Welcome to the Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast, you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to uplevel your money and your life. I'm your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey everyone. It's been a while. I've been away for most of the summer. I will definitely talk about that in a future episode. But I wanted to bring in one of my friends from Student Loan Planner. If you've known me for a while, you know that this is the consulting company that I always recommend my clients who want to make sure they are on the best repayment plan possible for their federal loans.

We're talking about federal loans. Private loans. Well, they're private and subject to whatever terms you sign with the bank. We're talking federal loans. There have been so many changes since the pandemic and we have some even new changes thanks to the big beautiful bill. And so the big beautiful bill had lots of things, but it had some new verbiage about student loans. So that's why I want to bring in Lauren Williams from Student Loan Planner to talk about that.

Now, it's a lot of information, a lot of acronyms. And so I don't want you to get too lost into the weeds. If you get lost, first of all, it's okay. That's why people like Lauren exist. And this is why I always recommend working with someone from his team. If you want to make sure you understand your student loans and you want to make sure that you are on the best plan for your current situation.

And so when you use my link to book a call, you actually get $100 off and you actually get an additional, I believe, total of 6 months of email follow up. So after you have your consultation with them, you can still reach out to them with questions that you might have. And so to find out more, go to wealthymomd.com SLP those are the letters SLP for student loan Planner.

So we're going to talk about what's new with this new bill, what to expect, who needs to pay attention, who needs to maybe reach out to someone like Lauren or another team member. And even if you don't have student loans, if you know someone who is about to start college, start medical school, this is also information about future borrowers as well. So tune in. And again, let's welcome Student Loan Planner.

Welcome to the show. Lauren, so good to be here. Ready to talk all things student loans with you today, Bonnie. Yeah, I'm excited to meet you. I'm surprised our paths haven't crossed before. Since I've been, I've known Travis for, oh gosh, it's been a while Now, I think 2018, 2017, something like that. So I've known. Wow, so you've been around the same amount of time as me. Yeah.

I can't believe we haven't crossed paths. I know, right? So I wanted you on the show because student loans have been changing like so rapidly. I mean, during the pandemic it was just hard to keep up with all the things that kept getting passed. And a lot of things have sort of calmed down in student loan world. But now we have a big new, what is it called?

Big beautiful one big beautiful bill. And there's some student loan parts of it. And so I wanted you on the show to kind of, so we can update everyone on sort of what's going on because I know a lot of my clients feel like there's nothing to do now or they see little snippets in the news and they get worried. People in training. I know some of my listeners are in training.

They might be medical student or a resident. So I definitely want to address, you know, that population as well. Is PSLF going away? I'm sure you've been getting all these types of questions, so we're going to try to cover everything that you think my listeners need to know. And also obviously you've been working with people on their loans and so you've been seeing what they've been asking or you've been seeing what's been coming up.

So I'm so glad that you're here and I'm so glad that there are people who are experts in this area because it is a lot to keep up with. So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself? Absolutely. So my name is Lauren Williams. I am a four time Olympian, the first American woman to earn a medal in both the summer and the Winter Olympics. And, and so you're probably already thrown off because you're like, wait, we just said we're getting ready to talk about student loans.

So that was my previous life before I became a certified financial planner. And I bring it up to say that I became a financial planner because as a professional athlete I tried to hire a financial advisor and didn't know there were different types of financial advisors out there in the world. They are not all created equally. Did not end up in the hands of someone who had my best interests at heart and made a lot of financial mistakes along the way.

So that led me basically to life after sport, wanting to be able to help other people organize their finances because I didn't feel very financially organized with the. And I ended up hiring a couple other people. And that also didn't go well. So I was like, what can I do? I want to kind of be the same. The change I want to see. I opened my own financial Planning firm in 2016 and the very first person that came to me that was not a friend or a family member had $365,000 of student loan debt and about 150,000 of income.

She was a single woman living in Michigan. And she was just like, the cost of living is not high here. I thought that when you it to six figures, life was going to be better. And I just feel like I'm throwing everything toward my student loans. And I was just like, oh man, I don't know what to do to help her. So I went down this rabbit hole of like the Internet and trying to learn because the CFP didn't actually teach us that.

All the. For all the information I got with all these certifications, that was the one thing that I didn't have any real expertise in. And as I started to learn ChatGPT, this is pre chat back in the pre chat TBT days, prehistoric times, you know. And so I went down this rabbit hole just to help this one person and realize how complicated it was. And despite having financial expertise, it was hard to kind of make ends meet and understand what was going on.

I was like, how is the average person doing this? So I kind of got addicted to student loans via that. Ran into Travis, who is the owner of Student Loan Planner, and he was like, gosh, you're as passionate about student loans as me. Like we should work together. And fast forward. I met him in 2018. Here I am in 2025 still working with Student Loan Planner, where we help people in just 60 minutes out their student loan plan.

Because no student loan plan is equal to your your peers. There are no two that are alike. Yours needs to be customized based on your particular situation. And it, it brings me great joy to be able to do that for people. Yeah, I mean, I've been sending people to Travis and his team. You've probably worked with some of my clients since basically he started because it is a complex topic and there are so many people are eligible for forgiveness and they don't even realize that they are or.

And even if you're not, at least you know for sure now that you've, you know, done your due diligence. I had a client actually a year or two ago. She was, she was older and had like $20,000 in loans. So she. I'm not even sure why she made an appointment with, with. I don't know who was on her team, but I guess maybe I said something and it made her think that maybe she was.

And then she got those $20,000 forgiven. And that was, I mean, that was pretty cool. It's so awesome. Like I said, this work has been extremely gratifying because there's so many different pieces of the puzzle and so many things people don't realize. Same vein as what you're just saying. I had a gentleman the other day, he reached out, he was getting ready to use all the proceeds from selling his home to pay off his student loans.

And he was like, I just wanted to double check before. And thank God he did because he was eligible for immediate forgiveness as well. And so it can literally be life changing. That's not every story. You know, sometimes it's like you gotta pay your loans, sorry to tell your student loan payments going up, or this is your particular path. But not knowing what to do, not knowing how to optimize based on your particular situation can cost you tons and tons of money.

In this case, it would have cost him like $350,000. That's crazy, right? Yeah. Do they ever pay you back if you over. If you overpaid? Just curious. Only if it's pslf. So if you're over the number of payments and you're actively making payments, they will refund you, but in general, no, they will not refund your money. I'm glad I asked. Okay, so first of all, we're have to talk after this because I want to hear all about this Olympic gold stuff that you've been talking about.

So we'll hop the circle back to that later. Okay, so student loans. So there's been a lot of changes with student loans, specifically repayment options. So can you tell us about the SAVE forbearance and define it? Because people are like, what are they even talking about? The save forbearance that ended on August 1st. And what does that mean for borrowers? Yeah, SAVE is the biggest thing that has people kind of up in arms right now, really nervous.

So SAVE is a payment program, an income driven repayment program that about 8 million people chose during COVID President Biden was rolling out all sorts of different programs, waivers and different things to try to help borrowers and try to regroup the department of Education and get things back together. And one of them was save. It was a payment program that was going to give people a much smaller payment than any other income driven plan.

Well, the opposing party said, nope, this is not lawful. They went to court. There has been an injunction placed on the SAVE plan. And as of either June or August of last year, depending on what type of loans you have, if you are on that save program, your loans went into forbearance and you've not made a payment since. Well, they decided that as of August 1st of this year, that interest was going to start to accrue on anybody who had those loans sitting in, say forbearance.

So it's basically like they've been sitting on pause for a whole year. No harm has been done to you. You haven't been earning any credit toward forgiveness, but you also have not been accruing any interest. And so people have just been like, I'll hang out here and wait to see what happens. Well, now they're like, nope, nope, nope, you can stay here if you want on this forbearance, but interest is going to start to accrue and people are like, oh my goodness, I can't let the interest accrue.

I don't want my balance to go up. And so now everybody's like, what do I do? What do I do? And the right answer for most people is to get off of this safe forbearance. 1. They said if you're a physician, a lot of you are eligible for pslf. And if you're going for pslf, you sitting on safe forbearance is not helping you get any closer to that 120 payments that you need.

If you're just going for regular forgiveness, which is usually 25 years on the SAVE program or some of the other income driven repayment programs, you're also not earning any credit toward forgiveness. So now it makes sense to make a decision on like what do I need to do, what other payment plan can I choose so I can continue on the path toward forgiveness? Okay, but it sounds like in general you probably shouldn't stay on the save forbearance anyway.

I would say yeah, there are very few people that should stay on the safe forbearance. I would say if you're in a big like financial crisis. I talked to someone recently, had $40,000 of credit card debt. Their parent was ill. So while their income Was, you know, such that they would like they could warrant them paying off their loans. Their particular, you know, situation right now was not such that they could even be able to pay them.

And so I recommended that she stay and save forbearance for the time being until she can, you know, rectify some of the other life matters that she has going on instead of having to worry about a student loan payment on top of everything else. But in general, yes, you should be moving off of save and onto another payment plan so that you can start to earn credit toward forgiveness.

Okay, all right, so takeaway one fear on safe forbearance. You probably should get off it, get off of it and join another repayment option. Okay, so I feel like every few years is like a new repayment option. And that's sort of what our next question is going to address. So now there is a new income driven repayment plan. Let's talk about that first. Let's talk about what it's called, what the acronym is, and all the things I wanted to say.

Absolutely. Yeah. So it's the RAP plan. It stands for Repayment Assistance Plan. It actually has not fully been unveiled yet. It has only been unveiled via the bill, the obbb, because it's too much to say. And so the way that that one works is going to be income driven as well. It's going to be based on your adjusted gross income. But the way that they calculate is going to be different than all the other payment plans, the previous payment plans.

So pay, save, old ibr, new ibr, icr. I know, it's a bunch of Alphabet soup. We'll get to some of those a little bit later maybe. But those all calculated based on the federal poverty line. This one calculates solely on your adjusted gross income. So let me give you an example. Let's say that you make $120,000 as a physician. They're going to say that's 10% of your AGI or $12,000 a year divided by, you know, 12 months in the year.

Your payment is $1,000 a month. So it's a lot easier to figure out what you're going to pay based on whatever your adjusted gross income is. Previously what they would have done is they would have said, oh, you make 120,000, well, how many people are in your family size? And then they would have taken a certain amount out of that 120,000 and then done a calculation based on 10% of your income.

So there was a lesser payment generally for other payment plans than there will be on the WRAP plan. But the thing that's kind of interesting about it is that they do 1% for every $10,000 that you make. So if you make like 10 to 20 grand, you're going to make, you know, you're going to pay 1% of your AGI. If you make between 20 and 30, you're going to pay 2%.

At the point at which you hit 100,000, you know, you pay 10% of AGI and everybody above that number, which would be applicable to most physicians, you are going to pay at 10% of your adjusted gross income after 30 years, which is a pretty long time. So the other payment plans were 20 or 25 years. So this is a longer time frame. Your loans will be forgiven. If there is anything left over to be forgiven.

It's a lot less likely that there is going to be something to be forgiven because you're paying for so long though. Okay, so a few things. Is this going to replace the 20. So the 20 year plan is PSLF, right? The 25 year plan is the non PSLF. And 30 years also another non PSLF. Is that going to. Is the 30 year replacing the 25 year? So yeah, let's break that down a little bit.

PSLF is a program that you have to meet certain requirements working at a 501c3 or a nonprofit that comes with the requirement of making 120 payments, which is the equivalent of 10 years. Right. You do that while you're on one of these income driven plans, which is save, pay, icr, IBR and now the WRAP plan. And so they all have different time frames. Pay and new IBR are going to be 20 year plans.

And then save and ICR and old IBR are all 25 year plans. And now we have wrap, that's 30. So basically we have 10, we have 20, we have 25 or we have 30. And rap is not replacing any of the plans. It's going to be an addition. However, there are some plans that are going away. Yeah, this is the part where it gets confusing. Right. Because it's like, Right.

It's like this WRAP thing sounds terrible. Why would I ever choose it? That's the first question that came up to me. Came up for me. So first of all, you said it hasn't quite been implemented yet. Right. So you can't actively choose the WRAP plan as of today. So like we just talked about everybody or getting off a save or almost everybody getting off safe. If you go online, you're not going to see WRAP as an Option.

What you will still see as an option is Pay as you earn, which is going away. So that's important to know. Pay as you Earn has the criteria that you borrowed after October 1st of 2007. So if you borrowed loans exclusively after October 1st of 2007, you are eligible for Pay as yous Earn. It is a 20 year plan. It is probably what you need to get on right now, even though it's going away.

And then you can get moved over to either IBR afterward or the RAT plan later. There's also ICR and this one is relevant to physicians that are really high earners right now that are going after pslf. So what happened? What we're seeing a lot of is people who got on SAVE and were doing pslf, they got caught on this plan. So now they haven't earned credit for the last year.

They've got their new attending salary, their income has gone way up and now they're not actually even eligible for the other income driven plans because their income is so high. And so their only option is going to be this ICR plan which is going to calculate based on. It's called like a 12 year standard repayment. That's something we don't have to go down the rabbit hole on. But each payment plan works a little bit different and you have to know which one is going to be relevant to you based on your particular situation.

And like I said, some payment plans are not going to be available to you depending on when you borrow and depending on how much you earn. Yeah. And when do they make you pick a repayment plan? I guess after you finish medical school. Yeah. So generally you'll finish medical school, you'll get six months of a grace period and then you'll have to start repayment. And they'll reach out to you somewhere along the line and say, hey, it's time for you to pick a payment plan.

What do you, you know, what do you want to do? The best thing you can do as a physician if you're going to qualify for public service loan forgiveness, which most of you will be a residency, even if you don't choose to, you know, stay at a public service place once you start your attending work. And so you should consolidate your loans immediately when you get out of medical school because that'll help you get the fast.

Hit the fast forward button to get started on pslf. So generally you'll wait this six months of the grace period. But if you consolidate your loans takes usually about two months, that's four extra months that you can start earning your PSLF credit because you're on a payment plan and you've gotten going. Right. So okay, so we were just talking about students who are graduating and have to pick a plan.

Yeah. So I just remember not knowing what to do. I'm pretty sure I just said forbearance, which was not the right thing to do. But anyway, that's a whole, that's a whole nother story. My loans are gone now, so it doesn't matter what happened. But I wish I knew more about it back then than I, you know. So. Okay, tell us the difference between. Because I think many people assume PSLF is the only 20 year plan.

So you mentioned a non PSLF 20 year plan. I thought that was a 25 year plan. Yeah. So there's pay as you earn and then there is also new IBR. Pay as you earn, as I mentioned, is October 1st of 2007 new IBR. You had to be a new borrower after July 1st of 2014. So those would be some of the newer physicians that you know might even still be.

No, you probably wouldn't still be in residency at this point. You'll be done. But you are a new borrower after July of 2014, you're eligible for the new IBR plan. Both of those are 20 year plans where you pay based on your income. Whatever is left over at the end of those 20 years would be forgiven. But you pay taxes on that forgiven amount. Right. And so they're good plans that are available because you know it's the next best option after PSLF.

So PSLF is 10 years. This new IBR and this pay plan are 20 years. And then the other alternative like you said you mentioned is the 25 year. So that was the repay plan before save and then repay turned into save, which is also a 25 year plan. And then there's the old IBR plan which is kind of like the catch all for everybody who doesn't meet the criteria for one of these other plans I've talked about.

And so the new IBR plan is currently still in existence as is ICR and they are both 25 years you pay on the loans. If there's anything Left over after 25 years, that amount is forgiven. And there's also a tax liability related to that forgiven amount. So what we do as student loan planner is help people know how much they need to be saving for that tax liability if it is relevant to them what that tax liability will be.

And also of course is there going to even be any forgiveness after 20 or 25 years, you know, depending on which payment plan you choose. Okay, before everyone gets confused, I'm a little confused, but which is fine. That's why I send people to you all. But I just want to clarify something. It sounds like technically everyone can get on some kind of repayment plan that has forgiveness, but they might pay it off before they reach forgiveness.

Is that the. Exactly. That's the part, yes. So there are various payment plans that you can choose that are tied to your income. And the way those payment plans work is that if you get to the end and there is something left over, they will forgive it. But there is the possibility that your income is so high that you know, because what they do is that every 12 months they ask you for your income and they increase your payment based on your income going up or they decrease your payment if your income has gone down.

But every 12 months they're asking for your income so they're going to change your payment accordingly. And if your income continues to increase, which that's what we want for most of our life. You know, we want to be able to buy homes and save for retirement and save for our kids education. But every time your income goes up, your payment also goes up. And sometimes that leads to you paying the loans off before there's anything to be forgiven.

The other thing about that though is that it's usually a very inefficient way to pay your loans. Which is why the consultation is so valuable. Because we look at it and we say, hey, you can get on this income driven plan, it's going to cost you $600,000 over the 25 years. Or you can get on a budget, get your get really serious and it could only cost you 400,000 over 10 years and you could pay this off a lot quicker.

Those are the kind of things that we're looking at so that people understand it's not just about your monthly payment, it's about what's most cost efficient based on your particular situation. Yeah. And you guys have fancy spreadsheets and calculators and kind of give them the scenarios and you know, give your advice. Okay, so okay, takeaway two. There's a lot of income driven repayment plans. They all have funny acronyms.

They all have, they're all attached to different possible forgiveness plans that may or may not make sense to you. Was that accurate? Would you say that is accurate? Okay, good. Choose an income driven plan based on what is relevant to your particular situation. Yes. And then the way to figure that out is, well, you can go to Google ChatGPT or you could spend an hour with someone from Student Loan Planner and it includes some email follow up.

Yes, you get three months of email support. So we don't just abandon you after we talk to you for 60 minutes if you have additional questions. We do provide three months of email support so that you can ask your questions via email. The thing that I like about our company is that we're not doing an ongoing service. So you don't pay us monthly or quarterly. You know, we're not trying to just like suck you dry.

We're trying to give you the information you need so that you can feel empowered to take control of your, your student loan situation on your own. Yeah. Okay, so these new changes that are in the bill, even though they haven't, you know, fully been rolled out, are they good or bad? That's what people really want to know, right? It depends. It remains to be seen is really what I'm going to say.

More so than it depends. I think in the short term it's going to be really bad. And so what, what we haven't talked about is what's going to happen for borrowers going forward. There are going to be people entering medical school after July of 2026, and the game changes drastically for them because the borrowing limits have changed. You cannot borrow unlimited amounts of money the way you have been able to up to this point.

And so for physicians, it's quite normal for you all to have, you know, four or five hundred thousand dollars of student loan debt. And now there's a cap on the amount that you can borrow at 200k. And so it's like federal. Right, talking about. Exactly. And so what does that mean? That means that people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds who need, who don't have someone to be able to just like write a check for their medical school are not going to be able to borrow.

Or if they borrow, they're going to borrow from private lenders. So now you have maybe 200k of federal student loan debt and another 200k of private debt. Well, the private debt has no, it's not, no collateral. And so what are they going to do? They're going to give you a bigger interest rate, maybe 13% interest rate on 200k of debt. And so now you're leaving school, you have this really big payment.

You know, you're a resident, you got four years of earning maybe 50 grand, 60 grand a year, and you've got this private debt at 200k. At 13% it's going to be really hard to make those payments. But in the federal system it could be tied to your income and it could be affordable. With the private system, it's the same amount every month. And it doesn't matter how much you earn, doesn't matter if you can afford to pay it or not.

They just want their money. So this is going to put people in a really tough financial situation. So side note, I do remember hearing this and then I heard again. I was just telling Lauren before we hit record that I was in Europe for most of the summer of kind of avoiding the news in general, at least the news in the US and something like the thinking behind this was that because it was so easy to borrow money, that's one of the driving reasons why tuition has just skyrocketed, you know, because people could.

But now when people can't, I mean, I think it is gonna, it'll be interesting. Like you said, it does remain to be seen what happens. Like I was just thinking, so I graduated medical school in 2009. My tuition, this was private, was $40,000. And that same school now, so 10 years later, 10 years, not 30 years, not 40 years later. I think the tuition is actually, let's look it up because I feel like it goes up every year.

I look it up. Yeah, no, it gets unbelievable. And to your point about, you know, yes, there have been unlimited borrowing limits and I think the schools have taken advantage of that and that's why the cost of education has gone up. My hope was, you know, with the question you asked me earlier was like what's going to happen is that they're going to have to adjust the cost of this education because it is just like unheard of.

How much is they're charging for us to be able to get education and get degrees. But I think $80,000. Oh my goodness. Literally double, double in 10 years. I'm not a math major, but I'm pretty sure that's higher than the rate of inflation. Exactly. We could just say yes, yes, Right. I think we could all agree. Right. Anyway, okay, so now that might be true, but that as you said is probably going to hurt a lot of borrowers in the short term who don't have the means.

I, I do feel like, you know, my, my parents were not well off and it was based on my parents income even though I was an older medical student. But they had the financial resources to give scholarships and grants and funding. But not every school, whether it's private or not, has that Sort of ability to do that. Right. And endowments and things like that. Yeah. Depending on, like, who.

Who's giving back to those schools to be able to. To fund those programs. Yeah. So it's going to be more important than ever now going forward for people to find alternative ways to fund their education. Because like I said, the worst alternative is to take on a bunch of private debt where your only option is going to be to pay it back at a really high interest rate.

And so, like you said, my hope is that it's going to cause schools to lower the. The cost of insurance. And yeah, we get back to something that is more affordable for people. But I think in the short term, they're just going to like, push, fight. And if you're not an educated borrower, you're just going to do whatever you got to do. You're. I want to be a doctor and I got to take on whatever I have to.

But the financial implications are worse now than they were previously. Yeah. Okay. Is there anything else you want to say about the. How these changes are going to affect. I think the only other thing we haven't really talked about is kind of like the people who are straddling the middle. So we just talked about new borrowers. If you're a new borrower as of July of 2026, there's a new set of rules.

There's a new set of borrowing limits that you're going to be held to. If you've started to borrow already and you're in the midst of taking, you know, taking your degree or taking out loans for your degree, you will be allowed to continue to take loans to continue your education despite the new limit. So let's say you're not finishing school until 2028. You know, you've already started in 2025.

Like Locked In. Exactly. So you'll be able to continue to borrow what you need. So that's good news for those people who have already started to people who have not started. Exactly. But those people also have not started their payment plans yet. The people who are, you know, actively taking on loans. And so what's going to be available to you once you get out of school as payment plans is going to be a lot less.

You're probably going to be trapped only on the wrap plan. And so that's why it's important to understand how it works and whether or not it's going to warrant any forgiveness. And that will help you negotiate, you know, your first job out. I think that's also going to change Like I said, the overall market, you know, while, you know, depending on what kind of physician you are, you may be earn.

Well, if you have to think about the way you're going to pay back your debt, you may want to negotiate a little bit different salary or different production or, you know, different things like that to help you. Yeah, okay. So everyone's always worried about pslf. Does the bill say anything about it? Are they trying to get rid of it? What's, what's the latest? Yeah, people were really worried that PSLF was going to go away.

There was some talk that they were actually going to put some limits on physicians and dentists specifically. And everybody was all up in arms and it was like residency wasn't going to count for PSLF for you all. But none of that made it into the bill. So PSLF is safe. And your profession. Right, your profession particular is also safe. There have been no changes to pslf. Like I said, there's less payment plans.

That's going to be a thing. So like I said, save is going away, pay is going away, ICR is going away. You're basically going to be limited to Ibrahim or the new wrap plan going forward, which is, like I said, could probably result in a higher payment than before, but will still result in you getting public service loan forgiveness. So you just need to be mindful of what exists and then what your payment is going to look like.

Yeah, okay. All right, so of those people listening right now to this podcast, who would you say? And obviously every situation is different. As you said, who are the borrowers? Like, describe the person who should be sort of paying the most attention. Meaning, like, who's going to be the most affected and, like, who should consider scheduling a consult? I think the people that are going to be most affected are people that are going to be future borrowers.

So the 2026 going forward, there's a lot of limbo. We still don't have all of the details of the obbb, but we do know, like you said, those borrowing limits are going into place. And so you need to start getting creative about how you're going to pay for your debt or pay for your education. And then the second group would be, like I said, if you're the straddler, understanding where am I going to land as far as payment plans and how do I need to govern myself accordingly?

But the people that I think are most effectively still the biggest number of student loan borrowers that we have right now is everybody who's already taken out their loans and have already started repayment, you're stuck on save, get off of it. You're not stuck on save. Great. But understand whether or not plan is going away because if you're on ICR or pay, understand that it will be going away soon and that you're going to have to move to IBR in order to continue to pursue forgiveness.

And you also need to understand whether or not you're going to get forgiveness because you might have been on pay and it was going to give you forgiveness because it was a 20 year plan. And now that pay is going away, the only option available to you is going to be the old IBR plan. So what does that mean? Oh, we've tacked on five more years because it's a 25 year plan.

The old IBR plan where you were just now planning to only pay your loans for 20 years. Five more years of paying at a physician salary could be that thing that says you're not going to get forgiveness anymore because you got to pay for five more years. That five years later in life is when your earnings are much higher. And so maybe you thought you were a shoo in for forgiveness and now you no longer are because of the payment plan that you were on and the payment plan, you're not going to stay locked into the payment plan you're on.

Is that what you're saying? You're not getting grandfathered in to pay? Okay. And when is pay go away? Do we have a date? Ish. So they've said July 26th. July of 2026 is when they were going to start implementing the changes until July of 2028, which is a very broad time frame. Right. Oh, so they're not really sure we got two year. Okay. They don't know what they're doing.

So what do you think those people should be doing? The ones who are on pay and are were planning to do 20 year forgiveness? I think you need to update your plan because yeah, if you're, there's some people that are on pay that are eligible for new IBR which is the exact same thing as pay. And if you're eligible for new ibr, that doesn't change your plan. You just need to switch over to new IBR and get off of pay.

But if you're eligible for pay and you're not eligible for new ibr, they're going to move you to the old ibr and so that's going to be a big difference. That's the difference I just described. You're moving from a 20 year plan to a 25 year plan, you're moving from 10% of income to 15% of income. And so that's the person that needs to get a consultation to understand whether there's still going to be any forgiveness because they might have thought there was going to be forgiveness and now no longer.

That is the case based on what's happening and what's going to be available to them. What are the qualifications for new versus old IBR? New IBR comes with a qualification of you borrowed exclusively after July 1st of 2014. Old IBR, everybody is eligible for pay as you earn. You borrowed exclusively after October 1st of 2007. So let me give an example of a person you borrowed in October of 2009.

That was when you started school, that's after 2007, but it's before July of 2014. So you are eligible for pay as you earn. You are not eligible for new ibr. So you could be on new pay as you earn. I mean you could be on pay as you earn right now. And then they're going to move you to the old IBR plan, which is now, like I said, a 25 year plan, 15% of income.

There's also somebody that may be borrowed in 2015 for the first time ever. Well, they're eligible for pay as yous Earn and new ibr. They may have chose pay as you earn just because like, what's the difference? They, you know, they didn't know. You don't want to stay on pay as you earn. You're going to want to switch to new IBR and thank goodness you're, you're, you're able to choose between the two.

Not everybody can choose the new AB ibr. Sorry, they can move to the old or the new ivr. Everybody can move to old ibr. Everyone can move to old. Okay, Only certain people can move to new. That's July 1st of 2014. Some people are eligible for new IBR and pay. And so if you're on pay and you're eligible for new ibr, you should move to that. But if you're not eligible for new IBR and you're on pay, then you're going to have to get on old ibr.

Okay, I know everyone's like, what are they freaking talking about here? What is going on? Just book a consultation, we'll figure it out. I mean I'm not, and I'm not just saying that, but like it can be confusing and like we were talking offline beforehand. Like people don't know what they don't know, and like, you just want to make sure you're not overpaying anything and also making sure you're looking into every, like making sure that you aren't eligible for forgiveness before, let's say refinancing, for example.

So there's, there's just so many nuances. And yeah, a long time ago I threw in my hat and trying to like, keep up with student loan. This is even before all the pandemic stuff. It was a lot less complicated before then. And I was like, I can't keep up with this stuff. And so I, you know, I'm all about hiring the right people, like your financial team, you know, so whether that's having a financial planner, an accountant, tax person, etc.

But like all these experts are, are critical parts of the team because I've had so many clients that whether they got $20,000 forgiveness or 3 to 400k forgiveness, and then there's paperwork involved and you know how people feel about paper, at least how I feel about paperwork, it doesn't get done usually. And so there are so many nuances. So we'll, we'll post a link on how to contact them.

I know that my, if you go to the show notes, it'll be there, but it's wealthymomd.com SLP which stands for Student Loan Planner. And when you use my link, I believe that you do get a special rate and some addition email support time as well. $100 off, right? And then maybe you could hang out with Lauren and talk to her about Olympics. Absolutely. I think you bring up a really good point, Bonnie too, about like hiring an expert for the things that the experts are good at.

You know, accountant for taxes, a physician when you're sick. You know, we talked about, we joked about chat GBT earlier, but there you'd be surprised the number of people who are counting on things like that for their medical advice. And unfortunately, while that thing is smart, it's not smarter than the person who's gone to school for four years of residency, two years of fellowship, and now is attending and looking at this each and every day.

It might be helpful to give you some information, but it's not going to give you everything you know, you need to know. And we got a perfect example of this the other day. A gentleman said that he found her services via ChatGPT, got on the call and, you know, had just. ChatGPT had told him everything. He was basically booking this as a formality. And it was completely wrong what ChatGPT said.

Just flat out wrong. He was thinking that he was going to get forgiveness in like two years and he had 17 years more to go until forgiveness. He had just started with public service loan forgiveness one year before and thought that he could get his forgiveness in two years for that as well. He was just completely confused about what was going on. And so I bring it up to say that while we have all these new technical advances and, and they can help us educate ourselves, we should still depend on real people and real professionals who are like, counting on, who are doing this on a daily basis and have developed their expertise.

I'm not going to chatgpt if I feel sick. I'm going to the doctor. Yeah, I think it's good for education. I will tell you the few times I've had it. Do some math computations. For me, it's always been wrong. And then I'll say, that's not right. And you're like, oh, yeah, you're right. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm like, dude, why am I using you for math? So I actually, the honestly, like, I would say most of the time it's actually been making mistakes or just forgot to like, you know, I'll say do this, do that, and it'll like, skip a step.

So I just think it's important to know that because I think it can be really easy to believe that whatever it's saying is true, especially for something like student loans, and think like, okay, I double checked and it's fine, it might be right. But I just feel like this is the type of thing that you do not want to get wrong. And like you mentioned earlier about that guy who was about to pay off his student loans with proceeds from selling his house versus getting forgiveness.

And it was multiple six figures. So, like, I mean, that's what's at stake, you know. So, like, you know, spend an hour, send them your stuff, and then you have peace of mind. That's how I think about it. That peace of mind is worth it. So, all right, is there. I know we've talked about a lot of stuff. What do you want people to take away besides you know, hiring someone from your team if they want professional help?

But let's try to just do the TLDR version of what we've talked about so far. Yeah. I would say the biggest thing that is important is that you don't stick your head in the sand. Your finances are important. Student loans are a piece of your financial puzzle, as is your taxes, your insurance, your estate planning, your investments, your retirement. All of these different pieces of the puzzle work together so that you can have the life that you want.

Money is a tool to help you live the life you want. We don't want you spending a dollar more than you need to on these student loans and ignoring them and pretending like they don't exist or just kind of, you know, pushing the, the. The thing down the road and saying like, hey, I don't need to worry about this right now, is. Could be the most costly thing that you do.

So while it is hard, I know you're busy. It is not fun no matter what you choose, Whether it's listening to more podcasts, reading a blog, making your own student loan plan. It doesn't have to involve hiring us. You need to do something. Now is not the time to do nothing because a lot of changes are happening and they will affect the way that you can optimize your finances.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks so much for being here and for educating us, and I'm really grateful to have you and Travis on my. I would say. I was gonna say team. We don't work together, but just like, as a trusted, you know, a trusted resource. Absolutely. I said we love the work we do. We take a lot of pride in it. And so we are happy to share as much as we can to help people feel empowered and the confidence they need to.

To. To be able to tackle their student loan situation. Yeah. Awesome. So once again, if you are interested in learning more about the company or booking, using my link where you do get $100 off an additional email support time, it's wealthymomd.com forward slash. All right, Lauren, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Bonnie. Hey there. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

And if you're listening to this on Apple podcast, I'd love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome, and it will help women find this podcast so they too can live a well life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I [email protected] See you next week.