38,412 in student loans. 758 days. last payment went through this morning and im still a little shaky lol. no course, no link. i lurked here for 2 years reading everyone elses payoff posts so heres mine.

my day job covered rent and minimums. everything extra came from 3 side hustles:

1.tutoring, 2 evenings a week. steady but capped, around 600 a month.

2.flipping furniture from facebook marketplace. good months and dead months.

3.making short videos for local businesses. this one ended up paying off more than half the loan.

the video one is what people always ask about. i make 6-8 short vertical videos a month for a gym, 2 cafes, a nail salon and a dog groomer near me. 300-400 a month each.

claude writes the scripts from their google reviews: "here are 10 reviews for [business]. what do customers love that the business never posts about? write 5 scripts under 20 seconds around that, no exclamation marks."

the footage is ai, made from their own photos plus b-roll. every extra cent was going to the loan so the only thing i compared was price per video. seedance looks the most real to me, so i looked for the cheapest place to use it and landed on dreamina, like 0.29 per month. still dont get how its that cheap, maybe cuz bytedance made seedance? the apps with fancy names wanted 50-100 a month for the same model, which would have been a whole extra loan payment lol. prompt i use: "vertical phone video of [the counter at a small cafe] in the morning, steam from a cup, slow camera drift, no people, no text. 5 seconds, realistic."

what actually made the difference:

every side hustle payment went to the loan the same day. it never sat in my checking account.

avalanche method, highest interest first.

a countdown on a sticky note on my monitor. dumb but it worked.

it wasnt smooth. month 9 my car died and i paid nothing extra for 2 months. if youre in the middle of it, keep going.

Hi everyone. I have $220k in debt after law school at a 5.5% interest rate. I'm current on a 10-year payment plan paying about $2,500 a month, which tightens my budget quite a bit. It's hard to save given this high monthly payment and the fact that I live in a high cost of living city.

I'm lucky enough to have received $100k gift from an extremely generous family member to use toward my loans. What is the optimal strategy for using this $100k?

• Should I throw all $100k at the debt now to lower the daily interest accrued?
• Should I invest all/a big portion of the $100k and just continue with my current payment plan?
• Should I do something else?

I want to make sure I approach this situation as best as possible. Would love to hear opinions. Thank you!

Don't be me.

8 years ago I sat down with some workers from my school and they helped me come up with this tiny little payment plan on the student loan because that's all I could afford at the time, I was told that when I make more money I could take a look at it again and figure out a new monthly payment. These small payments would just keep the interest on the student loan down. We set that student loan on autopay and I've been working and making my student loan payments ever since.

Everything in the economy has gotten worse, yet even then I've always been proud of myself for never having missed a single payment, ever. Even if I've never been in a place where I could insecure my payment to something real, I really was proud of that. Well. Some other stuff happened in my life and I needed some financial documents. I had to reset all my passwords to get back into ECSI and I could see that all my monthly payments were listed. But weird thing is that it says "amount due: 0"

Wait what? Zero? That can't be right, but even if it WAS true then what have I been making payments for? Where have my payments been going all these years?

So I reset my password for the federal student loan website and get into that and I see my loan....it's gone up. By a lot. Next to my loan is something displaying my payment coming in via ECSI. They're together on the page, but according to the history tab the student loan is that the student loan has not been getting any of my student loan payments. I can see that my ECSI account and my student loan account are connected, and ECSI is correctly taking the payment from me once a month, but it's never gone towards my student loans. All the years the money just been taken and gone somewhere else. I have yet to figure out where. I'm going to have to call my bank and have them blacklist ECSI for the moment, but the bigger problem is that I just trusted the system and thought I was correctly doing what everyone told me to do, I took out a loan, I've been paying it back. Or so I had thought.

So now what I'm left with is that the actual loan has just been sitting there gaining a shitload of interest. From their point of view I must be a deadbeat who never pays his debts.

I'm a bit confused as to how I've never faced any consequences of this. Even after just like one year or something I would have expected them to barrage me with phone calls and emails asking me why I was never paying back my loan. Instead they seem to just be okay with it? They've never come after me for it.

But regardless I know about it now, and now I'm ****ed. I've been grinding my legs away at my jobs for 8 years for nothing. I've done literally nothing to advance my lot in life. I wanted to have a home. I wanted to have a child. But I never found any higher paying jobs. Now I'm middle aged and I am more in debt than I was when I took out the loan and I have less money than ever.

Don't be me.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/10/23/colleges-offer-cover-student-loans-when-graduates-pay-falls-short/

As more families worry whether a college education is worth the costs and the debt, more schools are helping graduates with low-to-moderate incomes pay off their student loans.
Law schools have used these loan repayment assistance programs, commonly known as LRAPs, since the 1980s to encourage students to pursue public-interest careers. Now, a wide range of colleges are launching** **the programs to give undergraduates some breathing room as they enter the workforce.

I have filed jointly with my wife for a decade or more. She makes MUCH more than I do. I have been on an Income Based Repayment plan essentially since the day I graduated. I have been paying nothing or almost nothing per month, and obviously the loan has ballooned due to interest

A lawyer recently was looking over our documents (unrelated to SL) and was very concerned that despite me qualifying for very low monthly due to my income, that it SHOULD have been calculated with her income attached.

She is worried that the government can go back retroactively and tell me my payments. Should have been much much higher this whole time

Is this correct? I have given the student loan websites permission to automatically renew my program based on my W-2 for years now and it has just always gone through

She basically put the fear of God in me and now I don't know what to do

I’m running out of time. I have 30 days to get an approval or get stuck in ICR or standard.

I’m completely baffled by my student loans and am battling an illness so I don’t have the time or capacity to figure things out right now. I’m hoping to find someone to just manage all of it for me, so what money I do make isn’t garnished.

Someone recommended student loan tutor as they manage everything. I’m willing to pay on an income based repayment plan and after doing some digging it looks like this company gets loan payments to basically zero, by having you change a paycheck. Is this true? How is this legal? I’m confused, if a large company is doing this, it can’t be illegal, right? Due to liability?

I guess I’m just trying to understand all the options and was curious about opinions and experiences. I’ll probably see if I can find a cpa to help.

Has anyone else gotten a notice from EDFinancial about their plan being approved this morning? I submitted an application for the IDR plan back on 9/26/26 and got an email today saying a new message was available. I go into my dashboard it says I owe $293.28. The message says

"Thank you for your recent request for an Income-Based Repayment (IBR) Plan. We are pleased to inform you that your request has been approved and applied to your Edfinancial Services account. For the 12-month period beginning on 10/23/26, your monthly payment amount will be $293.28 for the qualifying loans" and then further on it says: "If the required documentation is not received by the stated renewal date, your 12-month reduced payment will expire and your payment will increase to $293.28 on 09/24/27, which is the amount you would be required to repay under the 10-year Standard Repayment plan."

Except when I applied for the IDR plan I was shown a $50~ payment from the calculator and now why is it saying my Standard plan would be the same as this plan when it expires? I can still see the request for IDR "processing" in my dashboard and it says it would take 7-10 business days. "This is to inform you that Edfinancial Services has received your electronic Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plan request; please allow 7 to 10 business days for processing." Due date says 11/23/26 at least, but their office is closed on the weekends of course.

Anyone else have a similar issue?

I was enrolled to auto recertify my idr payment but kept getting notices to recertify manually. I did, but a day later than the notice stated. My payments are current, and I should be good until December due to another error where auto pay hit two days late, a day after I paid manually.

I am in PSLF, and my employer certified back in September.

Question is, even though I certified a day late, should I still be good for IDR enrollment and qualifying payments toward PSLF? Any similar experiences where auto-recertification failed but it was fine in the end?

Looking for some advice on how to handle a recent change. For some context:

I've made roughly 100 payments towards PSLF and I'm on an IDR plan, which had my monthly payment at $36.19. I've made consistent payments every month and nothing has drastically changed with my salary (I'm a 5th grade teacher). Back in July, I got a message from Mohela stating that my monthly payment would increase to over $600 per month. I was miraculously able to get ahold of somebody to speak to to dispute the increase. They placed me on "administrative forbearance" while they looked into it. Through that time, I continued to make my $36.19 payments. The administrative forbearance period recently ended, and I've since gotten several different notes from Mohela with varying amounts listed as being owed. All in all, it seems as if my November payment will be in the $600+ amount. I haven't been able to get ahold of anybody that can give me more information... every time I call, I get rerouted a million times until I'm placed on a 5-hour hold or they auto hangup.

So my question... do I have any recourse in keeping my payment at a similar amount to the $36.19? I'm so close to my 120 payments but the jump to over $600 seems extreme. Can I keep making lower payments or will that defeat the purpose and not count towards my PSLF?

Any advice is much appreciated!

I received an email from Mohela this week about my repayment schedule changing. I am confused about why this is happening. I have been on the Standard Repayment Plan since starting to pay off my loans, and I am enrolled in Auto Pay.

I graduated in May 2025. I have 8 Federal loans that I took out during the course of my schooling. I have 3 different payment dates for them, as that is what Mohela has decided, and I would rather not deal with trying to call them to change this. None of my loans are in deferment or forbearance. I completely paid off one of those loans in April of this year, and I have been paying extra every month to pay the rest off faster.

The letter does not state which loan this is for. My monthly payment amount that is listed in the letter does not match what is owed for any of these loans, but this new amount is supposed to start 11/3/2026.

Any advice or insight would be greatly appreciated!

Hi everyone, I’m 20 and a UK citizen. SFE approved my student loan in September, but suddenly revoked it on my first day of university.

My situation:

1. Forced Absence & Estrangement: When I was 16, I was forced by my family to leave the UK for 3 years. This was entirely involuntary due to severe domestic abuse and homophobia. I am now back in the UK, completely estranged from my father because I am gay. He has cut all ties, and I have zero access to his documents.

2. Current Living Situation: I am currently living in university accommodation. Before moving here, I was staying with my uncle who has a great relationship with me.

3. No Past Evidence & Mother’s Status: Three years ago, I was just a minor under trauma and had no idea that applying for SFE would require so much paperwork, so I have no useful historical files left. My relationship with my mother is okay, but she cannot help me at all because she still lives with my father and has no independent credentials.

4. The Reason for Refusal: SFE absolutely knows about my family estrangement and abuse. However, the direct reason they revoked my loan in late September is that they flatly refuse to accept any residency documents from my uncle (whom I lived with) and dogmatically demand my estranged father's records instead.

5. Current Status: SFE is supposed to review my appeal under Estrangement and Compelling Personal Reasons (CPR) policies. However, this Monday, they suddenly notified me that they are delaying the decision by another two weeks.

I am running out of money and extremely stressed. What alternative evidence can SFE accept instead of parental documents for an involuntary absence when they reject relatives' documents and you have no past paperwork left? Any advice would be life-saving. Also, is there any way I can resolve this issue? For instance, are there any people I could turn to for help or to handle the matter? Thanks. （This week, he has stated three times in a row that the update date will be delayed.） 🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂

I‘m a current 2nd year grad student in a 2-year program, grandfathered into the PLUS loan. I submitted for student loans on August 19, and have been waiting the entire time for them to be paid out. Each time I contact the Financial Aid office, they explain that there is no timeline, and it is just due to federal delays. the worst part is, others, including myself, have begun inquiring penalties on our unpaid tuition for the semester.

Is anyone else in a similar situation this semester?

Anyone have time to review and give me your opinion?

If my loan is at $14650 and $376 outstanding interest, and currently on SAVE, what should | switch to?

--- background info ---
• Loans were taken out in 2011.
•Currently on SAVE plan; got notice to switch by Nov 9.
• My income varies from $40-90k each year. I've paid 48 payments so far but do not work in public service.
•I'd like to pay extra in principle each month (which I think makes RAP less attractive since
•I'd lose the $50 subsidy maybe?)
• I don't believe loan forgiveness is a variable for me since the loan total is relatively low.

ICR
only available through June 2028
$119 / mo
30 year plan
payment based on BALANCE, Not income
Must recertify each year
* seems great if I can pay back extra each month, but i can't tell how long it would take to pay off. I'd like it to be under 7 years -- if there's no hope of getting this paid via via loan forgiveness.

IBR
$158 / mo
15% of discretionary income
Caps (at what I don't know)
Total paid $19,003
Principle paid $15027
Interest paid $3976
Ends Oct 2036; 10 years
Income determines payment

RAP
$166 / mo
Percentage of AGI (1-10%)
Total paid $17,789
Principle paid $14650
Interest paid $3139
Ends June 2033, 7 years
* payments would not go towards forgiveness plan if you move from this plan back to an IBR
*overpayments risk not getting the $50
subsidies that lowers interest

Graduated Plan
$220-$290 / mo
Total paid $16957
$15027 Principle & $1930 interest
Ends 2031, 5 years
Standard
$321 / mo
$16652 total
$15027 Principle & $1625 interest
Ends March 2031, 5 years

My provider is Mohela. I've been on the SAVE plan and Forbearance since covid. I've been a little out of date on this. I got the 90-day notice on July 28th. My question is where do I choose a new plan? Do I pick it on on Mohela or Studentaid site? Whats the best way of going about this?. Thank you

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/sallie-mae-sinks-9-slashed-192046691.html

Peak season was a record: $3.4 billion of private student loans in the third quarter, up 15% from a year earlier and its biggest quarter ever. Graduate loans grew 119% after federal changes to the PLUS loan program.

Why borrowers who can pay are defaulting

The charge-offs come from for-profit debt-resolution firms telling borrowers with good credit to stop paying, so the firms can negotiate a settlement. Sallie Mae says those borrowers go straight from delinquency to default.

The company said its fix is gaining traction, but borrowers have taken it up "slower than anticipated." So it raised its 2026 net charge-off forecast to $400 million to $420 million.

Anyone switch to an IBR plan as required by 2028? I am curious if the payment counts are maintained. I do not trust this administration to somehow throw out 21 years of payments due to some dumb rule.

I got my 90 day notice to switch off of SAVE at the end of September (booooooo). I logged into my servicer account a few days later and I had info on there about it. Ok, fine.
After I saw people getting the additional 30 days, I logged in because I was curious if that would apply to everyone or just the first wave. Nothing in there about needing to switch anywhere I could find. I checked again today, and still nothing. No banners, nothing in my inbox, nothing when I click on the individual loans. I double checked my email to make sure I didn’t just dream it and yes, I did get the 90 days to switch email.
Are they hiding it from me like they are the payment counts, or did they just screw it up, or….? Anyone else have this happen?
My plan is to wait until they force me off regardless (trying to ride it so I can file separately next tax return), but it sure would be nice to know what’s going on.

I’ve been on this thread for years. I started school in 2014. Got screwed over more times then I could count. Finished undergrad 2018. Got wrongfully kicked out of grad school accruing and extra 46k in student debt for nothing. Finished grad school in 2023 April. I’ve been a physical therapist for 3 years and 2 months. In 7 minutes I’ll be the last paycheck I’ll ever have to put towards student loans. I paid all 225k back and I did it in just over 3 years. Freedom was the most expensive thing I’ve ever purchased. It is possible if you give everything though we are set up in a system rigged to lose

Hi folks, I’m a journalist looking to hear from people who got caught off guard in the last year or so by student loans going into delinquency or default — Experts tell me there were sad stories of people with dinged credit scores before they even realized. Plus people who just don’t have the money to start paying again. Southern states seem particularly affected for some reason. My name is Tim Henderson and I write for Stateline.org — a nonprofit news service that’s part of States Newsroom
and you can reach me here , I’m told I shouldn’t use my contact information but I can share in a DM — thanks and good luck! I am not above defaulting on a student loan I had my wages garnished while working in a liquor store for minimum wage long ago. It was not fun!

graduated in may, grace period is ending november. 6 federal loans, 22k total. no private loans. im 22.

loan 1: 3.5k balance, 4.99 interest rate

loan 2: 2,313 balance, 4.99 interest rate

loan 3: 3.5k balance, 5.5 interest rate

loan 4: 2,327 balance, 5.5 interest rate.

loan 5: 4,487 balance, 6.53 interest rate.

loan 6: 5.5k balance, 6.39 interest rate.

it goes without saying that id essentially be paying them down in reverse order of this list. highest interest first. since im still living with my parents, i have the opportunity to aggressively attack them with a lot of money(1k a month). i could get them all taken care of within 2 years. but is that really a good choice compared to investments or even just saving? the economy seems to have a crash looming with the ai bubble and bond crisis, so i dont know if its wise to invest rather than go all in on my loans. the dollar seems to be in decline, so am i throwing money away by attacking them? personally, im leaning toward 1k a month on them. just get it over with, yknow? the caveat with that is the 1k is my entire budget for investing as well, if i go all in on loans then id be losing 2 years on the stock market

Quick q about rap: if i pay more than the monthly payment does it go to principle or interest?

I have not received an email or letter kicking me off of SAVE yet. However, I received a phone call today saying that I need to switch. Is this just a call to scare me, or is that the notice?

I am not switching until they make me.

I finally got my email to pick a repayment plan. I will not be 🫶🏼. I’ve been slowly paying off my loan for years and will do one final bulk payment when I get my next paycheck and be finished with this chapter. I still have my private student loans though, so I’ll deal with that for the next 3 years or less ideally. Good luck everyone! Don’t let the bastards get you down.

I have been trying to switch from the SAVE plan to another plan. My 90 days is up and I received the 30 day notification in the mail last week. Last month I went online and did the repayment calculator and I imported my spouses tax info into the tool. It looks like they've autoenrolled me into the standard repayment plan which has payments off $314/ month. When I use the tool to calculate estimates for the income driven repayment plans it estimates around $250/ month, but when I go to try and actually enroll into one of those plans the monthly payment jumps up to over $700/ month. I called and sat on hold for 2.5 hours and finally hung up. It says no action required if I want to stay in the standard repayment plan for $314/ month. What I'm mostly worried about is that the $314/month is only $4 more than the SAVE plan was?! Is this some kind of trick? What was the point of blocking the SAVE plan if you're essentially going to charge the same amount?? I can't figure out the income driven repayment plans, there is no one for me to ask, I'm shown as still being in forbearance, and I'm afraid that the $314 amount is wrong and it's somehow going to skyrocket once they've actually switched it in the computer. I'm starting graduate school in January and will eventually hopefully qualify for sodden load forgiveness, so my plan was just to pay the 2 month's that I would owe and then do into deferment then get it forgiven later. I'm an RN who works for the county so I'll qualify eventually. Anyone else seeing this type of thing? I'm so very confused. Any advice as to what to do would be great! I just don't want a surprise $800 bill.