Student Loans: A Walkthrough of Studentaid.gov

All right, associates, we're back. Let's do a walkthrough of studentaid.gov. you've probably already logged in. Hopefully you have. If not, that's okay. Recently the government has merged two sites. One was formerly called the NSLDS site, which with their studentaid.gov. so now all details are in your studentaid.gov account, all details about your student loans. Really important that you understand how to navigate that website to see the layers of your student loan structure. Most of my clients, our clients here at Practice CFO don't just have one single student loan. They'll have sometimes multiple student loans. They might have one consolidated with some unconsolidated. More of a pure setting would be you have all of your loans consolidated. So it's one loan and it's on one of the IDR programs. Well, all of this, no matter how it's structured, can easily be accessed and understood pretty well on studentaid.gov. i give the government compliments for making this pretty user friendly. Well, let's look at this page. When you log in you have sort of a dashboard page. And this is the case of a client. There's no information here of who that client is, but this client had a few loans that predated 2010. In fact, some were 2007. Even so some of these were called fell loans, Federal Family first loans.

Education loans, and those ones are unique from direct loans because those are guaranteed loans, as I mentioned earlier. Well, let's look at the website. Here you can see we have total loans of 241,425. So a little bit of crude interest there, $237, not much. And then on the right there's some grants. This particular borrower also got a few grants while they were in school from the federal government. And, and then notice I put a red box around two of the key buttons. One is View detail. So what are the. Let's drill down into this. The website lets you continue to drill down into it to see more and more details. And then you can see who your student loan servicer is as well. And it will have a link that will take you to a separate website for your student loan servicer to see your payment detail and interact with your student loan loan servicer. Alright, so if we click that top one View Details, we come down to this page, which again it shows you that same balance and then you can click View Breakdown. So now we want to see what is this 241,425 made up of exactly well, it's made up of various loans. The largest balance showing there at the top is the Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development. This is one of the non big four student loan servicers. And the one below that is from the University of Southern California. Now, as I mentioned in a prior module about student loan servicers, if you got a loan at your local school and they might be servicing that, so it's not serviced through one of the nine outsourced student loan servicers that the government uses. And that's totally okay. This one you can see it's a very small balance. And if you were to scroll down, you would see a few more loans. But I'm going to click on View Loan Detail there in the red box of the 157,875. So we drill down into that a little bit more. Now we can see that we have some unsubsidized loans of 46,365 and some subsidized loans of 9,732. And if I were to scroll down, you would even see additional amounts there. So I'm going to click on View Loan Details. And now I drill down even more. And here, now we have the details about this specific loan, which has a balance of $46,365. Of that amount we have capitalized interest of $50. And if we then look to the right, you can see that when this loan was taken out, you can see the status that is currently in repayment. It's being repaid right now. And with this particular client, we're working to refinance. She's at the point in time where the next step is to refinance into a private loan. And so we're working on that. The interest rate is at 6.8% and it's fixed and on the right. The only thing on the right I want to mention is the PSLF Cumulative Match months. The PSLF Cumulative match months. This would indicate the number of months that have been paid and qualified toward the PSLF forgiveness. In this case, none of it. This client actually owns her own practice now, and therefore she is definitely not going for the PSLF forgiveness, which is great, she's doing great, but we're not going to get any forgiveness there. So it basically says, na, this is not applicable. And I have a separate module. We're going to talk about the pslf. And you want to make sure to track this and track it carefully so that you know that your payments are actually clocking in as forgivable. Per thestudentaid.gov so then we can.

Drill down a little bit more and we can look at the types of loans. Actually, you go out and there's another link and it will allow us to see these loans as types. We have four consolidated loans. We have two graduate plus loans which cannot be consolidated. We have one Perkins loan for subsidized, so these are undergraduate loans. And then we have four unsubsidized loans as well. And if we were to click on the four consolidated loans, we can see all of those. There's some fell loans here. These were all predated. They all predated 2010 and that's when they had those guaranteed loans I mentioned in a priority module, which were actually loans taken out from a bank as the Federal Family Education Loan. And we can see the balance here at 80 2005, 23.

Okay, that's really just a quick summary. I wanted to go over studentaid.gov hopefully to give you a little bit of an understanding how to navigate it and specifically what you're looking for while you're on the website.