Hi All,

I am glad I found this forum.

I am in the PSLF and have been for going on 4 years. I submit the annual Employment Certification every September. Because I am the music director for a church. I include a letter every year that explains how 90% of my work is secular. This works.

I expect to be working at the same church for at least another decade. What are pros and cons of submitting this every year? A big part of me says to wait until the tenth year and just submit one final EC. That’s 6 less chances for a screw up.

Thoughts?

Kyle

Pros:
-Ensure that your payments are counting. You do not want to wait until the final payment only to learn that your last 6 years of payments did not count.
-Ensure that you and fedloan servicing agree on how many payments you’ve made. If you think you’ve made 12, but they only count 11 for the past year, you have the time to fight for a correct number (it took me a few months for the ombudsman to come through and fix my payments to an accurate number)
-It gives you evidence in case another servicer takes over the loan and you have to fight with them to get them to count the same number of payments. I don’t expect it to leave Fedloan servicing, but many had issues when their loans were transferred from Direct Loans to Fedloan Servicing.
-It gives you evidence in case they suddenly say that music directing at a church does not count any more. Having the documents showing that they’ve accepted the payments in the past gives you a stronger case to fight it.

Cons:
-Tedious to fill out every year
-Not sure, but I guess it’s possible for someone to key in the number wrong and you’d have to fight for accuracy, but to me it’s not that big of a concern because you have the time to fight it if they do. I’d prefer to do that in order to have peace of mind that my payments are in their books.

My advice: you don’t have to do it annually, but I would recommend doing it regularly just to have a paper trail.

Thanks Hart,

I haven’t done it yet this year, and it is tedious, but I suppose I’ll keep filling them out. I DO feel secure having three approvals on file already. It would be great if others chimed in on this question.

Kyle