Hello,

Thank you for this forum, I have a potentially unique question that I couldn’t find information on in my reading of the federal student loan forgiveness program.

My wife has a number of student loans that qualify for the program in varying amounts. $10 thousand here, $25 thousand there, about 6 different loans. She is current going for her PhD so the loans are in deferment and will be for the next few years. But she also took up a job at a non profit which would qualify for this program.

It would likely be unmanageable to pay all of the payments on all of the loans at this time, but she would be able to make full payments on some on the loans.

Does the student loan forgiveness qualify each specific loan separately? So if she chose to keep 4 of the loans in deferment, but made full normal payments on 2 of the loans, and did this for 120 payments while employed at a non profit, would those 2 individual loans then qualify for forgiveness while the other 4 would still be on the books?

This would allow her to pay $100-200/month instead of $500/month and still reap major benefits in the long run.

Thank you.

All very good questions. Are any of the loans in repayment status?
Each loan has it’s own clock so to speak. So in theory, I believe your plan would work. When you start submitting the PSLF sheets, you’ll get a listing of all your loans and each loan has a number beside it telling you how many qualifying payments you have made towards that loan. Each loan also has it’s own due date as well. You might have issues trying to get your loan servicing company to understand what you are trying to do, and there’s a good chance they’ll botch it up. You’d have to specify in writing that only certain loans should be in deferment while the others are in repayment status. You’ll have to waive the grace period if you want your payments to start counting immediately, and I’m not sure if waiving the grace period for some of your loans will waive it for all of your loans…something you’d have to look into. AND, you’d have to make sure that when you sign up for IBR or PAYE that they don’t remove all of your loans from deferment status and place them all in repayment. I would think it’s possible and should be easy, but as you can tell I have very little faith in them getting it right. Should you want to go this route, don’t get a lowly service rep to do this for you. Either do it in writing or ask to speak to a manager and have them do it for you. I’ve had multiple instances of low level reps telling me one thing and doing another. It’s horrible. And always monitor your account! Also, if you have multiple loans with multiple servicing companies, sending in a PSLF form will cause all qualifying loans to transfer to Fedloan servicing, and you might get a month or two of disruption (which is why I think doing it this way may potentially open a can of worms). You might suddenly realize that after the transfer, they’ve placed all your loans in repayment status, and want you to pay immediately on all of them, thus leading to a nightmare of validating in school status, etc.

Thank you very much, I appreciate your timely reply.

It sounds like it is possible to start payment under this program with one loan while continuing to defer others.

One last question, while reading material yesterday I read conflicting statements about which loans are allowable under this program and which are not. My initial research said that only “Direct Loans” are eligible and that Stafford loans are not. It is confusing to tell which loans are “Direct” and allowable and which are not since all Stafford loans on record also say “Direct” and other loans seem to use abbrivations that may or may not mean “Direct”. Looking at these names from FedLoan, are you able to quickly tell me if all, none, or some of these loans qualify?

These are the names directly from the FedLoan website View Loan Details:

Direct Unsub Stafford Loan
Direct Unsub Stafford Loan
DI Special Consol Unsub Loan
DI Spec Consol Subcns Loan
DI Special Consol Uncns Loan
Direct Unsub Stafford Loan
Direct Sub Stafford Loan
Direct Unsub Stafford Loan

I quite sure all of these qualify. I had to go to the NSLDS website and look up all my loans. Some said Direct Unsub Stafford Loan, and others said Unsub Stafford Loan. The keyword was direct. If you have a direct loan, you are good to go. I was unfamiliar with DI Special Consolidated loan, but upon reading up on it, it looks like it was a special consolidation opportunity in 2012 and does indeed qualify as it is a direct loan. I’m unsure what DI Special Consol Uncns loan is…..does that mean “unconsolidated”?