You have to get the people installed. You have to get, you know, the Secretary of Education chosen. They have to hire their staff. So like, I would expect that that would happen sometime, like in maybe March or April, potentially. They might push that recertification date much faster, much sooner, but it's going to be something that we're going to have to monitor really closely because, you know, one of the things that Republicans very much believe on the student loan side of things is, you know, they very much, you know, blame Democrats for, you know, running up the bill on the student loan program and they're very anti student loan forgiveness. They're very anti creating a, you know, very generous environment for borrowers paying a lot less than Democrats are, right? So, and I think that, you know, if you think about the politics of it, it makes a lot of sense. When I started doing this in 2015, 2016, you did not have education being one of, basically the critical defining factor breaking down the who's belongs to what party, right? I mean, it was not as big of a thing because if you were highly educated, maybe you live in the suburbs, maybe you kind of don't like taxes all that much. And so maybe you, you know, maybe some people vote for Democrats, but some people vote for Republicans, right? But if, you know, if you look at, you know, the more educated you are, the more correlated that is to partisanship with people with very educated folks voting more disproportionately for Democrats, people with lower education voting disproportionately for Republicans, obviously and not always, you know, but this is just a trend, right? And so, you know, going forward in the second Trump term, you know, those trends have gotten even stronger across the, you know, racial and ethnic background as well, right? And so I do think that you will see, you know, a lot less caring about student loans and a lot more aggressive policy actions on student loans. Let me talk about that aggressive policymaking that I'm expecting. So the second Trump term, he's already picked the first female chief of staff in history. She's his campaign manager that's credited by, you know, nonpartisan and even Democratic leaning strategists as being the most professional, running the most professional campaign operation that Trump's ever had. And one of her requirements for taking that job was like literally she said to Trump, quote, I'm only taking the job if you promise that the clown car is not allowed anywhere near the White House. In other words, the people that, you know, are more sort of controversial, like the most controversial people in the, you know, sort of MAGA movement, like, or essentially she was telegraphing, they're not gonna have access to the president and the West Wing. And so what do I think about that? What do I mean by that? So in the first Trump administration, he wasn't expecting to win. He did not have any experience in government. A lot of his people didn't have any experience in government. And you did have a lot of people, you know, like, you know, some of the John Kellys of the world, right, running things that would intentionally put up roadblocks to try to slow down or limit certain things that President Trump could do, right? In the second term, it's absolutely true that he, you know, knows how to pull the levers of power more effectively. He's got folks that are more organized and more disciplined around him that will not put up those roadblocks to achieve what the Trump administration wants to achieve in the policy front. And so the reason I'm saying that is not to kind of say it in sort of the way you might hear it on like a cable news station to alarm you or something like that. I'm saying it this way simply because what it means is there's a lot higher probability that Trump's preferred outcomes, or really, obviously, the people around Trump's preferred outcomes on student debt policy and a lot of other policies, but we're talking about student loans, it's a lot higher likelihood that some of the more, some of the big changes that we didn't see in his first term could definitely occur in his second term. And so on student loans, you know, those priorities like repealing PSLF, he'll never get 60 votes in the Senate for. And, you know, one kind of reality, right, is if they had removed the filibuster in the first, or during the 2021 kind of era, right, as many Democrats wanted them to do, I don't know if that would have maybe helped them win the election, I'm not sure. Maybe, I don't know if they would have been able to get some permanent policy things that maybe people would say would be worth it. But if, you know, without the filibuster, Republicans could absolutely annihilate all the student loan programs, just to be really clear, right? Like if you had 60 votes in the Senate, or if you had 51 votes in the Senate, but you had, you know, no filibuster, then, you know, Senate Republicans could just push it forward, and then you'd have no PSLF, you'd have loans capped at 100K, you'd have no more, like, IBR forgiveness, they'd probably repeal that too. They'd probably make it so that you have to pay back all of your loans, right, it would be, it'd be very, very strict if you did not have that filibuster. And so, you know, if you are, you know, I mean, people in 2021, Democrats were extremely frustrated the filibuster existed. Second Trump term, I think that you're gonna see, you know, Republicans be very frustrated that the filibuster exists, because it's gonna work at slowing down a whole bunch of the stuff, and stop a bunch of the stuff that student loan borrowers would, going for forgiveness, might be really not happy about, like the elimination of PSLF, like capped borrowing, like IBR going away. So all that stuff's protected. I think the big question is, is what can they do via something called budget reconciliation, which only requires a majority instead of 60 votes in the Senate, what can they do via budget reconciliation, student loan wise and policy wise, that could have an impact? And, you know, the things that we're gonna have to think about with that would be, you know, like the tax treatment of student loan forgiveness, they could put a cold blanket on that by making it taxable again. But some of the other things, I'm not really sure, to be honest, with budget reconciliation, what happens is they try to put something in a budget reconciliation bill, it has to directly impact the budget allocation of something or tax policy. So it has to impact spending, or it has to impact tax. And, you know, could it could be said that, well, the PSLF program affects the budget, so therefore, you know, can we restrict limit who's eligible for it, or, you know, repeal it, because it saves us money on the budget. And I don't think that they can do that. The reason I'm saying that is because Republicans were very opposed to PSLF in 2017. They tried to eliminate it in 2017, but their Prosper Act bill got stopped in the Senate because they didn't have that filibuster-proof majority support, and so it died there and never went anywhere. So, you know, so that's why I'm feeling fairly confident that a lot of these things can't be touched without that 60-vote Senate majority. And, you know, we have to see. I mean, I will say this, and out of humility, we don't know everything on student loans. It is impossible to know everything on student loans because it is always changing, it's always crazy, but let me say this. If you have, if you're going for forgiveness before the election, you should very likely go for forgiveness after the election, particularly people with two-to-one debt-to-income ratios or more. That's a very clear-cut case. No matter what they do with income-based or something, it's much better to go for forgiveness, no matter what they create. Now, if you have less debt than your income, the only scenario you'll get forgiveness is going for PSLF, and if that's the case, you probably need to get onto a plan that gets you a capped payment, an IBR, and then hope that you can still get PSLF. If you're in between one times your income and two times your income, then for forgiveness, the answer is it depends on what you should do. If you are able to stick with the pay plan, then a lot of people would still be able to get forgiveness even at one, barely over one times their income and debt. If the pay plan gets eliminated and you get stuck with old IBR, then maybe people should go for forgiveness only if their debt-to-income ratio is above 1.5 to one instead of like it was previously with when things were more generous. So we're gonna try to monitor this as best we can. I am trying to do my best to interpret these results in a way that helps you really get a lot out of like what will happen to student loans, right? That's my job. And I recognize that a lot of folks are worried, right? A lot of folks are worried. I just wanna acknowledge that. Some folks are not worried. Some folks are much more than worried. Some folks are not worried at all. So I think that whatever you're feeling, let yourself feel it and say, what can I do with my student loans to lower my stress levels where I don't have to worry about it? And I think there's a whole bunch that can be done to make sure that you've got more money in your pocket to use on your life dreams and goals and you don't have to worry about your student loans. And if you have questions about all this or comments or things you wanna have appear on our podcast, go to studentloanplanner.com slash voicemail and record a quick memo on your phone. It's very, very easy. You can ask questions about what your fears are about Trump's second term with student loans. You can talk about what you're thinking about doing yourself. You can ask questions of me, whatever you're thinking. And then you also can book a consult if you need one. So if you do need a follow-up consult or a first-time consult for student loans, just go to studentloanplanner.com slash book. You get a member of our team. We'll analyze all of the different plans, including the ones that might go away and the ones that might actually go into place like the House GOP plan that haven't been created yet. We have the rules. I've run the models. We already know what it would do for you and how it would impact your plan if it did happen. So we really do do a comprehensive job of making sure that we've looked at every angle so that no matter what happens in the next four years, you don't have to worry about your student debt. You can still grow wealth, get closer to your dreams, live a happy, fulfilling life. And that's our job is to make you the star of the show and make sure that you're feeling unburdened and happy with what your future holds financially and otherwise. So I want to encourage you. Thank you for being just an amazing listener of this podcast, studentloanplanner.com slash voicemail if you want to leave a quick question or a comment for a future episode. And you've got this. Wealth growth takes time. And like anything, I think that we will just hopefully get to stick around here. And then in four years, we'll be talking about whoever wins that election and what that means for student loans, right? Hopefully, knock on wood, I don't get hit by a bus between now and then, ideally. So have a great rest of your week. Thank you for listening to Student Loan Planner Podcast.