Heather,

Thank you for being such a great resource for student loan borrowers.  We recently discovered the married filing separately option to qualify for income based repayment earlier this year and just switched to IBR. 

My wife has been working in qualifying positions for PSLF for the last 4 years.  However, when she graduated, she consolidated her loans under a 30-year payment plan.  We then made additional payments on her loans each month for the last 4 years so that they would be paid off within 10 years.  Each payment was at least as much as the 10-year repayment plan would have been.  When she filed PSLF paperwork recently, they did not count any of our previous payments because she was not technically on the 10-year repayment plan.  Is there any way to qualify under some kind of substantially equivalent clause?

Thanks again for all of your help!

You may want to look at the payment plans that are eligible for PSLF. I don’t think that the 30-year payment plan is one of them (just my informal opinion based on the link).

https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/charts/public-service#what-is-a-qualifying

Income-driven repayments plans or “Other PSLF-qualifying repayment plans are the 10-Year Standard Repayment Plan or any other repayment plan where your monthly payment amount equals or exceeds what you would pay under a 10-Year Standard Repayment Plan. “