(Ep. 180) Riding the Rapids: Decoding Student Loan Cancellation, Waivers and Survey Results

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Student Loan Planner Podcast. I'm your fearless host, Travis, and we are going to tackle some hot-button, crazy, intense, emotionally charged issues on today's podcast. So we're going to talk about student loan cancellation. Will it actually happen? And have I been wrong for all of this time about whether or not it will happen? So we're going to talk about the big cancellation discussion in the rest of this episode. But first, I thought we would take a few listener questions. So remember, you can ask these at studentloanplanner.com slash voicemail. First one is about parent plus loans and whether or not you can sort of fall on your sword and absorb those. Let's listen. Hi, Travis. First and foremost, I want to thank you for all the effort that you put in. I've been following you for about five years and used you as a marriage decision. Now, I have an interesting situation when it comes to loans, and I'd like your thoughts on it. My in-laws have some parent plus loans for my wife and her brother. Now, my father-in-law has been working in the public sector the whole time that they've been paying for these loans, while my mother-in-law has not. My wife has four years of credit for PSLF right now. So I was thinking of doing a kamikaze and taking on the parent plus loans debt. And it looks like according to all of the free stuff, in a sense, that's coming out, I could then consolidate that into the PSLF credit that my wife already has. So we just have a larger balance, but ideally we would still have that four years of PSLF credit. Beyond that, I was curious on the parent plus loans that are my father-in-law's name. If there's nothing to consolidate into, is there any way to get the parent plus loans to the ICR or eventually an IDR so that he could squeeze in before October 31st for PSLF forgiveness? I would appreciate any feedback on my question and hope it comes on the show. Thank you and take care. Great question. And here is the thing that everybody needs to understand about parent plus loans. Parent plus is not your debt. It is in the name of your parent or whatever parent who borrowed it. There's not even an affiliation of these loans to the person that went to school that the debt paid for their education. So in other words, in this case, this person's spouse, maybe both parents took on parent plus loans, let's say, those parent plus loans belong to the parent. You cannot consolidate them in anybody else's name. So let's just say that the person's name is, a parent's names are, I don't know, Bob and Jane Smith, and they both have 200,000 each of parent plus loans. Well, Bob's got to hold on to all 200,000 of his parent plus loans. The only way to send that away from him is for the child to do a private refinance into the child's name. On our site, Laurel Road and Common Bond have historically done that. That's the only way to have that loan burden transferred away from the parent is through a private refinance. You cannot do it through the federal system. So there is no way to get additional credit in the name of the person, the child who's working for a PSLF eligible employer. Now for the parents with the waiver, those folks, they might actually be able to potentially get some credit under the PSLF waiver. It depends. So what we'd like to do is look at the parent plus situation is what's the best long-term approach? And anything better than that is just gravy. So for example, if somebody doesn't have any loans to consolidate with, to do two consolidations where they can pay 10% of their income instead of 20% of their income, we might actually tell that person to go back to community college just for one loan to get an additional loan to consolidate with because of the benefits long-term of paying 10% of your income instead of 20. There is still kind of a, it's still up in the air. The parent plus debt's not going to get credit for the PSLF waiver by itself, but there is a little bit of a question mark as to whether or not you can consolidate it multiple times and get credit that way. We're monitoring this very closely. So for this person, I would say that they need to book a call with us because parent plus is just the most complicated stuff in the world. I mean, almost the most complicated in the world, I guess. Spousal joint consolidated loans from the 2000s are probably worse. Parent plus debt's very complicated. And the good news is we've had a lot of success helping rescue people from that burden just psychologically and mathematically by just getting a clear plan in place. Do not absorb any parent plus debt before getting a plan for us because it could be a massively bad decision. And it might be a decision that costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars that you didn't necessarily need to take on. So hopefully that answers that listener's question. Let's take on another one. Hi, Travis and team. Thank you so much for your podcast and your web page and also your consultation services. My question is about payments made on federal student loans prior to graduating from graduate school. I am now a librarian and eligible for the PSLF program, but prior to graduating from graduate school, I made payments from time to time on my student loans prior to consolidation as a way of just chipping away at interest prior to graduating and then formally enrolling in the PSLF program. And so now I'm wondering with the new PSLF waiver, whether there's any ability to get what amounts to fairly significant money applied toward my total number of qualifying payments counted so that I can reduce the time that it's going to take to achieve PSLF. So any advice you have would be great. Thank you. So what matters here is, are you in the deferment? And if you are, what kind of deferment was it? This person was almost certainly in something called an in-school deferment when she was enrolled in graduate school. And that means if you're making any additional payments on your loans, those do not count. So for this PSLF waiver, it says deferments before 2013 that are not in school, as well as forbearances can count towards PSLF if you were making payments during that time. Now, actually, I should say deferments, that's not even actually formally confirmed yet, because we're still, cough, cough, waiting on the dadgum guidance to come out. Department of Ed is like, let's announce the, you know, Christmas in July, and then you don't have any of the details of what that's going to look like. It's just very frustrating, to be honest. But this person's not going to be able to get any additional credit, unfortunately, because this was an in-school deferment, and those payments made during that time would therefore not count. So let's take one more listener question. Hi, I have had the privilege of having my initial consultation with one of the staff members at Student Loan Planner, but I had a follow-up question just in regards to the PSLF waiver that's been coming out. And I wonder if other people like me have a similar question. So, I was technically started to work at my nonprofit organization until 2017, but I was only there for eight months before leaving to go to graduate school for occupational therapy. While I was in school, they still technically had me on the books as an employee, so I can work per diem. So my employment history with them states that I've been working there since 2017. But when I first consolidated my loans and applied for the forgiveness, the payments that counted only were considered since I submitted the application. And although I wasn't working full-time for that full duration since 2017, I was wondering if I would count for some of the payments under the PSLF waiver that has come out. So just checking to see if there's any loopholes that would apply to me due to the PSLF waiver. Thank you so much for everything that you do. Thank you so much. So that's another good question. So the key operative word that this listener said was that she was working part-time or she wasn't considered to be full-time during this period that she was making payments. So during the PSLF waiver, the one part of the rules that they did not suspend is that that employment while you were making payments had to have been at a qualifying employer for PSLF purposes, which means at least 30 hours a week where your employer's definition of full-time, whichever is greater. And if you're not full-time with your employer, even during periods where you were in a forbearance or making payments, but on the wrong plan, or you had the wrong kind of loans, you do not get additional credit for that. So that's a little bit of a bummer. I don't like being the bearer of bad news, but the good news is that there's a lot more positive things that are happening because of this. People are right now just, I mean, after, I mean, it's kind of, if you think about it, it's kind of crazy. Like the PSLF waiver was announced in October, 2021, and people are just now really understanding the full benefits of it. And the IDR waiver was literally announced a couple of weeks ago. And to me, that means that we're not going to even begin to see the kind of people realizing how good this is until probably a couple of months from now in the summer, or even the early fall. And, you know, I get a little bit of anxiety about it because I know what's coming. And a lot of people, I think, including some people at the Department of Education don't really understand what they did. I mean, at least some of the higher up people probably don't understand because in the press release, if you look at the IDR waiver from Department of Education, they say 40,000 borrowers will receive PSLF forgiveness immediately, and a few thousand will receive cancellation under IDR forgiveness. And then in the studentaid.gov IDR adjustment page, which is where they're issuing, I guess, the early stages of their formal guidance, it literally says that you will receive cancellation if you've been in any repayment plan for 20 or 25 years. That means that if you were on an undergrad loans only, it would be 20 years because it repays 20 years for undergrad loans. And then if you have some grad loans mixed in, then it would be 25 years because it repays 25 years for graduate school loans. So they say that you're going to get cancellation automatically if you've been in repayment for that requisite amount of time. Now, they also say that payments made before consolidation will count. And the PSLF waiver applies credit for the loan that has the most number of payments on the new consolidation loan. So presumably, they would apply that same credit towards the IDR waiver. And if you think about it, based off of the letter that was a response to Senator Warren back in April of 2021, Department of Education said as of December 2020, there's 4.4 million people that have a loan that's at least 20 years old. Now, the way they phrased it, I think was actually like a strategic decision to try to get that group of people defined by probably people that are very smart policy people or more of like left-leaning policy think tanks, right, that were probably working on this IDR waiver for a long time. And so that means the population that could be eligible is probably 4.4 million people. But a whole bunch of those would need to consolidate because a lot of those people, frankly, probably just have a couple loans they took out forever ago and might have taken out more loans more recently. One common trend that we see is somebody took out some loans for their own undergrad in the 80s, 90s, or 2000s, and they go back to grad school a little bit later and take out a bunch of direct loans. Under the terms of what we think the IDR waiver will be when they finally do get around to announcing the rules, cough, cough, then you could probably get the credit for that oldest loan added to the new consolidated loan. And so that means that these 4.4 million people that have had repayments for at least 20 years, we think probably about two-thirds of those are undergrad only and one-thirds of those have some graduate school loans mixed in. And a whole bunch of those people from before 2010 will have a lot of those loans be under the federally insured student loan program, the FFEL program, where the banks made the loans and the government sort of just guaranteed it. And those loans cannot be forgiven automatically because I think that they know that there would lawsuits if they did that. So the way Department of Ed is working around that is if you consolidate your loans into the direct loan program, that's how they're able to apply all these benefits ex post facto to your loans. So that's why stuff's so confusing is because stuff can't happen automatically and it's just a big old mess. So that's kind of what we're dealing with, trying to navigate, preparing people for what this IDR waiver could say, because we think that's what it will say, but we're still waiting on guidance. And by the way, the end of the IDR waiver is probably going to be the end of this year when Democrats are expected to lose the House and maybe the Senate. So it's just kind of confusing. We're going to shift a little bit today into talking about the major student loan cancellation announcement that President Biden hinted at the past couple weeks. President Biden has been getting a lot of pressure from the sort of the left wing of the Democratic Party, the activist wing, to cancel student loan debt now for a long time. And it seems like he is finally coming around to this idea. The issue with this is going to be that the courts are almost certainly going to see a challenge. Probably the Republican Party or some sort of affiliated group will probably file some sort of legal motion to block this as soon as it comes out. That's our expectation. When I became clear they were going to extend the student loan pause past May 2nd, I planned a vacation. So I'm going to be on vacation here this upcoming week. And, you know, of course, that's probably when he's going to announce the details of the exact cancellation he's going to do. Heck, it might even come out before this podcast comes out. So I apologize if that's the case. And I will analyze all of it when we get back from our vacation. The reality here is this is what's going to happen, though. President Biden's going to announce probably some kind of cancellation because at this point he probably has to. And I say that because he probably has to politically, because he's sort of backed himself into a corner. I think that there's all kinds of like strategic political stuff that I feel like I've learned following student loans for several years where, you know, President Biden kind of suggests to the Hispanic Caucus that he's open to the idea of cancellation. And then maybe some of the more progressive members of that Congressional Hispanic Caucus then leak this to the media to try to box him in to do something on the student loan cancellation issue. Now, the issue with this cancellation is, yes, it's a way to possibly motivate the Democratic base to turn out in the midterm elections, which is super important if you're the Democratic Party. But it could not be coming at a worse time because you're not canceling student loan debt in the middle of a depression or a recession or a 2008 like event. You're canceling student loan debt in the middle of the number one concern people having is inflation. And if you are canceling a bunch of student loan debt, which would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, you're going to make yourself even more vulnerable to attacks over inflation that you might say, well, the boost in the economy will be more important than any kind of worries about inflation. Inflation is such a hard thing to attribute to one source or another. So you wouldn't need to worry about that. One of the things that President Biden said when he was talking about cancellation is that the timing was delicate and he had to be very cognizant of inflation in his announcement. What that tells me is that they probably would prepare the cancellation announcement and then maybe drop it right after a more moderate inflation print if they have one in between now and the midterms. Right. That would be very smart, I think, to drop a student cancellation announcement maybe right after CPI is published and it's, you know, comes in below expectations. Then maybe you announce the cancellation after that, for example. Now, the other thing that they're doing is they are also very cognizant of cancellation and the attacks that they're going to have over it. That's one of the reasons why President Biden has talked about means testing student loan cancellation if he does it, the executive order. So what he has said is that they're trying to decide this, by the way. So this is very in flux, could change even before this podcast comes out. But what they talked about is canceling probably, well, they said less than 50,000. So he's very clear we're not going to cancel 50K. So it's going to be lower than that. Probably you would assume 10, but it could be anywhere between 10 and 50. Right. That's the amount that he's talking about doing. And he said that he wants to cap it at people who earned either 125K or 150K in the prior tax year as a single person or 250 or 300K as a married couple in the prior tax year. So we would be assuming that would mean 2021. And also he's talked about doing this only for people with undergraduate loans. In other words, not allowing it to be for graduate school borrowers. Now, the simple reason for this is politics, because I think that the administration is just super sensitive right now to the optics of things. If you actually think about student loan cancellation, if you kept it like that, if you just said the cap was only people making less than 150 as a single person or 300K as a couple, if those were your means testing, it's important to note that that would capture almost no one. So in other words, what I mean is that almost everyone would qualify. 97% of borrowers would still qualify for 10K of cancellation if they means tested it with 150K single, 300K joint limitation. And also by doing undergrad only instead of including graduate borrowers, I think the idea there is to insulate themselves from attacks that they're just forgiving debt for doctors and lawyers and bankers, which is what the Republicans are using as their language of attacking this on Twitter. The issue with this cancellation thing is it's going to actually be a straight up street brawl. I mean, I'm just being honest. This is going to be a fight. And the reason is Mitt Romney was out there at the beginning of the pandemic talking about how maybe they should defer student loan payments and interest for three years for new graduates. I mean, that's a lot. I mean, it ended up being that way already for everyone. But he was very, you could say, in terms of a Republican, being pretty liberal on the idea of student loan debt earlier on in the pandemic. But when this cancellation news came out, he came out and was very aggressive about it. He was like, so it's okay for Biden to bribe voters, what's next? Mortgage debt, car loans, credit cards. I mean, he was very negative about the idea. And why would someone care about that? Well, that tells you where the center of the debate is. If you've got one of the more moderate Republicans being very against this, then that means that it's going to be a lot more of a fight and it's going to draw a lot more attention. Whereas if you look at other things like the IDR waiver, the PSLF waiver, the repeated extensions of the student loan payment and interest pause, that really only drew the ire for the most part of your more conservative members of the Republican Congress, right? So like Senator Tom Cotton, some of the more conservative House members, which you would expect, right? The more firebrand type of people were super against the announcements that they've done so far about student loans. But when you're getting really aggressive opposition from people like Senator Collins and Senator Romney, more of the moderate members of the Republican party, then that's something that's portending a big fight. This is kind of really bizarre. There was a former Republican, A. Wayne Johnson or something like that. I forget his name exactly, but he ran on this platform of canceling debt in a Republican primary in Georgia. Didn't get a lot of attention because that's not a very popular position among Republicans. But he actually came out and said that if President Biden tries to cancel student debt via executive order, he's going to file an immediate lawsuit against it. I'm not clear what standing he has, but that's the example of what's going to happen with any kind of cancellation announcement is somebody is going to try to sue over this. Who knows that the person will have standing. That's a big debate in legal circles as to whether or not anyone has standing to block cancellation by executive order. But the reality is when you have an open question about something legally, what happens is people like to test it. And that's what we're going to see. I think you will see a cancellation announcement from President Biden. I think it will be kind of similar to what he talked about on the campaign trail, maybe 10K, maybe 20 or 25 if he wants to get really aggressive. I think that that's also kind of important is how does he announce it? Because that's also going to tell you how willing he is to have it thrown out in the courts. So if he announces, you know, 25 or 30K, which would cost, you know, 500, 600 billion dollars, then he's basically saying, let's just take this to the courts because we need to energize the base. And we think that this combined with, you know, this is just breaking as of yesterday, right? But the hint that Roe v. Wade might be overturned, maybe that's a big strategy here is to make, you need a foil, right? If you're the Democratic Party, you need somebody to turn out your base and also kind of deflect all of the attention on negative economic news. And maybe this is a really smart strategy politically. It's come out very bold with student loan cancellation and then have the court be the double bogeyman over reproductive rights and student loans and have that be a very motivating reason to turn out the base in a year where President Trump is not directly on the ballot. Why would they want to cancel only debt for undergrads? We looked at that. And if you look at the details, part of the issue is that student loan forgiveness is almost impossible to obtain, or at least it's very difficult to obtain for people that have modest balances. Frankly, everybody talks about PSLF as being a program for nurses and firefighters and teachers and police officers and things like that. It's really not. The reason is because it's just very hard to mathematically get 25k forgiven, even if you're making a modest amount of income, because one little mistake can just sort of completely take away your ability to easily sign up for PSLF and pay-as-you-earn and all that. If you're making $40,000 a year, all it takes is a little bit of income from dividends or maybe you have a job in the summer, you're working as a teacher, and suddenly you've hit your $200 a month cap on pay-as-you-earn, and now you get this confusing letter that says you don't qualify anymore, and you get confused, and maybe you sign up for teacher loan forgiveness, which doesn't count for PSLF, and then suddenly you're not getting your loans forgiven because you made all these mistakes, right? Whereas if you have even a small amount, like $60,000, I say small, it's not that small, but $60,000, $80,000, I guess small in terms of comparison to what we see every day, but $60,000 to $80,000 of student debt, but you're a social worker, well now you've got that debt-to-income ratio being high enough that you almost always qualify for income-based repayment, always have a low enough payment to get something forgiven, so we did a survey. We did a survey with over 6,200 people in our audience, which is maybe the biggest student loan forgiveness survey that's ever been done. I'm not sure about that, but I think it's possible. I wanted to talk a little bit in today's podcast about that because I think the findings are absolutely extraordinary. We looked at, you know, asking the question, how many of you are pursuing student loan forgiveness as a strategy? Is that your approach? So out of the people who responded, we found that people that have less than $50,000 of student loan debt, 47% said they planned on going for student loan forgiveness. Now that is a very small number because our list is probably biased towards people that are seeking student loan forgiveness, right, compared to people overall, so I do want to admit that, but compare that number to the people who had $400,000 or more of student loan debt, 85% of those people said they were pursuing forgiveness. So think about that. You know, the $400,000 plus debt crowd, not all, but a lot are people with the most education, dentists, dental specialists, physicians, lawyers, people with, you know, terminal doctoral degrees. That tends to be a lot more of the folks with that $400,000 plus debt size, whereas your, you know, your $0 to $50,000 is mostly people from undergrad degrees, and then your $50,000 to like $200,000 is like your two, three-year master's programs, and then your $200,000 to, you know, $400,000 tends to be people with less expensive doctoral programs, maybe that don't last quite as long or don't charge quite as much. So that's a straight line of people, the more you borrow, the more likely you are to seek forgiveness. So if you are, if you care about equity and your goal is to help more people get forgiveness, rather than make a change across the board that lifts, maybe it lifts the $400,000 plus crowd going for forgiveness from 85% to 90% and the under, you know, the people with undergrad size debts, you take that group of people going for forgiveness to 47% to like 60%. What I think that people are kind of trying to do is say, well, let's make that debt really focused on people with undergrad debts so that we can get that number up to like 80, 85% of people pursuing forgiveness instead of having this huge disparity of almost everybody with huge debts with graduate programs going for forgiveness and people with undergrad only debts really having no choice but to mostly pay it back. And there's a lot of people that don't even finish college. So this is an interesting part of the conversation about student loans is 40% of people don't actually finish their bachelor's degree. The numbers I believe are worse at community colleges. And these students and these borrowers actually have a lot smaller balances. And these are the hardest debts to be forgiven if you think about it, because if you borrow 10K, you know, let's say you're a person making a very modest, you know, 20 to 40K income. You've got kids. Yeah, your pay as you're in payment might be 50 a month, but the second you make too much, now it gets capped. You're paying 100 a month on your loans. 100 a month is no joke if you're making 30K a year with kids. I mean, that's a lot of money, right? Whereas, you know, if you have even a slightly higher income and way higher debt, it's just a lot easier psychologically to pay your loans and not have to worry about your payment being super high relative to your debt size if you're making a more lovable wage as a graduate student. Now, even if you make a very small income, right? Like, let's say I'm talking to the social workers in the group, right? People that are really making very low incomes with graduate educations. Even that income is much better than a lot of the people that don't finish college, right? Because even if you're making 30K a year, if you're working for the government or a non-profit or something like that, you probably have better benefits than the typical person. You probably have maybe some paid time off, at least hopefully some maternity or paternity leave, maybe a 401K match or a 403B plan, or maybe even a pension if you're in a state that funds these services better. You're better off as a graduate school degree holder in pretty much almost every single case compared to somebody that didn't finish college. And the student loan program doesn't react that way. It doesn't really reflect that reality that people struggle more, that don't finish college, the people who finish grad school. Now, if I'm a person that, you know, has a graduate degree, I might want to have as much relief as possible for everyone, but please don't leave me out kind of thing, right? I understand that. And we decided to look at a lot of different demographic groups in our survey of 6,000 plus of our community to ask, you know, who are the people going for forgiveness with high debt balances? What are people's characteristics? What is the picture of somebody that's, you know, pursuing student loan forgiveness? One thing overall is the people that say that student loan forgiveness is a gender issue, is a gender justice issue, are very correct. I mean, two-thirds of our audience are women. Women were far more likely to respond that they were pursuing student loan forgiveness than men. About 70% of women were saying that they were pursuing forgiveness, whereas 60% of men said they were pursuing forgiveness. That difference in gender was actually by far the biggest difference in our survey of any demographic characteristic. We looked at ethnic background, marital status, LBGTQ status, age, income level. I mean, it really was striking the difference in gender in our survey. A couple of the other things that we looked at in terms of the different demographics that we looked at that predicted how likely somebody was going for student loan forgiveness. Married borrowers were more likely to go for forgiveness than single borrowers. People who identified as LBGTQ were slightly more likely to go for student loan forgiveness, primarily among women, though. The difference between men was actually not that significant. It was pretty similar. And we also looked at just different other characteristics I'll talk about in a second. The marriage thing, that was a little bit of a surprise to me as to why people that would be married would be going more for student loan forgiveness than people who are single. I guess part of it is just you might have a bigger poverty line deduction, so you have a lower payment. You also might have some tricks available to you if you're married, like married filing separate in a community property state. And maybe people on the margins that are married also maybe seek out more education, again, at the margins, not overall, which might result in higher debts, which means that you're more likely to have that forgiven because the more you borrow, the more likely you are to seek forgiveness, which makes sense. Now, the demographics of student loan forgiveness in our survey were really surprising to me. So we looked at a lot of different demographic groups to really look at something that we felt like was significant. We made the sample size minimum 50 people to try to have an idea of what was significant and what wasn't. In most of our sample sizes, we had hundreds or even thousands of people in each of the different samples that we looked at. So the student loan forgiveness and the student loan cancellation type of debate, I think, is really fascinating given this survey data. Of the top sort of five demographic categories that we looked at that had a significant sample size, the top five were all female identifying, right? So that was really interesting to me. And the bottom five were all male identifying. So that was pretty striking. In terms of the most to least likely to go for forgiveness, I'm just going to read this off so you can kind of think about it. This is most likely to say they're pursuing forgiveness to least likely they're pursuing forgiveness. And again, this is our audience, which is disproportionately high debt borrowers. Number one is female LBGTQ of any race, 76% pursuing forgiveness. Number two, female black or African American, 74%. Female white, 71. Female Hispanic or Latino of any race, 67. Female Asian, 66%. Male black or African American, 64%. Male LBGTQ of any race, 64%. Male white, 63%. Male Asian, 60%. And male Hispanic or Latino of any race, 56%. So I know I just threw a bunch of stats at you. So this is kind of the thing that kind of was shocking to me a little bit about the politics of student loan cancellation. If you would say, you know, what is the base of the Democratic Party? Certainly women disproportionately vote for Democrats, men disproportionately vote for Republicans. You would say African American women, LBGTQ women, like maybe would be disproportionately more favoring the Democratic Party. But there was some weird stuff in this too, right? Like, I would not have expected that Hispanic men would have been the least likely demographic group to benefit from student loan forgiveness. That's pretty shocking to me. You know, among women, Hispanic and Asian American women were less likely to say they were pursuing forgiveness than white women. That was, again, kind of pretty shocking. So if you think about the politics of this, it's not very abundantly clear what the results would be. I mean, you know, if you think about the 2020 election, Hispanic Americans swung heavily, well, not super heavily, but, you know, notably heavily towards the Republican Party compared to prior elections, which was unexpected. If you think about Democrats using student loan forgiveness as a strategy to turn out their base, is there any risk that, you know, especially like Hispanic men who might not have a college education would view this very poorly and would, you know, maybe consider a second look at a Republican Party, for example, with the polarization for education as a predictive factor for who votes for what party? I don't know. I thought that was really interesting. You know, some political genius is going to have to look at this issue because I'm not really sure what it all means. One thing about our demographic groups in our study, I will say that among high debt borrowers, black men were very underrepresented. So in our survey, about 4% of men were identifying as black or African American. 12% is the number for the population overall. Black women were less underrepresented, 8% in our survey versus 13% overall in the population. And we found probably the most underrepresented population in our survey was Hispanic men and women. About 8% in our survey, 18% of the population overall. Asian Americans were overrepresented. Whites were overrepresented. So this is a really nuanced conversation. So it could be true of multiple different things. African Americans do bear disproportionately the burden of student loan debt, but maybe they don't bear disproportionately the burden of very high student loan debts because maybe African Americans are still underrepresented compared to where they should be in fields like medicine or law or dentistry. This is just a complete hypothetical. I'm not sure, right? But I mean, this is a complicated issue. And when we're talking about cancellation of how you structure it, you do give disproportionate benefits to certain groups of folks. In this case of the student loan payment and interest pause and the IDR and PSLF waivers, our audience has benefited enormously from that. And somebody who's a single mom with 10,000 of student loan debt, who's been a default for a number of years, has benefited very little from anything that the administration has done on student loans. So cancellation would be a way to rectify that and maybe free the person that has the small debt from the big burden. But the problem is the cancellation stuff is also the most likely to get challenged in court. Whereas the IDR waiver, PSLF waiver, these payment interest pauses that people really don't understand what the actual benefits and costs of them are. The accounting on this stuff is so bad that people are really clueless. But cancellation is pretty easy because it's like, oh, this is the amount you're going to cancel. This is the bill. It's just a lot more obvious. And so then just because it's a more obvious issue and it's because it's more of like a bumper sticker type of issue, where there's a lot more polarization on something like this, because it is easier to understand and makes it easier to have political sort of attacks and support on both sides of this issue. I think that we're going to see this is probably going to get brought into the courts. I think that cancellation, this is what I'm just predicting. I don't know if this is going to happen, but what I expect will happen is some Republican group will pick a really attractive jurisdiction, kind of like the mask mandate, right? Remember how that was like a Tampa, President Trump appointed judge, you know what I mean? Like a very sort of sympathetic district, if you will. And this is obviously me talking not as a legal expert. So I apologize to all the legal experts and lawyers listening to this, but you maybe pick a favorable place to bring your lawsuit to get a stay, which would block the cancellation being processed. And then you appeal it. The other side of the administration would appeal it maybe to, I don't know, maybe a more favorable district court or something like that. And then maybe that would get appealed to the Supreme Court. And maybe this is what the administration wants to, again, like if you're President Biden and you're dealing with all kinds of issues in the foreign and domestic sphere, making this election about a extremist Supreme Court that doesn't reflect the people that has to be stopped at all costs, right? I mean, that's just politically a lot more attractive campaign to run than, oh, corporations are really greedy with inflation. And it's just sort of like, you're trying to come up with somebody to blame for inflation besides yourself as the party in power. And that's a lot more difficult campaign to run. So that's why I think that maybe the play here for the Democrats, maybe why President Biden had a change of heart is maybe that they have come around on this idea of either we're going to get cancellation because nobody's going to have standing to sue when they try to sue, and we're just going to be able to deliver this promise that we promised on the campaign trail, or this is going to be something that is going to get blocked by a conservative majority Supreme Court, which is going to backfire on the Republican Party politically, which might help us hold our majorities in Congress. So something a little bit less obviously political we asked in the survey is what occupations are most likely to pursue student loan forgiveness. So we asked of the people that responded to the survey, what's your occupation and how likely are you to pursue PSLF and the 20 and 25 year forgiveness. So these are the top 10, and we'll go in reverse order this time. So number 10 to number one, top 10 most likely professions to pursue forgiveness. Number 10 is physicians, nine veterinarians, eight therapists and counselors, seven nonprofit employees, six teachers, five college faculty or staff, four chiropractors, three psychologists, two government employees, number one social workers. So that is out of sample sizes that had more than 100 respondents. If we look at the number of people pursuing PSLF specifically, number 10 to number one here, number 10 pharmacists, 40% of pharmacists pursuing PSLF, nurses, number nine, therapists, counselors, eight psychologists, seven teachers, six physicians here, number five, four nonprofit employees, three social workers, two college faculty or staff, number one government employees. Another list here, top 10 for 20 and 25 year forgiveness. So like pay repay forgiveness over 20 or 25 years. And again, this is sample size over 100. Number 10 pharmacists at 28%, therapists, counselors at 30, number eight psychologists, seven physical therapists, six lawyers, five business slash corporate employees, four optometrists, three dentists, two veterinarians, number one chiropractors. Now that was over sample size over 100. If we included sample sizes below 100, there's some fields like acupuncture and naturopaths that have close to 90% doing forgiveness. Other kind of interesting things, very, very, very few people that are dental specialists pursue PSLF. There were some really interesting things like that. Physicians were really interesting because of the physicians that responded to the survey, which we had over almost 800 physicians that responded. So it's a pretty large sample. 64% of these physicians said they were pursuing PSLF. 8% said they were pursuing 20 and 25 year forgiveness. So that was one of the biggest, starkest differences of any profession on this list. So, I mean, physicians, you know, more physicians as a proportion of the population appear to be pursuing PSLF than teachers, which is just really shocking. If you think about it, that, I mean, as a physician, it's fantastic. We want as many of our physician clients to get loan forgiveness as possible. So I'm not saying anything against that. What I am saying is, as a public policy design, how interesting is it that we made a forgiveness program where physicians with two or three or 400,000 of debt have an easier time getting it forgiven than teachers with 20 or 30,000 of debt? Does that make a lot of sense? I don't know. Physicians are really, really critical and important to this nation, and we desperately need more of them. So maybe we should have both of them be getting zero loan educations or low loan educations, right? But it just shows you kind of just how bizarre these loan programs are, where that would be something that might result, just because Department of Ed and the government in general, in my view, with student loan programs, doesn't think a lot about these programs. They sort of just do something, and they try to correct stuff with executive orders because there's no interest in Congress to fixing any of this stuff and paying for it directly or reforming it directly or getting bipartisan agreement on these things because we're so divided as a country. And so you get all these really odd outcomes in terms of what professions are most likely to qualify for forgiveness and which ones are not. What does all this mean for you? So remember that I'm on vacation next week. So, you know, still contact us, still send us emails, still leave us voicemails at studentloanplanner.com slash voicemail, and know that I'm going to react to whatever the administration's going to do when we get back. And what I think they're going to do is cancel some student loan debt, means test it. Most everybody's going to qualify, even though they put a means test on it, simply because the means test is really trying to deflect those attacks that are going to come from Republicans. And then I think we're going to see a court challenge from Republicans about this. I think it's going to get kicked to the courts. We're going to also hopefully have IDR waiver FAQ coming out in the next couple weeks where we'll be able to actually see for sure what is the Department of Ed actually doing on this. Are they really only trying to cancel tens of thousands of borrowers loans? Are they really trying to give an opportunity to cancel millions? And I think it's the latter. I think that they're trying to create an opportunity to cancel potentially millions of borrower student loans, but they either didn't do the work on this to actually come up with a cost estimate or they're being strategically ambiguous about it because they're trying to get all of the FAQ published before anyone has a chance to mount any kind of challenges to it. But the other big risk with this is if you do cancellation, you're going to get this thrown into the courts. And what is the risk of that? Well, it could get appealed. And then what might come under pressure would be this meaning of the HEROES Act that all this stuff is based on, which says that the president has a national emergency declaration. They've got all this flexibility with what they can do on student loans. And if that comes under threat, which it could, could you see the whole thing just get the rug pulled out from under you? If that's the case, I don't think it's going to happen anytime that soon, but there is a little bit of urgency to getting a plan as soon as possible to get any kind of needed consolidations or any kind of ECF forms submitted that need to happen just in case. And here's something really crazy that I'm going to drop on you. There is a non-zero chance that this student loan cancellation announcement could cause student loan payments to start again in September, literally a couple months before the midterm elections. I'm not going to say that's likely, and I still think it's a lot more likely that it's going to get kicked out until like December 31st or January 31st, and payments would start about 30 days after that. I think that's by far the most likely scenario. But this cancellation thing being announced, there's a little bit of an X factor here because the administration is really trying to deliver for a lot of key constituencies in the party without falling under attack about inflation, which is their just biggest vulnerability right now, period, with the economy. They're really underwater with approval ratings on the economy. So they need to be very careful about how they message this stuff. And I think that that would be one way to kind of counteract attacks that they don't care at all about inflation. And here's an example, the student loan stuff they're doing. You could cancel some student debt and you could start payments again after August 31st. And those two things kind of don't make it quite as easy to attack them over inflation. So I don't know, I've just heard a little bit of chatter with that. And I think that's kind of interesting. And the other big X factor is, is there going to be some bombshell that drops where Department of Education did intend to cancel millions of people's student loan debts through this IDR waiver, but tried to hide it? Is that something that could come out and cause issues? I think that, again, I talked about this in a last podcast, this is not something that would be because of what we talk about on this podcast. This is something that both sides of this have smart people that dig on these issues and find stuff that they're going to find. I mean, people don't care about the IDR waiver as much, as much as cancellation. Why? Again, because the IDR waiver is just really confusing to understand, right? So, I mean, even if you did find that a lot of people could qualify, the bill for the IDR waiver will certainly be way less than cancellation simply because the IDR waiver, a lot of people are going to have to consolidate to qualify. A lot of people are going to have to realize that they qualify. And it's just, you know, a lot of people would get the old loans canceled maybe before they're able to consolidate to get the rest of them canceled, right? So even though there might be $200 billion of eligible loans, it very well could result in maybe $30 or $40 billion of canceled debt, which is larger than the $17 billion the administration's canceled so far, but not that much larger. One thing that I will admit here is I am a little exhausted. It's kind of like we have with our knowledge of student loans that we've built over the past six years, we kind of have a formula for the life raft or something that we know, and we're trying to reach as many people as possible with it before the opportunity expires. So we've been trying to rapidly grow this business because our calendar is coming under heavy bookings, which is a good thing. We want to serve you. We want to do a fantastic job of serving you, and we want to be able to scale that. So I've been adding additional consultants to the team, making sure that there's quality controls, making sure that they're trained up, and trying to prepare for a run on our calendar that I expect will happen as we get closer to the expiration of these waiver programs in June, July, August. You can book up to three months in advance without a credit card. So if you're thinking about getting a follow-up plan or an initial plan, I would do that. studentloanplanner.com book, you can schedule a plan. All of our consultants have done tons of plans, and they're very accomplished people. We pay a lot more than the average firm would pay for folks on our team because we want to get the best. This time last year, we were doing, I think, 120 plans a month. This past April, we did 350, which is just really crazy, and that's because we're having tremendous impact. I mean, how many times can you have a conversation with somebody that's PSLF waiver eligible that didn't realize they just needed to consolidate their debt and apply in a certain way for the ECF form? Not only could they qualify for PSLF, but the whole thing's forgiven immediately. I mean, that's literally a conversation that saves somebody 150 grand sometimes, and those are the kind of conversations we're having. You don't have to be getting the whole thing forgiven to get additional credit for this. That's important to note, is you can get additional years worth of credit for this and then just get your clock way closer to forgiveness, which is a big deal, too. And we're having a lot of those conversations, and we were having a lot of those conversations around public servants, and also we've been having conversations about people worried about rising interest rates, how does this impact refinancing strategy long-term, and then what I expect we'll have is a lot more of the non-PSLF heavy populations reaching out to us in the coming months, like the people that are very likely to pursue the 20 and 25-year forgiveness plans, like your chiropractors, veterinarians, dentists, optometrists, lawyers, physical therapists, psychologists, pharmacists, et cetera. I think those professions are going to start more heavily booking us. We've been having a lot of people in the college professor, government employee, physician, teacher, kind of social worker space that are qualifying for the PSLF waiver that are contacting us, but I think we're going to get a lot more of that non-PSLF heavy crowd that's going to start booking, and I just want to make sure you get the help you need. So if you have any questions for the podcast, studentloanplanner.com slash voicemail, getting a consultation for your plans, studentloanplanner.com slash book. We're going to have a little bit of a variety on the show for the next couple of shows, I think, and maybe I'll do an emergency pod if there's some sort of big cancellation announcement to break down what it says. I really appreciate you. Thank you for listening to the Student Loan Planner Podcast. Please share this with one of your friends that needs this information. If you think about people qualifying for the PSLF waiver and the IDR waiver, what we know is when you give a program that requires somebody to do something, it ends up being disproportionately people who have more resources and more access and more financial literacy and more education that disproportionately qualify for this stuff, and we're trying to fight that as much as possible to get this message out to as many people as possible. So if you could share a Student Loan Planner Podcast with your friends who can get this information for free if they can't afford our services, we would love that. If you could share studentloanplanner.com and just the blog post and the email newsletter sign up now is on our homepage. So if you know somebody that needs to sign up for the newsletter, they can go to our homepage, studentloanplanner.com, and just they can put their email in right there and that'll sign them up for the weekly updates so they get that information. I truly do believe that we're going to get billions of dollars canceled for people the rest of this year, us individually and collectively as a community. So I really would love your help in doing that. The finances of our business are going to take care of themselves. When you're helping people save as much money as possible through these programs, I'm not worried about that. I'm more worried about getting this message to as many people as possible. So if you have like grand rounds that you want to bring us into, email help at studentloanplanner.com. We're doing presentations for like, you know, programs, medical programs for free. If there's a big enough group of people, we'll send one of our consultants virtually via Zoom to do a presentation for a grand rounds or even we'll bring somebody in person if there's a budget to do so. So we're just trying to get this message again out to as many people as possible. Please help us do this because it's going to make you look really good. It's going to be super life-changing for your friends and colleagues that could benefit from this that are not nearly as financially literate as the average person listening to this podcast is going to be. So just thought I'd say that. I hope you have a great week and I really hope they don't announce the cancellation thing until I come back from vacation because I hope I enjoy this vacation because I know what's coming the rest of the year and I want to be super energized to help you guys. But that's probably how it works. They're probably going to announce it when I'm over there. So we'll see. But thank you for listening to the Student Loan Planner Podcast. I just really appreciate you being such a vital part of our community and just how so many of you share the positive things that our podcast and site have done for your life. And that really is so motivating because that's the whole point of this is a mission-driven business that changes lives and frees people from the shackle and the shame of student loan debt and transforms people's life into a path of wealth and financial prosperity instead of debt and anxiety. So that's what we're doing here at Student Loan Planner. Thank you so much for being a part of that. I'm Travis with Student Loan Planner. Have a wonderful rest of your week.