federal student aid · web viewwe do have some staff online who are here to answer some of the...

PSC-ED-FSA-TISDModerator: Christal Simms

12-01-16 3:37 pm CTConfirmation # 1642549

PSC-ED-FSA-TISD

Moderator: Christal SimmsDecember 1, 2016

3:37 pm CT

Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants will be

on a listen-only mode throughout the duration of today’s conference. Please

(unintelligible) that this call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you

may disconnect at this time.

And now I would like to turn the call over to Ms. Jessica Barrett Simpson.

You may now begin.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: Hello. Welcome to our webinar on the Public Service Loan

Forgiveness program. My name is Jessica Barrett Simpson. I work in the U.S.

Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid and our Customer

Experience Office.

My work focuses on student loans, the borrower experience and it includes

outreach efforts such as this to make sure that our borrowers are aware of the

repayment options in the programs such as the Public Service Loan

Forgiveness program.



I’m joined by another presenter this evening, who I will turn over to, to

introduce herself as well.

Woman 1: Hello everyone. My name is (unintelligible). I also work with Federal Student

Aid, but I work in the Direct Loan Servicing unit. In my position, I work with

pretty much servicers and specifically the PSLF services which is FedLoan

Servicing to help them implement requirements to improve their operations

and also communications relative to PSLF. I’ve been with the department for

about two years. But previously I worked at a four-year institution for a little

over 10 years as a financial aid administrator.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: Before we get started on the presentation I wanted to point out that

the PowerPoint slides for this webinar are in the top left of your screen and it

can be downloaded. There is also a chat box for you to ask your questions.

You can ask questions either during the presentation or you can hold them to

the end.

We do have some staff online who are here to answer some of the questions

during the webinar, but if we don’t get to them, we will have time for

questions-and-answers at the end.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program was created by the College

Cost & Reduction Access Act in 2007. The purpose of the program is to

ensure that students who take out student loans to get an education are not

deterred from public service because of their debt.

The program provides forgiveness of the total balance of your student loans

after working in a public service for 10 years. There are some very specific

definitions, however, who is eligible for the program. The PSLF program

forgives the remaining balance on your direct loans after you’ve made a 120



qualifying monthly payments under Qualifying Repayment Plan by working

for a full - working full-time for a qualifying employer.

So I just said the word qualifying three times. We’re going to spend a little bit

time unpacking that and focusing in the beginning of this webinar on

eligibility. So we’ll start out talking about how you qualify for Public Service

Loan Forgiveness and then we’re going to do some sample calculations to

show you how to calculate how much you might pay under different

repayment plans and how to calculate how much you might potentially have

forgiven on your loans under the program.

Then we’ll briefly touch on other types of student loan forgiveness such as

Teacher Loan Forgiveness and talk about how that might work with the Public

Service Loan Forgiveness program. And then we’ll do a summary wrap-up

and we’ll answer some of your questions.

So we’ll start first with eligibility. To be eligible, you need to make 120

qualifying payments on direct loans on the Qualifying Repayment Plan and by

working full-time for a qualifying employer. We’re going to delve into the

aspect of eligibility and we’re going to start with direct loans.

So, only direct loans are eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. If you

borrowed federal student loans after 2011, you would have Direct Loans. This

includes Direct Subsidized, Unsubsidized, PLUS Loans or Consolidation

Loans. If you borrowed prior to 2011, you may have what we call Federal

Loans and both Federal and Perkins Loans can be consolidated into the Direct

Loan program in order to be eligible.



So you might be wondering what kind of loans do I have, I’m not really sure.

You can either check with your loan servicer or you can logon to

studentaid.gov.

On the right hand of the slide you can see a screenshot of what displays on the

studentaid.gov and you can see that this particular borrower has two Direct

Loans and four Fed loans.

So if you were - (unintelligible) and you wanted to qualify for the Public

Service Loan Forgiveness program, you might consider consolidating your

loans into the direct loan program. By doing that it would make all of your

loans direct and all of them will be eligible for PSLF.

There are some pros and cons to consolidation and we’re not going to get into

detail in - about what those are here. But you can learn more on our websites

or by calling the Loan Consolidation Information Center. One thing that we

want to point out is that it is free to consolidate your loans. You do not have to

pay a fee. And to do a loan consolidation, you can do that on the

studentloans.gov website.

So next we’re going to talk about Qualifying Repayment Plans. There were

five repayment plans that qualify; four of these are what we call Income

Driven Repayment plans. And that means that your monthly payment will be

tied to your income.

You could make payments on the 10-year Standard Repayment plan or on any

plan that is equal or greater to that amount. Those payments would also

qualify towards Public Service Loan Forgiveness. But you need to be on an

income-driven payment plan if you want to have some amount to be forgiven

at the end of the 10-years. If you repaid your plans on a 10-year standard



repayment plan they will be paid off in 10-years and there will be no balance

left to forgive.

So when you first go into repayment, you’re automatically put on a 10-year

Standard Repayment plan. That means that the amount that you pay that first

month that you go into repayment, that’s the same amount that you’re paying

10-years later for your final payment.

And for some people that doesn’t work well, because if you just thought of

school and you maybe have an internship or a low paying job when you first

get out of school, you don’t have as much income to put towards your student

loans as you do 10-years later when hopefully you have a better paying job

and you’re in a more financially stable position.

So the purpose of some of these income-driven repayment programs is to

make your monthly payment more affordable and to tie it to the percentage of

your income. So if you don’t make a decision when you first (unintelligible)

payment, you’re automatically put on a 10-year standard.

There are some plans that you can switch to without filling out an application.

You can just call up your loan servicer, you can request to have graduated

repayments, so your balance - your monthly payment starts out being low and

then it gets higher as time goes on or extended repayments which would lower

your payment, but you pay more interest overtime. But for income-driven

repayment plan, you do have to fill out an application. And as with

consolidation you would fill out the application on studentloans.gov.

If you’re consolidating your plans and applying for income-driven repayment,

you would want to consolidate your loans first. Once you’re in an income-

driven repayment plan, you would need to recertify your income and family



size every year. You will submit the same application each year to see. If your

income goes up then your payment would go up, if your income goes down

then your payment would also go down.

The third aspect of qualification for Public Service Loan Forgiveness in

addition to the types of loans and the type of repayment plans is the type of

employer. You don’t qualify for this program based on your jobs; it’s based

on your employer. So your employer must be either a government

organization, a 501(c)(3) or another not-for-profit organization that provides

specific qualifying services.

So here are some examples of other not-for-profit employers that will qualify.

It can’t be a labor organization or a partisan political organization, has to be

the one providing public services. (Tunika) is going to talk in a few minutes

about how to be sure that your employer does qualify by submitting their

Employment Certification Form.

But that’s often the question that we get when people look at some of these

lists, they’re not really sure what categories that their employer falls into. And

the way that you can figure that out for sure and then get confirmation about

that is the (unintelligible) and Employment Certification Form.

About 61% of our borrowers who have submitted one of those forms work for

a government agency, either federal, state or local, and another 38% work for

the 501(c)(3) not-for-profit.

Your employer - employment must also be full-time. If you’re only working

for one employer, full-time is defined as either your employer’s definition or

30 hours per week whatever is greater. If you’re working part-time for more



than one qualifying employer, full-time means a combined total of at least 30

hours per week.

If you work at a nonprofit organization that has part of the time spent on

religious instruction, worship services or pathologizing, the hours spent on

those activities don’t count towards those 30 hours.

So now that we’ve gone through the three required qualifications; the type of

loans, the type of repayment plan and the type of employer. If you meet those

three qualifications, you then need to make qualifying payments. And this is

what we mean by qualifying payments. To receive forgiveness on your loans,

you have to make 120 separate monthly payments.

After October 1st, 2007 when the program became available, these payments

do not need to be consecutive. If you take some time in between if your loans

are in different (unintelligible), they don’t - the payments don’t have to be one

after another.

They must be made for the full amount that is due for the month and made

within 15 days of the due date, so late payments do not count as qualifying

payments.

If you make partial payments, they only count as one payment. If you make a

payment when it’s not required that doesn’t count. The separate payment

requirement does not apply on some instances for borrowers in the

AmeriCorp, the PeaceCorp or the Department of Defense may apply a lump

sum to their student loans.



So now I’m going to turn the presentation over to (Tunika) who will explain

to you how to calculate your potential loan forgiveness and then how to

navigate the process.

Woman 1: Okay. So first I’m going to talk about if you’re interested in just seeing what

sort of payments you would have under income-driven repayments or under

the other traditional plans like the 10-year standards.

The best thing that you can do is go to the repayment estimator. This is

basically an online calculator that is available with studentaid.gov, it’s also

available on studentloans.gov and it can tell you how much you’re going to

pay under those different repayment plans. And also more importantly it’s

going to give you an estimate on how much forgiveness you will be eligible to

receive.

New to the repayment estimator are actual calculations for a Public Service

Loan Forgiveness. When you go into the estimator, it’s fairly easy. You can -

you just answer questions regarding your eligible loan. You put in information

if you want estimates on income-driven repayments regarding your tax value

status, your income and your residence. And if you hit Public Service Loan

Forgiveness, the below button that you see that circled on there, it’s going to

give you an estimate.

We’re going to go to the next slide. So next we have our sample borrower

(unintelligible) into a tally. And when you go into the repayment estimator,

you can either login using your SSA ID or you can go in as a guest. So this

particular borrower has all their information, they’re going to login using SSA

ID and you see that they have their total loan balance of just $65,500, $23,000

of that is Subsidized Direct Loans and $42,500 is Unsubsidized Direct Loans.



They know their interest rate for their loans and so I keep this simple. We

have the interest rate at 4.5%. They’re single, so their family size is only one

and their income is 40,000.

Now the repayment estimator does make some assumptions when you sign

into it and one of those assumptions is that your income will be increasing at

5% each year and then the borrower would also put in their residence and so

this borrower is Washington D.C.

So when you enter this information into the repayment estimator, it’s going to

pull out information about all of the repayment plans and that includes your

traditional plans like your standard or graduated plan. But also if you put in

information about your income in a balance status and family size, then it’s

going to give you estimates (unintelligible) income-driven repayment plans

such as REPAYE, IBR, ICR and PAYE.

So the interesting thing is if you look at the calculations as for instance on the

standard repayment plan that as Jessica stated we know qualifies for Public

Service Loan Forgiveness instead of the 10-year plan you wouldn’t receive

any sort of forgiveness, so that’s why that dollar amount is zero.

But when you look down and look at the other income-driven repayment plan

such as REPAYE or PAYE, you see that under the Public Service Loan

Forgiveness column there was a significant amount of this borrower’s loan

that’s going to be forgiven after that borrower makes the required 120

qualifying payments.

So next, after going into the repayment estimator, you probably want to know

what the PSLF process is and how you would know if you’re eligible for

Public Service Loan Forgiveness. So as stated before, to know if you’re on



track you need to know what your qualifying loans are and if you have

qualifying loans, if you’re on a qualifying repayment plan such as income-

driven repayments and if you’re working at a qualifying employer.

So to do these things and to figure out if they’re (unintelligible) for that, the

best thing that you can do is submit an Employment Certification Form to

ensure that you’re on track to receive loan forgiveness and to confirm that

your employment and the payments that you’ve been making on your direct

loans qualify.

So this is a shot of half of the first page of the Employment Certification

Form. And it’s actually a fairly simple form as well. It’s about two pages. The

first page has had biographical information that you’re going to be entering

and then it also had some authorizations, understandings and certifications just

so you understand as that (unintelligible) PSLF program is and that you’re

required to make a 120 qualifying payments in order to receive forgiveness.

The second page of the form involves your employer completing some

information about your employment or you just submit to the public service

loan servicer FedLoan Servicing.

So when your employer completes the form, they’re going to be filling out

information regarding where you work, what’s your employment status is,

whether you’re working full-time or if you’re working part-time. And whether

you – one of those qualifying categories, whether you work at a government

organization, whether you’re working at a nonprofit organization that falls

into those qualifying categories or whether you work at a 501(c)(3).

Then your certifying official would need to sign the form, they (unintelligible)

their contact information on it and then that form needs to be faxed or mailed



to FedLoan Servicing for them to make an evaluation in terms of your

eligibility.

So when the PSLF service, they receive let’s say close to about 21,000 of

these forms a month, they will do some common mistakes. So one of the

common mistakes is that authorizing officials or the person that you have

completing this form for you, sometimes they forget to check a still employed

box just to show that you’re continuing work at this organization or some of

the identifying information such as the employer TIN number. So just make

sure when that’s being completed, when you provide that your employer that

all the required items are completed.

So next is a really colorful slide is the PSLF Employment Certification

Process. So the first thing that you will do is actually get your employer to

complete their section of the form. You’re going to submit this form to

FedLoan Servicing. And FedLoan Servicing, they’re going to do a couple of

things first. First, they’re going to evaluate the loans for completeness and

then they’re going to check to make sure that you have qualifying direct loan.

If, for instance, you turn in the form and you only have PEL loan, what they

will do is they will reach out to you, send you a letter letting you know that for

instance they checked your loans, you only have PEL and they will give you

options in terms of consolidating your loan into a Direct Consolidation Loan.

Suppose if you turn in the form and they determine that your employment

qualifies, then the first thing that they’re going to do is transfer your loans to

FedLoan Servicing if you’re not – if that’s not currently your servicer.

Generally they will process from receiving the form to determining if you

have direct loans to evaluating whether that your employment qualifies, it

takes about seven business days. So it’s not very long.



They will send you notification to let you know that they’ve done an initial

evaluation and your employment qualifies and then they will explain to you

the process (unintelligible) currently with FedLoan Servicing.

Then after they transfer your loans over and that process could take anywhere

from let’s say three to four weeks. Then they’ll actually go through all of your

borrower history for everything that coincides with the qualifying service that

you have in your Employment Certification Form to count all of your

qualifying payment during that period.

And that process, that can take some time depending on how long you’ve been

with your employer. If it’s not very long, it can take anywhere from two

weeks to about let’s say about a month for them to do those counts. It just

depends where you are in the process and how long you waited until you

turned in your Employment Certification Form.

Then after that point they’ll send you a letter and it will tell you that you’re

approved, it will give you your (unintelligible) qualify and it will

(unintelligible) how to check this information on online.

Then the process starts all over again. And we always tell borrowers that you

want to submit an Employment Certification Form annually if you can or

whenever your employment changes, just to make sure that you’re on track to

receive forgiveness after making that 120 qualifying payments. It is not

required that you do the Employment Certification Form annually, but it is

strongly recommended.

So after you do your - you’ve been doing your Employment Certification

Forms and you know you’ve made that 120 qualifying payments, the most



important question is when is your loan actually going to be forgiven. And the

PSLF application is currently under development and it’s going to be

available prior to October 2nd, 2017 which is the earliest state that any

borrower will be able to receive Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

Unlike IBR forgiveness, Public Service Loan Forgiveness in order to receive

it, you would have to do a PSLF application. And the PSLF application that is

being developed would have an employment certification form combined with

it so you would (unintelligible) employment and do that application and then

Fed loans with the process eligible law where they have their loans written

off.

One of the important things that you should remember about receiving PSLF

is that you need to be working at a qualified public service organization at the

time that you submit the PSLF application and you need to remain working

there until your loans are actually forgiven.

And one of the biggest benefits at PSLF is that any of the loans that are

written off, they’re not considered income by the Internal Revenue Service.

Therefore you’re not going to have to pay any federal tax from the amount of

your direct loans that are forgiven after you make that a 120 qualifying

payment.

So if you remember back to the sample borrowing we had, that borrower had

about close to $60,000, a little over $60,000 worth of loans that will be written

off and that’s not something that they would have to consider as income for

the IRS. So it’s a really huge benefit if you’re able to qualify for PSLF.

So next I want to talk about other types of student loan forgiveness. And

probably the - another big program is Teacher Loan Forgiveness and this is



for anybody that’s considering going into teaching or someone that actually is

currently a teacher. This is for full-time highly qualified teachers who are

going to teach for five years and that’s going to be complete in consecutive

academic years. And it’s for certain elements in secondary school or

educational service agencies that is serving low income families.

The amount of money you receive for Teacher Loan Forgiveness varies

depending on the subject thought. But the one benefit of Teacher Loan

Forgiveness is it does apply to direct loan and FED loan. And I know as we’ve

stated before, PSLF is only for direct loans.

So great thing about Teacher Loan Forgiveness is it’s something that you’re

able to qualify for is that it can be used as PSLF. It’s just that payments that

you make during the service resulting in Teacher Loan Forgiveness wouldn’t

count towards the 120 payments required for PSLF. And there is also an

application for Teacher Loan Forgiveness that needs to be submitted if you

want to receive that $5,000 to $17,500 off of your loan.

So the next slide just shows you different types of student loan forgiveness.

As we’ve talked about before, Teacher Loan Forgiveness which is where you

have to do five years of service to receive up to $17,500 off of your loan.

Then the next we’ve been discussing during this webinar which is Public

Service Loan Forgiveness where you have to make 120 qualifying payments

and qualifying employment with your qualifying loans. And then the other

two are income-driven repayment plans and we have that listed twice for 20

years or 25 years. And that difference in term has to do with what type of

income-driven plan that you go into. So if you’re doing repay and you only

have undergraduate loans it will be 20 years, if you had graduate you need 25.



The other big difference with income-driven repayment plans versus PSLF

and Teacher Loan Forgiveness is that the loans that are forgiven for IBR are

still taxable by the IRS. So even though it’s considered in this program or it’s

something that you get forgiveness for, that loan that still would have to -

accounted as income for the IRS firmly.

And this is the last slide for Teacher Loan Forgiveness and PSLF and this is

just showing that these two loan forgiveness programs can work together. If

you’re a teacher it just - your full forgiveness wouldn’t occur until 15 years,

because you’d have to do your first five for teacher loan forgiveness and the

next 10 for PSLF.

And generally if you have high loan balances, this is something that would

really benefit potential teachers who’re going to be staying in their field or

continuing to do work in a qualifying nonprofit to receive that sort of

forgiveness after the 10-year term.

So our next slide is just our cautionary warning (unintelligible) student loan

debt release companies or third party debt release companies. And just to

remember that if you’re ever asked to pay for any service whether it’s

applying for income-driven repayment or doing any sort of recertification or

applying for loan consolidation or any of the forgiveness programs whether

it’s Teacher Loan Forgiveness or a Public Service Loan Forgiveness, these are

all free and you should not have to pay for them.

So always be aware of any companies that are charging a monthly fee to do

these services or that are going to charge filing fees to do these services. If

you ever want to report a suspicious activity regarding those companies or

you’ve been contacted or even if you had to pay something to do one of those



free applications, you can report that suspicious activity to

studentaid.gov/feedback.

So we’re going to wrap - reiterate some of the things that we discussed during

this webinar. So the most important thing is to make sure that if you’re

interested in PSLF is that you want to check your loan types and repayment

plans to see if they’re eligible for PSLF. You can do that through

studentaid.gov or you can go to NSLDS.

If you have federal loans and again these are generally if you received loans

prior to 2011, you want to consider consolidating them into Direct Loan

Programs to make them eligible for PSLF. And you can check up the pros and

cons of consolidating your federal loans on studentaid.gov.

If you’re not on an income-driven repayment plan, you definitely want to

consider switching to one to qualify for PSLF. And as we saw previously, to

be able to make payments based on your income and then have that loan debt

forgiven at 10-years is a huge benefit.

After you have done a repayment estimator and you see how much you could

be forgiven after 120 month of qualifying payments, you want to go ahead and

submit an Employment Certification Form to confirm that your employer

qualifies. And the Employer Certification Form is also available on

studentaid.gov or you can go to studentloans.gov to receive that form.

FedLoan Servicing which is a PSLF servicer, they would tell you how many

qualifying payments you have made and when you can expect loan

forgiveness. And they will do that after receiving the Employment

Certification Form and validating all the information that you put on that form

is correct and that you’re eligible.



And then again although it’s not required, you want to try and submit your

Employment Certification Form annually or when you’re - whenever your

employment changes. And then since you’re going to be doing an income-

driven repayment plan to really receive the benefit of the PSLF, you are going

to make sure that you recertify your income and family size for that income-

driven repayment program.

In terms of IBR, recertifying is required so that’s something you would have

to do to make sure that you stay in the IBR program where submitting the

Employment Certification Form is you don’t have - you’re not required to do

that.

So the next slide are resources and I know we said (and also mentioned) those

studentaid.gov is really the best place to get informational - information about

the Public Service Loan Forgiveness or income-driven repayments.

You can do the repayment estimator through their (unintelligible) information

on consolidation; I mean also learn information on Teacher Loan Forgiveness.

You decide that you want to apply, well you can pull that form off of

studentaid.gov and if you want to apply for income-driven repayments, you

can do that with studentloans.gov.

We also included a link for myfedloan.org and that is the PSLF servicer. And

you can also go to their page. They have a lot of information on Public

Service Loan Forgiveness and they also have their phone number, you can call

them even if you just have general questions about PSLF or if you turn in your

Employment Certification Form and want to find out how well it’s going to

take them to approve that.



So finally, Jessica, I just want to thank you again for listening to this webinar

on PSLF and I want to open this up for any question or answers.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: And if you have any questions, please type it into the chat box.

We’ve had a number of questions so far and go ahead and ask yours. I will

read a few of them in case there are others that might benefit from answers of

some of these questions as well.

So someone asked us, is it possible to qualify for the Public Service Loan

Forgiveness program if your loans are in default? And the answer is no,

defaulted loans are not eligible. However, if you are able to get your loans out

of defaults, they can become eligible.

And we also have a question about the type of employers that would qualify.

So there is a question about whether or not a tribal government agency will be

a qualifying employer and the answer to that is yes.

Let’s see. We also had a question about the 10-years with the qualifying

employer and the question was does that 10-years need to be with one

employer or could it be 10 years with different employers? And the answer is

that it can be different employers.

You can go from a government agency to a not-for-profit, two different not-

for-profits, but in the end it just needs to be - your payment need to be made

while you’re working for a qualifying employer. So it doesn’t have to be one,

they just all need to be qualifying.

Is there any other questions? Oh, let’s see. Do you foresee any changes to the

Public Service Loan Forgiveness program such as caps on the forgiveness

amount? (Tunika), do you want to answer that question?



Woman 1: Sure. I know there has been some discussion about potentially capping the

amount. We haven’t heard anything yet. So it’s just something I think we’re

all following in terms of capping it as of right now. And I know forgiveness

is, the earliest - any borrower can get forgiveness in October 2017, there is no

cap on forgiveness for PSLF.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: All right. It is something that has been discussed and it’s been

proposed, but we haven’t seen any movement on it and so we can’t really

make any speculation. We would hope that if anyone in the program that if

there was a cap put on it that people who entered it before will be

grandfathered in and then the cap would apply for those in the future. But it’s

hard to know what Congress will do.

So the next question we have is what happens if you go back to school and

add more loans, how without work. (Tunika), do you want to answer that

question as well?

Woman 1: Sure. So I - so you still will be able to qualify for PSLF, so generally what

would happen is if you go into school you’re going to have in-school

deferment. And then when you would get out, if you’re on an income-driven

repayment plan at the time that you went back to school, they would align

your new loans to that income-driven repayment plan.

You still need to be recertifying while you’re in school even though you’re in

a deferment. But you would still be able to, you know, once you’re finished

with school, if you’re going into a qualifying employment again, still be able

to continue your accounts for Public Service Loan Forgiveness.



Jessica Barrett Simpson: So the next question, can a student submit employment

certification for a previous employer and still have those years and payments

qualified? And the answer to that is yes. You could fill that out and certify all

of your employers that you had over those 10 years.

There is a risk to you if you wait and you don’t fill out the Employment

Certification Form, because you will not know for certain that your employer

does qualify, that your payments that you’ve been making qualify, you won’t

know for certain.

So while the Employment Certification Form is optional, is voluntary, it’s

something that we highly encourage so that you do know that you’re on track.

That’s what we’ve been communicating is to know that since the 10-year

period is a long time, you want to make sure that you are on track towards

forgiveness under this program.

So do fill out the Employment Certification Form and we encourage you to do

that every year to make sure and you know, it doesn’t have to be every year.

So if you wait and you do it for several employers that you had in the past,

that’s fine. Your employer has to sign it. And so I guess that’s an issue to

consider if you’re still in communication with that employer, because the

employer has to sign the form. But you can do that as regularly as you want to

and we encourage you to do it every time that your employer changes.

Woman 1: And actually Jessica, I want to jump back to again fees question, I want to

make sure I answer that correctly. One thing I wanted to say to, Public Service

Loan Forgiveness is at the loan level. So for instance if you got new loans,

your count would start for that new loan that you receive for Public Service

Loan Forgiveness.



So if you had loans that you had prior to going back to school and for instance

you made 50 qualifying payments on that, that will be 50 qualifying payments

for those loans. And then if you receive new loans then it would start at after

you finish with your school and within a qualifying limit, you again would

start at one for those loans. So you can receive multiple forgiveness for each

of your loans if you’re - they’re not consolidated. And so I hope that answers

your question a little better.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: Right. So the forgiveness can be on different tracks. You may have

some loans that you got earlier that could be on track to be forgiven earlier

and then something that you took out later that could be forgiven at a later

date.

And that’s similar to another question that someone asked where they said if I

have two direct loans and I’m making two payments on them, does that count

as two payments or does that only count as one payment? And it only counts

as one payment, because like (Tunika) just said it is at the loan level, so even

if you do have two loans, you’re making those two payments each month, it

has to be 125 - the 120 qualifying payments on that specific direct loan.

Okay, we have some more questions. On the income-driven repayment plan,

the PowerPoint slide shows that you have to repay 20 to 25 years, but the

speaker keeps saying that you only have to pay 10, can you clarify the

difference?

That’s a great question. So the income-driven repayment and this is slide 28,

the income-driven repayment forgiveness is only if you don’t qualify for

Public Service Loan Forgiveness. So apologies if that wasn’t clear. But if you

qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, your loans will be forgiven after

10 years, those are 125 - 120 payments.



If however you are only on an income-driven repayment plan and say you

don’t work for a public service organization, but you are on an income-based

repayment plan, your loans can be forgiven after 20 or 25 years.

And we’ve got another question. Can you apply retroactively as you just

learned about the program, but you’ve been making regular payments for the

last five years for working for a qualifying employer? The answer to that will

be yes.

The question that I would have will be are you sure that you have direct loans

and what kind of repayment plan are you on. So if you have been working for

a qualifying employer for the past five years, if you’re on a 10-year standard

repayment plan, your payments could qualify.

We will just encourage you to apply for an income-driven repayment plan,

because otherwise you would - you get to the end of 10 years and there will be

nothing to forgive. And the income-driven repayment plans that would lower

the amount that you would pay each month then you would have some of that

forgiven at the end of 10 years.

So yes, you can apply retroactively. It could be possible that you have been

making payments and that those payments qualify even if you just became

aware of the program today.

We have another question. If a student has federal loans from before 2007 and

they consolidate them as direct loans, will they still need to make 10 years’

worth of qualifying payments, are there any exceptions made for these

students?



So the answer to that is once you consolidate those federal loans into the

direct loan program that is the point at which they become eligible. So any

payments that you made on those federal loans previously wouldn’t count

towards Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

We have another question. Do you have to make 120 payments to apply? And

yes, that is what is required to apply to have your loans forgiven.

Then another question. What is the communication method between

applications and FedLoan Servicing? Is it email or paper mail? What happens

when your certification is rejected? (Tunika), do you want to answer that?

Woman 1: Sure. So from what I understand that you can communicate with FedLoan

Servicing via email, you can call into them or they also do receive some mail

letters. If you receive a denial letter since you did Employment Certification

Form and then you were denied for any reason whether they said your

employment doesn’t qualify.

In that letter they should be giving you the opportunity to rectify any incorrect

information that they may have made a decision one that isn’t correct or for

instance they told you that you have 100 qualifying payments and you know

that you made 110 qualifying payments, then you can go back to them. You

can either appeal to them via email or you can call in and they’ll kind of walk

you through that process.

Jessica Barrett Simpson: All right. If we’ve missed your question - I think we answered

them all, but if we’ve missed anyone’s questions, please ask it again. And if

there are any others, now is your chance. So we have a few more minutes if

anyone else has a question.



So I’m not seeing any other questions. If you do want to learn more about the

program, do go to studentaid.gov/publicservice and what you will see after we

conclude this webinar is a brief survey to ask you about your satisfaction with

the webinar and if there is anything else that we can do to meet your needs. So

thank you so much for joining us this evening and have a great evening.

Thank you.

Coordinator: Thank you.

END

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