Student Loans: The Latest Updates

Hey, dental associates and new practice owners. Welcome to the Associates on Fire podcast, powered by Practice cfo. This is the podcast that teaches you what you never learned in dental school, the financial side of dentistry. We cover topics from planning for ownership, buying a practice, to student loans, taxes, and all things financial for the hungry to learn Dental Associate. So let's light it up.

Welcome, everybody. Excited to have you back for a new episode of our Associates on Fire podcast. Want to give you a quick FYI that we are in the process of actually renaming our podcast from Associates on Fire to a new name. And the reason why we're renaming this from our Associates on Fire to a different name is because so much of the subjects that we talk about here on the Associates on Fire program really are not just for associates. It's also for when you move from associate to owner. There's a lot of content from our, from our guests that talk about how to be successful as an owner. And in fact, I would say It's a good 50, 50 really on our content. And so we're rebranding it a little bit. So it's not focused or exclusively just targeted toward you associates, but it's just targeted for you as a dentist and you as an associate dentist, but also you as a future owner dentist. So stay tuned for, for that to change up. Pretty excited about it. Today's episode is really going to focus on you as both an associate and even a practice owner. We're going to continue on a subject that's been a theme of mine here on our program for really the past month or two, and that's student loans. And the reason why is because there's just a lot of changes going on in this landscape of student loans right now. And I think it's created a lot of questions and even some confusion. And I've tried to do a good job at clarifying that through our podcast and our newsletters. But at the end of the day, this is an area that may require a specialist who focuses on this as a significant portion of their job. Now, we do here at Practice cfo, our advisors do address student loans, for sure, but we're also addressing your practice cash flows. We're addressing taxes and debt and retirement plans and education funding for your kids and buying a dental practice or selling a dental practice. So we have a large, I would say, spectrum of advisory in our scope. And so I wanted to invite on our show today somebody who spends a lot more of their of their time proportionately on student loans and can just clarify areas or gaps that are in my previous podcast that I did and in some of our letters and just add to them and give us the most current real time update of what's happening in student loans and then to really, really say, how does this apply to you, dentist? And try to give you a framework to ask the right questions and find answers to those questions. So our guest today is Dan Rooker and dan is with studentloanplanner.com. welcome to the show, Dan.

Thanks, Wes. Really excited to be here. Really looking forward to jumping into the time sensitive topics and also just some of the topics around student loans that are ever present.

Likewise, excited for you to be here. Such a relevant subject right now for dentists who, unless they're maybe later on down their career or came from maybe a little bit more financial backing in their, in their family, are going to have student loans. And therefore, whether they like it or not, they have to sort of confront these, these questions and issues around their student loans. Dan's been a financial planner for 10 years. He's in the past year or so, he's really turned his focus to be more exclusive on student loans and now is a member of the student loan planner.com company and that was founded by a friend named Travis Hornsby who I've had on the show, I think a couple of years ago and who dedicated his life to the understanding of student loans and giving advice to people on student loans. And now he's, he's got a sizable team who support him, Dan being one of them because of the intense demand for clarification on student loans and how people should handle those student loans. All right, let's jump into this. Dan, you ready?

Oh, ready, definitely.

Okay, let's do this. All right, I want to start off by talking about this, the moratorium ending. Can we start there? August 31, unless it's been changed. And you and I both know this has been punted like five times from the government. The end of the, of the waiver period, the COVID created waiver period, where the government said, hey, all you student loan borrowers, you don't need to make any payments right now. And we're not going to accrue your balance, any interest to your balance. And so all of that is on hold. And, and that was supposed to be initially for I think a few months. And then they extended it. They extended it. They extended it. Question for you, are they going to extend it further?

So at Student Loan Planner, we do think that they will extend it further. You know, it's, we're at just under or about 30 days before payments resume at the time of this recording. And.

Servicers, the loan servicers out there. So names you've heard of Navient Nelnet, Fed Loan Servicing, Mohela. You know these servicers are required to give borrowers notice. They need time to let borrowers know payments are going to start up again. And you know traditionally we thought of that as 60 days notice. And the President has said I'm going to make an announcement about student loans. And you know our opinion on that is it's not going to be anticlimactic. So you know, he hasn't announced it yet, but we're thinking there's going to be a payment extension, a payment pause extension. And the last payment pause extension went from May 31 to August 31. And at that time if you used Wayback Machine to Look at the studentaid.gov page for when you need to recertify by it said November of 2022. When they extended it, they pushed that out to March of 2023. So an FYI to anybody listening to if you haven't recertified your income driven plan since prior to the pandemic, then the earliest you could be required to recertify currently without the announcement is March of 2023. And if there is a payment pause extension, that date may be pushed out.

To Beyond March of 2023, which so the required recertification. And as Dan stated, just to clarify you all, everybody on this page podcast, if you have student loans, you should know that you have to report your income to the your student loan servicer who will then adjust your student loan payment based on that. Now Dan, does that only apply to people on an IDR plan, an income driven repayment plan like IBR Pay and Repay that you have to submit that financial information. I assume if you're On a standard 10 year plan, you don't really need to submit anything. If you're on a non income driven plan. This only applies to income driven plans, right?

Correct. Correct. So I guess I should take a step back. And so in the federal system you've got nine major plans, you've got five that are based off of how much you make. Income driven plans. A lot of folks call them income based when in fact income based is two of the five income driven plans.

The old IBR and the new ibr. Right?

That's right. Outside of that you've got the standard extended, the graduated and the extended graduated.

Plans and none of those are contingent upon your income.

That's Right.

Those are normal loan schedules, just like a car loan or home loan. They have nothing to do with your income. You just pay, you just pay those amounts. So those are not income driven repayment plans or IDRs.

That's right, yeah. So, and high level with those, you got the standard 10 year plan. If you've consolidated and you pick the standard plan, it's a range, it's 10 to 30 years and it's a fixed payment. And whether it's 10 years or 30 years or some time frame in between is based off of how much you consolidate. For most of our listeners, if you consolidated your loans and picked the standard plan, if your balance is above 60,000, that's probably all of the listeners here who have student loans, then you're placed on the 30 year fixed plan like a mortgage. If you pick the graduated plan without a consolidation so you finish dental school, you pick the graduated plan, that's also a 10 year plan. It solves for 10 years and it starts low for two years and increases every two years until it hits 10 years. If you pick the extended plan, that's a 25 year fixed plan. If you pick the extended graduated plan, it works just like the graduated plan did. On the 10 year standard it's 25 years, it starts low and increases your payment every two years. So you won't have to provide your income per se before the pandemic freeze or the payment pause ends. But if you're on one of those plans that adjust your payment every two years, I would expect an adjustment to still solve for 10 years or 25 years from when you started. So expect the payment change, I suppose.

And so the when this deferment ends, whether that's at the end of this month, which it's currently scheduled to do, or and maybe most likely later after. Did you say the President's going to make an announcement on this?

The Biden administration has said that they're going to make an announcement.

Okay, so it might come from the Department of Education, but somebody's going to make an announcement on this that they may defer this out maybe another three or even six months. But the time that you have to recertify, therefore is tethered to that date. And that makes sense. If you're not having to make any payments, then why would you have to report your income through the recertification process? And that's a yearly process, right? The recertification normally.

So on those five income driven plans, you have the President Clinton's income contingent repayment plan from 93, you've got the July 09 plan. That's old income based repayment. You've got December of 2012. That's pay as you earn, revised pay as you Earn and new IBR new income based repayment both in 2014. Those five plans normally require recertification every 12 months unique to the borrower and anniversary date. One more to keep track of and that is the normal requirement. That will be the requirement that things return to after this payment pause is over. In the meantime, that earliest required recertification date is March of 2023. A lot of folks, especially folks who are on top of their student loans will say have recertified their income because they, they know that they had to do it every 12 months. And that could work out to your benefit if you happen to recertify where you're at a point where your income was lower. But that could also hurt you if you volunteer that information any sooner. And that's not to say that a loan servicer isn't going to reach out to you. I've run into consults where they said my loan servicer told me that it's time to recertify. And.

From their perspective they're servicing potentially millions of people, millions of borrowers and they're, they're drinking from a fire hose from the Education Department with announcements and something like that. Pushing an announcement, pushing a correspondence letter out to say it's time to recertify may have gone out just because they were trying to prepare for that eventual happening.

And I would think that some of that is because there's just a lag between the, the government updates and really the software or automatic.

Communication from the service providers to the borrowers and it takes time to build into their systems what are these updates and when these updates are changing pretty frequently, I will I guess come to the defense a little bit of the student loan servicers because I can't imagine what it's like to try to keep up their softwares and their systems to such a changing environment. But that's a really good point Dan, and something everybody should know that if they get a letter from their student loan servicer saying time to recertify, you can actually ignore that or at least punt it out a year from the date that it's saying that it's actually due. If that letter comes before March 31st.

Correct, yeah. So if it, well, so if you were to sign in as a federal borrower, everyone has access to studentaid.gov and you sign in using your FSA ID, the same place that you filled out the FAFSA. You can go into and look at your required recertification date. And if that date is a date before March of 2023, then it is pushed out one year if that date.

And that's March 31st. Is that right?

That part hasn't been clarified.

Oh, right now it's just generally March it says.

Yeah, the language on suny.gov says March of 2023.

So.

Which I feel like someone wrote on purpose just to.

Yeah, so yeah, create some margin there.

Exactly. But if your date on your login on your access says some date after March of 2023, then it is that date. Now if they make this payment pause extension from August 31st to sometime later, I would expect that that recertification date is also pushed. And there's a landing page for that on studentaid.gov maybe we can throw it into the show notes just for borrowers who are interested. You can check that page and that will tell you I would check that page probably about a week after. Any announcement about a payment pause is.

Pure curiosity driven.

Question here. How much of this extension or this sort of moving out.

The date that payments resume is because we're trying to give. The government's trying to give student loan borrowers more time, more financial support. Maybe they're not fully out of sort of all the COVID setbacks and how much of this is the government just needs more time to figure out the student loan servicer transitions going on and all of that. And really they're just trying to buy more time. Yeah, I think you don't have an.

Answer for that, but I look at these two waivers that were announced recently and I think that's part of our topic today is these waivers, the PSLF waiver, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Waiver and the IDR waiver, the Income Driven Repayment Waiver. Those two were created to try to.

Solve.

Part of a systemic problem or part of a problem that's been created by changes over time. And this loan servicer is trying to take that information and.

Distribute it to their borrowers. And the IDR waiver changes are projected to happen fall of 2022 for people pursuing Public Service Loan forgiveness and spring of 2023 for everyone else. Those are off in the near future. And I think the payment pause might just be the Education Department's way of buying some time to figure that out.

Could be a little bit of both then perhaps. Great. So what reason would a borrower have to submit their financial information before their required Date. Yeah, let's say, let's say August is, it all starts back up in August, but they don't have to recertify until let's say, September of next year. What would be a good motivating reason to actually still certify?

Yeah, great question. So plenty. A couple examples I can think of right off the top. One would be you are between jobs right now. If you are between associate positions right now, then technically your income is zero. And so if your payment was non zero, scheduled to start in September, you could recalculate your payment until the next time you're required to recertify. And that payment would be based off of your current income.

If you have experienced a drop in income, say you went part time because of a dependent at home, then that would be another good reason to, you know, so a drop in income or an increase in family size without an increase in income. Those are kind of some right off the top, very obvious reasons to volunteer that information sooner than required.

And in my last podcast I talked about recalculation versus recertification. And that's essentially what we're talking about here, is that recertification is when you're kind of required to do it. Recalculation is when you submit your information even though you're not required to do it because you actually want your loan payment to go down. And you have justifiable reasons, either increased family size or decreased income to do that. So that's a good extension of that conversation we had previously. So then if safe to say that somebody could keep their loan payments at effectively zero if they want to, until their true recertification date, which is going to be sometime after March 31st of next year. It's, if all this is deferred more, it could be, it could be a lot later than that. And that even if things resume at the end of August 31st with payments, you could theoretically submit your financial information. Or if I understand it right now, you don't actually have to submit your financial information. You can just go and state my income is X, that the government is just accepting your word on it, they're not doing any due diligence or validation. And you could, and I'm not telling anybody to be dishonest, but theoretically you could go and say my income is zero right now. And then until you have to actually recertify, regardless of the, of the end of the deferral period, you still don't have to pay anything on your student loans until the time that you have to recertify the only difference is that once the student loan payments are supposed to resume, then you'll start to see your balance accruing the interest at that point. Am I getting all that right?

Yep. So far. So far so good. Wes, this is great. Yeah. And if you are thinking it's I need to do that, I need to take action on that, then go to studentaid.govidr that's the page where you can get onto an income driven plan, recertify your plan, like that's what we've been talking about. Next spring, recalculate your payment or switch your plan if you're on the wrong income driven plan. And I, I point to studentaid.gov often in one on one consults. And I often say this is where you source your information. This is also where you create or generate documents for your loan servicer to process. Your loan servicer is not there to give you advice, they're there to take the forms. And you often have the option to go directly to your loan servicer and get those forms processed with them. But the drawback to that as a borrower is if, if history repeats itself and loan servicers are switched on you, then that paperwork is lost. If you want your paperwork, your paper trail to be there for a long, long time, do it on studentaid.gov, generate it there, send it, then have it get sent to the loan servicer from.

Studentaid.Gov that I did not know that you can make these updates to your student loan, I guess configuration, either through your student loan servicer like Mohela or Navient or what used to be Navient, or you can do it on studentaid.gov and I'm sure some things you may have to go through your service, maybe some things you have to go through studentaid.gov but there are some things where you can do it on both. And you're saying whenever you have the option, do it directly at the source at studentaid.gov, which is the government, not the government's contracted company that is administering the logistics around the loan. So give me that example one more time. What is it in that example that you're recommending they do specifically on studentaid.gov was that to recertify, was that to do submit for recalculation and to do that on studentaid.gov and not through their service?

Yeah, I would do, I would do both of those things directly on studentaid.gov. so if you're going to switch your plan, if you're going to recalculate your payment, if you're going to recertify your income driven plan, if you're going to apply to get onto an income driven plan, or if you're going to consolidate your loans for any reason. All of those things can be done through studentaid.gov directly. And after you've submitted or completed it, then you can always view it later as a completed document in the My Documents section of your profile.

Got it. Credit to studentaid.gov, it seems fairly intuitive when I last I checked on their website and at least their redesign, which they did a couple years ago.

Exactly. Yeah. It used to be pretty antiquated. It's a lot better now.

I noticed that studentaid.gov and the government has said on their studentaid.gov website that they are trying to now be the.

Be the record.

The source of recording payments that qualify toward forgiveness. It's almost like the government in the past has delegated this to the servicer. And this is part of the reason why they pay servicers. The money they do is so the servicer keeps track of all of that. And almost like there's been so many errors. Now, I could be wrong in this, but so many errors and mistakes and complaints and poor service to the borrower from the service providers, student loan servicers, that the government is saying, okay, we're going to be the primary source of record now for some of these critical data points such as how many of your payments qualify for PSLF or qualify for forgiveness through an IDR plan. Is that a correct understanding? And do you see the government handling this better than the servicers did when it comes to qualifying payment toward forgiveness?

So I think that the Education Department is, there's a reason why they hired this out. They outsourced this in the past. Even back then there were too many borrowers to have employees oversee it. If there is a technology driven.

You know, way to track payments then, and I'm sure that maybe that's what they're working on then, yeah, I could see the Education Department handling that piece of it. The, the. But the act of recertifying, the act of recalculating that happens is generated from the borrower side of things. And the timing of that is what probably in the past and still today gets in the way of counting months, progressing towards some future forgiveness state. And I think about it from, from all of us, like when we were assigned homework, did we do it? Did the majority of us do that homework 30 days before it was due? Or did we do it the night before did we cram like right before? And you know, an income driven plan has an anniversary date and a due date. The majority of people do it the day before that date. And the loan servicer needs time to process the form. So what do they do? They put your loans into administrative forbearance for a month and then the next month so that month gets missed and doesn't count. You're allowed to do it up to 60 days in advance. And to everyone who does a consult with Student Loan Planner, that's what we recommend is do it sometime in the month before to give your loan servicer time so that you don't miss a month. But add that up times millions of borrowers over a decade or more of, you know, forbearances here and then you have grounds for a class action suit or something and then you have the IDR waiver.

And this is actually a perfect segue into the PSLF and the IDR waivers because they're trying to retroactively correct this problem of borrowers waiting until the last minute to apply for loan forgiveness. And knowing that in the next 10 years there's this massive wave of people who are going to come up to their, you know, their 20 year point for some of these IDR plans and who are going to be saying, hey, am I getting a forgiveness here? And I remember looking at a statistic around the PSLF and I could be wrong in this, but I, I don't think I'm terribly far off in concept that it was like less than 5% of PSLF forgiveness applications were actually granted forgiveness. And it's because the student loan servicer said, hey, we don't have actually record of 120 qualifying payments. Even though you've been working at a, at a government facility or an Indian reservation or whatever, you know, for 10 years, we don't have record that all of your payments qualified. So therefore we're not going to give you forgiveness on that. And the borrower's thinking, but I have been working for a charity or nonprofit or a government entity or the military for 10 years. So why is this not being forgiven? And it's created, I think a lot of heartache and frustration for people and for the student loan servicers. So the government you're saying, is saying, okay, this can be a tech based, there can be a tech based solution to this. We can use technology to more effectively gather qualifying payments, count those payments, track them, report them. So when the time comes after, in the case of PSLF or 10 years or 20 years, under pay or 25 years under repay. Now it's a fairly clear, easy thing to go ahead and do that. And the government's trying to solve that problem before this massive tidal wave of student loan forgiveness coming down come down the line. Okay, let's pivot now into these waivers which are attempting to solve this problem that's accumulated since there are, we're now at that point since the start of these IDR plans and PSLF where this concept of forgiveness at the end of that time period.

Arrives. Now, now that's, that's really upon us. And for PSLF, that's already upon us. For IDRs, that's now coming upon us. And the government is saying we got to do this right? So now they have these waivers to say we're going to do this kind of one time. We're going to have this one time window in the case of a PSLF waiver. And this I guess a just a.

What would I say? There's no end to the IDR waiver. It's just we're going to add back in old payments that now we're going to say qualify toward your forgiveness. But the PSLF waivers is different. You have to go back and, and try to get your loan payments qualified by October 31st. Is my understanding, let's start off with the PSLF waiver. Let's not spend too much time on that, to be honest, because I don't, we don't have too many dentists or I think listeners who are going for the public student loan forgiveness waiver. But my understanding is that by October 31st, you've got to go to the government, you've got to see how many qualifying payments you have. If there were qualifying payments that are not reported on the student loan servicer's website, you have a chance to go and get that fixed so that now you can get forgiveness on that. Or if you were on a fell loan before.

The government took on student loans directly, that this would, I think predate 2010, if I'm correct. And you were on really a private bank loan backed by the government. So those were indirect loans back in the day. Now you can actually classify those payments into the PSLF waiver for forgiveness. How am I doing there, Dan? Can you grade me or clarify my explanation there?

Yeah, yeah. So with, with the waiver that's going on and waivers are temporary, right? They end at some point.

For PSLF for public Service loan forgiveness. That program is, we'll call it stringent on its requirements and, you know, requirement that you work for a nonprofit state or government employer requirement that you work full time, that's 30 hours a week or full time as defined by your employer, whichever is greater. So 28 hours a week and full time as defined by your employer doesn't count. 36 hours a week and part time by your employer doesn't count either.

On an income driven plan. So you can't be on one of those non income driven plans. This the extended, graduated, extended graduated or something that isn't the ten year standard plan. You have to be on an income driven plan. You have to be making the payments as required and on time. On time means no later than 15 days past the due date. So if you had autopay set to the 16th and it was due on the 1st, didn't count. The PSLF waiver does away with all that. Pretty much says just as long as you were working full time for a qualified employer going back to October 1st of 2007, we will count all of those payments made whether they were and a $0 payment or a non zero payment as long as you weren't in school deferment or in grace period or on forbearance initially. And that's a little bit like some of those forbearance maybe would get counted per the other waiver. Now the PSLF waiver pretty much says you can be on any of those plans. In the federal system you can have the wrong types of loans. You could have because normally PSLF says you have to have direct loans. You could have FFEL loans, you could have Perkins loans, you could have health professional loans. You just have to make them direct loans before October 31st through consolidation and they'll go back and count prior to the consolidation any history on those loans. On top of that they'll take the highest number of payments in the history of any of those loans and apply it to the new consolidated loan.

So you know, easy example if and then we'll probably move on to the IDR waiver. But if you were an associate dentist that worked for the VA from 2008 to 2012, you potentially have four years of baked in payments towards PSLF. But you got to take action aka make sure that you have direct loans today and certify that employment, submit the PSLF form, get it signed by the VA from back then and now you have four months, four months, four years of time cemented towards that program that you can pick up whenever you decide to later if you have.

Yeah, and this is all or nothing. You could have nine years. But if you didn't get that 10th year, those last 12 payments, you don't get 90% of your loan forgiven. It's 0% of your loan is forgiven. Correct.

I love the way you said that. That's often how I phrase it in a consult. This is all or nothing. You don't get a part. There's no partial forgiveness here.

And you have to consolidate in order to, to get. So action is definitely needed on this.

Yeah.

To get that forgiveness.

If this applies to you, you know, consolidation takes two months. I would plan on it taking two months. And you know, we're kind of ran out of time in a sense. I mean, if it happens really quickly, maybe it happens five weeks, but it's consolidate and then submit that form.

On that note of consolidation too. This is something that actually got me and I realized my mistake with the client about a month later is when you consolidate, you're not adjusting your existing rates pre consolidation to what is the new market rate post consolidation. The consolidation is simply taking the weighted average of your of your rates prior to consolidation and creating one rate post consolidation that's really equal to the weighted average of the prior rate. So you don't have to worry about losing any low rates prior to consolidation. Yeah, well, yeah, we had a client. Oh, go ahead.

There is like maybe two points of clarification there. So it takes the weighted average and it rounds up to the nearest 18 of 1%. So it's in the nearest 0.125. The government doesn't want to round out to the fourth decimal place. And then the other thing that you may lose if you're doing this is if you have FFEL loans, especially like mid 2000s FFEL loans, you probably have been receiving an interest rate discount to the tune of a percentage point. And you lose that interest rate discount, you get back instead the interest rate that you used to have before you had.

All.

Right, and therein is an example of a specialist over a generalist when it comes to the subject of student loans. So thanks for. Thanks for that clarification. Okay, let's move on to the IDR waiver. And the IDR waiver is going to be very relevant here. And for me, there's actually more questions. It's not as clear in my head. How far back can you go to suddenly classify payments as qualifying for forgiveness? What counts? What doesn't count? What action is required in order to take advantage of the IDR waiver? How many people this is actually going to affect? I think according to the government, it Wasn't that many. According to Travis Hornsby in one of his podcasts, it's going to affect a lot of people. Let's go ahead and talk about this. Go ahead and explain what is the IDR waiver and what questions should a dentist ask her or himself as they want to try to apply this, this waiver to their own situation.

Sure. So if you have federal loans and you borrowed prior to October 1st of 2010, there's a good chance that you have FFEL loans, federal family education loans, which are part of the guaranteed student loan program. And the guaranteed student loan program existed side by side for decades with the direct lending program. And I would think of the direct lending program is one that exists today as Education department backed, treasury backed and the FFEL program, the guaranteed student loan program, as mostly commercially backed loans, mostly backed by a bank. They're still federal loans, but they're two different programs. And so if you went to dental school or undergrad before October 1st of 2010, there's a good chance that you had FFEL loans, you know, chaired by Sallie Mae and pushed by Sallie Mae onto financial aid offices across the US and.

Those loans are eligible for just one of the five income driven plans. That's the old income based repayment Plan which takes 15% of your discretionary income. The other plans only allow direct loans into their programs. And two of them that are often talked about, pay as you earn and revised pay as you earn, take 10% of your discretionary income. So this type of loan that you were saddled with, even though your financial aid office had the option to pick from the two programs, prevents you from being able to be on a plan that takes less of your income. And the IDR waiver is the Education Department's attempt to, to remedy that. And it says essentially as long as you make, it says we are going to make a one time adjustment to your payment history and we'll include payment history on a non income driven plan or any plan in general.

And add that to your income driven plan progress on that 20 or 25 year plan that you're on and we'll do that.

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As long as you have all direct loans. So we'll do that to all of the direct loans that you have. If you consolidate an FFEL loan, that means you're paying that loan off and replacing it with a direct consolidated loan. And.

The IDR waiver pretty much says we'll go ahead and take that new loan, take the history of the FFEO loan and apply it to that and apply it to the new income driven plan that you pick. Which is huge because it means that you get to experience a reduction in discretionary income requirement like that percentage of income that's required and you get to maintain pick up where you left off with your history. You also get to tack on any history where maybe you started out on the standard plan, maybe you started out on the extended plan. You get to tack on that history too. So a lot of folks are getting a huge head start and the action is consolidate before they make that adjustment. And they've said that for people who are pursuing long term forgiveness, that's 20 or 25 years. We'll start making those adjustments no sooner than January 1st of 2023, which says, well, I got to do it by the end of the year.

So there is a due date, so to speak, on action required for the IDR waiver.

Yeah, they don't say, they didn't say we're going to make a two time adjustment. They said we're going to make a one time adjustment. So if you miss that one time adjustment, then you missed it. And they said that we're going to start making those adjustments January 1st of 2023 on the IDR waiver page.

Okay, let's talk about, I want to dissect this a little bit more. Let's talk about borrowers who had loans pre2010 and our listeners who have loans post 2010. And if it's pre2010, you're likely and you haven't done anything, you haven't consolidated then or you haven't refinanced in another private loan, then you probably have FFEL loans. And what if you go all the way back to the 90s or maybe early 2000s, can you go all the way back? If you consolidate now, can you go all the way back and count your earliest fellow loan payments toward a qualifying month of payment?

So the way we treated that, because that was a question that came up right when that page was posted internally was well, they didn't explicitly say they weren't going to count it. So it's just not included. They just said the language says we'll count payments prior to so repayment status prior to consolidation. And the PSLF waiver was very clear 10-1-2007. That's as far back as we'll count qualified payments. The IDR waiver isn't clear.

I'd say position yourself to benefit from it through consolidation. Recognize that normally consolidation is a bad word in my vocabulary. It normally means erase your history, but in this circumstance it's not going to erase your history.

And I want to mention a few comments about that. What happens if you switch plans when you consolidated accrued going into capitalized interest, that kind of thing. And we'll get there in a sec. But as of our understanding right now is you can effectively go back to day one month one on your FFEL loans and you can get that counted. So if somebody has loans in the 90s, loan payments in the 90s, and they could start, if they go through this process and they get those as qualified, they could essentially have forgiveness right now.

On their loans. If they can show they have 20 or 25 depending on the plan, I would think that they would just switch over to pay instead of repay or IBR, the new IBR, which has 20 years. Because then why wait an extra five years when you can just have it forgiven at the 20 year rather than the 25 year mark? Do you for, do you foresee this happening? And all of the sun. A lot of those borrowers who had loans from the 90s suddenly having their debt forgiven. And it's my understanding that the tax bomb is not applicable through 2025 if they do end up having their, their loans forgiven before that point in time that the forgiveness is not taxable.

Yeah, I think that, yeah, Wes, I think that anyone who positions themselves to benefit from this, who has loans from back then.

You know, is probably going to benefit in a big way.

So even if you have say 30,000, which to me feels like immensely small compared to what most borrowers have these days, but even if you have 30,000, why not go through that process and save yourself $30,000? And a lot of my clients who are saying their 50s, they have a lower balance typically, and that might be, you know, sub 150,000 or so. This could be very, very applicable to, to, to them especially because they could see benefits of forgiveness in the very near future.

Yeah, for them, you know, for this, for a long time they've been just kind of off on the wayside on a fixed plan that doesn't accrue towards any sort of forgiveness state. And that's because when they started paying back loans, the only plan that was available was the income contingent repayment plan from 1993. And that takes 20% of your income. And if you're a dentist or a practice owner, that's an incredibly large amount.

I've never met a single person on icr, so safe to say nobody was on an income driven repayment plan during that time. And they probably haven't updated that just because they've been too involved in life. And there haven't been any of these waivers and kinds of things. So it was like why, why, why try to start a 20 or 25 year clock now when I'm so deep into the, to the repayment schedule, there's not a lot left. And, and so I'm not going to do it. But suddenly there's this door that's opened up to allow them to retroactively apply this. And so it's making it a very interesting proposition for people, for, for those.

For those folks who have a low balance and really high income. So I think their income is two to two and a half times their current balance. The ICR plan might actually be a great solution because it has something that the other plans don't have. It has a ceiling and no barrier to entry. So the pay as you earn has a barrier to entry. It says you can't have been a borrower before 10-01-2007. And if your payment is greater than what it would cost to pay the loan down in 10 years, if your calculated payment is higher than that, then you're not allowed into the plan. Revised pay as your says, we'll take 10% of your income, but if you have a lot of income, it's a big payment. Still income contingent repayment says it's either 20% of your discretionary income or it's the 12 year standard plan payment adjusted by your income. So what does it cost to pay the loan down in 12 years? For most of our practice owners, multiply that payment by 2 and that's the payment they'll make until they get forgiveness.

Okay. I think this is actually a really critical point that I entirely overlooked, which is if you have these fellow loans from the early 2000 or even the 90s, and now you're saying I can go back and have these qualified toward forgiveness, but in order to do that I have to consolidate, right? I have to consolidate and I have to move to one of the IDR plans. The ICR plan is the only plan that goes back that far where you can attach those old payments to an IDR plan if it's pay or repay. Those were newer plans. So you can't go past before when those, the inception of those plans.

You could, you can. It's just I think that a lot of folks in that situation, like I run into this with consults where I have like a tending physician who has, you know, well over half a million of income, but they have a $30,000 loan hanging out and they could go on the revised pay as you earn plan, but that's a really, really high payment. They're not allowed onto any of the other plans because they make too much relative to what they owe except for the ICR plan. And a lot of folks look at that and they look at the first rule and they go, well, 20% of my income. I'm not going to pick that when in fact that's the lowest payment. When the rules are run out and they calculate the payment they may have, they might already be there. They might already be at 25 years. They're just not on an income driven plan right now. And to have this adjustment made next spring, you have to get on one.

Got it. So they can't do that. Dr. Making 500,000 can't do pay because they're not suffering a financial hardship. In other words, their 10 year plan payment is higher than 10% of what their income is and they could benefit from repay.

But repay is 10% of their income. ICR is 20% of their income. But you're saying there's a reason why ICR may be better than repay. I need you to clarify that for me one more time because I am still pegging my mind on. Well, 20% is higher than 10%.

Yeah. So if you had a, say a $30,000 loan, since we've been talking about that, the ICR plan looks at, that takes the interest rate, let's just say it's 6%, $30,000 loan over 12 years, that payment is just under $300 a month.

That's under the ICR.

Under the ICR plan, it would say 20% of your income or the 12 year standard plan adjusted by your income.

Got it. Okay. So the 12 year standard plan could be less than 10% of their income, which is.

Yeah.

Or could be less. Yeah. Than 10% of their income, which is what the repay option would be. Okay, so hopefully I haven't confused. Listen, if you have a repay option, you're paying a full 10% of your income. There's no, there's no other calculation or cap or limit a full 10%. So if you're making 500,000, then you could potentially be paying $50,000 of your income. Now that there's, it's not exactly 10%. Calculating your actually your actual payment. There's a little bit more to that, but you get the point. Pretty close, 50,000 where if you're under the ICR plan, it caps it under either 20% which would be 100% of your income, or a 12 year repayment plan which could end up only being $15,000 of your income or $4,000 of your income for the year on 30,000 balance. And so in that case the ICR is better because it has a cap, has two caps and the lower of those two caps, which is the 12 year payment plan is less than 10% of your income, which is what's required under repay. Okay. You just taught Wes something very new. And I've spent a lot of time in student loans, so that was, that was very helpful. Hopefully it was helpful. Some of our borrowers who have, have older loans and who are making a good money and we definitely have a lot of those types of clients, so this could be helpful to them as well. But if.

Somebody decides to consolidate their loans through financialaid.gov and they have payments going all the way back to the early 2000s or the 90s.

They can now qualify those payments even though they weren't on an IDR plan. Which seems a little bit strange to me because the whole point of the forgiveness was that you were on an IDR plan and it was sort of subject to those, those rules. And those rules are what made you eligible for the forgiveness. Now they're saying you didn't have to be subject to those rules and we're still going to give you forgiveness because we think our country has a student loan problem and we as a government want to try to give this blanket support to alleviate that problem.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's, I think it's created opportunity for folks that, you know, never had that opportunity. And there, there's like with every announcement there are some unintended consequences. And for the folks that want to, for lack of a better word, exploit those unintended consequences for their benefit, I would view this like someone might view a tax loophole in a sense.

Yeah, like a Roth conversion. You know, we, hey, we can do that. The law allows this. So, so we can do it. Hey, we at practice cfo, if the law allows it, we do it. We definitely will have our doctors do it. All right. Now for borrowers after 2010, which is going to be a lot of our listeners here, this can still apply in the sense that if they were not on an IDR loan, they had not consolidated because you can have a loan in 2018 and you never consolidated or you, you graduate in 2020, you'd never consolidated because, well, you haven't had to make any payments anyways. So why go through all that decision making process of consolidating or not? So you have people who haven't consolidated since 2010. This now allows them to count all payments prior to consolidation, also toward their student loan forgiveness. That's the benefit to them. So even though they already have direct loans, they may not have consolidated those loans. They don't have fell loans. Those were predated them, but they still get the benefit because they never consolidated their loans. So it wasn't a matter of the wrong loan type. It was a matter. Well, no, I'm wrong on that. They were in a loan type that didn't qualify for forgiveness because it wasn't an IDR plan. They can now go ahead and make that. Make that, make that change. Is there any additional comments for people who got loans after 2010 who were not in fell loans that we want to make sure they take advantage of for the IDR waiver?

Yeah, so there's. On that IDR waiver page, there's two different bullet points that kind of may intersect with each other. So one is very clear about FFEL loans. Commercially backed. Commercially backed FFEL loans cannot receive an adjustment for their payment history unless they are consolidated. And you have to do that before they make the adjustment. We've been over that. The other bullet point says we'll count all payments prior to consolidation. And there's nothing mentioned about, well, what if you consolidate direct loans and if we go to the other waiver, the PSLF waiver, It pretty much said consolidate and we'll take the highest payment count from any one of your 12 to 24 loans and apply it to the new loan.

I can't draw a direct relationship there between those two waivers, but they are linked. The IDR waiver was announced April 19th of 2022. It updated the PSLF waiver that was announced October 6th of 2021 to include forbearances if they count under the IDR waiver. So the IDR waiver says if you weren't in repayment and you were just on a different plan.

Sorry, not on a different plan. If you were in forbearance status because you had called and said, you know, I'm in orthoresidency, I can't make the payments right now, then that forbearance would count as long as you had at least 12 months in a row or you had more than 36 months in aggregate. So they count that towards repayment, Count it towards the plan.

How we've been recently operating is if you have a direct loan or all direct loans with different repayment amounts. And an example of that could be you went to undergrad and you then took a few years off and then went to dental school, you may have had some payment history there and you could potentially borrow from that payment history through consolidation and have your new loan post dental school, have all that payment history as a head start to give you a head start on your path towards 20 years.

So the first month would be when they, even before dental school, when they were already making payments on their probably Stafford under grad loans. That was technically the start of their forgiveness period. And, and even though they got the bulk of their loans maybe a few years after that, we started the 20 year clock even for the loans after that, the big loans effectively getting a retroactive start date because you started making those payments before you went to dental school and started the clock. So in order to get this, you need to make sure that you consolidate all these loans together into one loan. Correct. And then it's simulated as if all of those loans started at your first payment from your undergrad loans.

Right. So if you had two years off between school and you had payments in an income driven plan, you might have two years of payments, head start, that's a big deal.

You might come out of your undergraduate loan with $15,000 of student loan payments, start making some payments on that three years later, go back to dental school or a year later. And then you got suddenly four years later or five years after, six years after you started making that first payment, now you've got $600,000. Well, we get basically six free years counting toward the 20 or the 25 on the whole darn thing. That's pretty cool. And again, the action required for that is that they do need to consolidate by. Did you say December 31st?

I would treat it as December 31st. So I think at the end of the day there's an opportunity to have past payments count and you want to position yourself for that.

There's seemingly no penalty for doing that.

Okay. On this waiver period, is it also a waiver that if somebody switches from a pay to a repay or vice versa, or an IBR to a repay or any of those plans, switching it around, that typically in the past you would have to capitalize any accrued interest, was my understanding. And what I mean by that is, as you know, when you come out of dental school and you're on an IDR plan or whatever and your balance is going up because the amount you're paying on your student loans doesn't even satisfy the interest portion of the loan. And based on a 10 year plan, and therefore the difference or the spread gets added to the balance of your loan. And so you see your loan goes up, most people, listen to me, are going to know that from personal experience. But you're not paying interest on the increased amount, so it's simply added to it. It's called accrued. But you're not paying interest on it. So it's compound. It's not, it's not being compound, it's not becoming compound interest. But if you switch from a pay to a repay, vice versa, historically, suddenly all that accrued interest now becomes compound interest and now you're paying interest on that interest. Does this waiver, is this waiver allowing people to switch plans without that trigger occurring?

I would go in with the assumption that it's going to and then run the math that way. If the math works out well for forgiveness or just least cost, then go that route. And normally that capitalization of interest when I run it out in someone's plan.

Is a lot smaller than paying 10% of their income instead of 15% of their income.

Okay, so you're saying assume that it still does capitalize, which means that upon the switch and under the new payment plan you are paying interest on that accrued balance, but that the overall effect isn't generally material enough to change the game plan.

Correct. Yep.

Okay, that's good to know. Now what if.

What if somebody going Back to the pre 2010ers, is there a refund if they have more than 20 years now under the rule and they switch to an icr?

So short answer is no. Slightly little bit longer answer is if we go to the PSLF waiver, they've already defined that to say if you had more than 120 qualifying payments on an FFEO loan, we will not give a refund for that. And this is kind of like that. You're consolidating an FFEL loan and you might have 25 years or more. And in that situation I would treat it like the PSLF way. Expect that there's no payments. It's from a bank backed program, a commercially backed program. The Education department is going to bail at the banks even further. They did that because I thought I.

Did see the word refund on the studentaid.gov website on the IDR page and it was confusing me like there was a refund sometimes but not a refund other times.

Yeah, there I think on that page further on down they talk about how the IDR waiver can apply towards pslf. And so all the refund talk has been towards public service loan forgiveness.

And they're basically saying there is no refund. Right. For the longer period if you end up having say 12 years working for a nonprofit payments, you can't get a refund for those extra two years that you paid on.

Not, not if you're getting that payment history from FFEL loans.

Okay, great. So we've talked about pslf, we've talked about idr, we've talked about ending of the, the COVID deferment I will call it. We've talked about recalculation versus reclassification.

I think I just want to end really quickly on student loan servicers and.

We'Re essentially seeing a changing of the guards pretty much on 90% of these loans because the big four which had I believe 80% of the loans, Navient, Nelnet, FedLoan Servicing which did all the PSLF and Great Lakes, those are all gone or going to be gone and now Mohela stays and Higher Education Services Corp. Ed Financial stays and now we've got these new players in FH Khan and Associates and who knows, maybe this is updated since two months ago when I looked at this. This stuff is changing all the time but we've got Maximus as a new player, we've got Trellis and we've got Advantage. Advantage is I believe the one taking over the Navient loans and you've got Mohela is now taking on the PSLF stuff. So there's just a whole lot of swap in and transferring going on here. I just want to distill this down to what our listeners need to know. How does this, what do they need to watch out for? What landmines are there that they're not aware of possibly that they need to take action on to make sure that they're not negatively affected by this transfer.

Yeah.

So I would, I would be first very, very careful about.

Just like anything in this current world environment like taking a phone call and believing that the person on the other line at first that they're from your loan servicer, that they are here to take your information. If anyone is asking you for personally personal identifiable information on the phone it's probably not your loan servicer. They don't do that. In fact they try to not call you and they've even said I remember Fedloan a couple months ago announcing on their site like please don't call us, chat us through our chat feature or submit a help request or send us an email. So I would be very cautious about phone calls especially if it's not you reaching out to them. And secondly with the loan servicers that are out there like as a current day, as of this recording you've got Aidvantage owned by Maximus Education and Aidvantage took all of the direct loans from Naviant earlier this year.

You've got Nelnet which just purchased most of or take is taking over most of Great Lakes loans. So Great Lakes loans borrowers, they're going to Nelnet and that transfer has already started. They're just transferring lots and lots of borrowers. So it'll take some time. And then you've got Mohela, which is they're taking over the responsibility of counting qualified payments towards public service loan forgiveness from fedloan. So fedloan is relinquishing that responsibility they've had for the past decade.

And then you have ED Financial, that's still hanging out there. So.

There are a few other loan servicers that are in the pipeline but as of current day that's the set. If you are not pursuing public service loan forgiveness, probably the best loan servicer to end up at current day is Nelnet. And if you are pursuing public service loan forgiveness and you're filling out an application on studentaid.gov they will prompt you to select Mohela.

And Aidvantage is serving for some reason as the middleman servicer between, between ED Financial.

Mohela, fedloan. So if you're doing a consolidation to transfer loans from, from one servicer to another, aidvantage probably has their fingers in the mix unless it's an lnet.

Now how to treat this? I would treat your loan servicer just like you would your bank, your, your major bank for where your checking account is. It would be like one major bank bought another major bank and you got a new checkbook but your cash is still there. The loan servicer, and I think I mentioned this earlier, is not there to give you advice. They're there to take your information, take your payment and apply it to your loans. Currently their job is still to count those payments towards forgiveness. That may change.

Okay, so what our borrowers need to do is know that if they have questions, don't take those questions to necessarily the servicer. They can maybe try to find some answers on financialaid.gov maybe research or studentloanplanner.com they can contact you guys in order to get accurate information. If you're client of practice cfo as you can tell, we have a decent understanding of this. We don't have the same level of understanding as Dan and the team over there. Studentloanplanner.com but from my understanding is like a bank switching over your home loan for example, is you're going to get a new website. Now you have to create a login for that. You're going to have to create a login make sure you've got that login. Should they be going on to financialaid.gov and downloading that CSV file of their payment history and having that as a record or maybe, you know, having something offline at a point in time that showed all their payment history in case something gets lost in transfer? Would that be a good idea?

Yeah. So we've recommended that often, especially for folks pursuing public service loan forgiveness, to screenshot or print to PDF their payment history from their current loan servicer. So their current loan servicer, that's where it could potentially get messed up is the data that they have because they use a different tracking system than the other loan servicer, the.gov file. That's a great idea too. I would download that file, that CSV file. So you log in, you go to your name in the upper right hand corner. As long as you're on a desktop device, if you don't see it, zoom out. Then you'll see your first name. Click on that. Click on my aid. And at the top right of the next window should be download my student aid data. You can download that to CSV to just have a permanent one instance of time of the history of your payments and your loans over time as they've been updated by different loan servicers. So those two things are great ideas, I think.

You know, recently I had my home loan. I want to make 2 comments on this because I think it relates. It's a very similar circumstance. I had my home loan which was with BVBA Compass, was BVA Compass was bought out by PNC bank, which incidentally does a lot of dental lending. And PNC bank has my loan over there. But I noticed with the credit bureaus, TransUnion, Equifax and Experian that report your FICO score, they now do not have my new loan. And so they're not showing any payment history on there. So there's an example of something getting lost in a transfer of data from one servicer, in this case a bank, to another bank. And so I need to take action with the credit bureaus because I want them to show that, because that actually helps my credit report because my loan payment is an automated payment. I know I'm not going to be late on that. Here's another thing too, is that when all this happens and your required payments resume, if for any reason you don't have those set up automatically. And correct me if I'm wrong here, Dan, but student loans payments do show up on your credit score, right? So if you have A late payment on a student loan. If you have a late payment on a student loan, that is going to affect your credit score. And if you're an associate plan to buy a practice, your credit score can drop extremely fast from low payments because.

Paying your pay, making your payments timely, is 30% of your credit score. That is, I think the biggest factor in what your credit score actually is, is paying your payments on time. Now, this is a, it's a very sensitive data point in the calculation of your credit score. Let me give you an example. I have a separate side business. It's somewhat of a passive business. I'm not really involved in it. It's with a, with a couple friends of mine and we had set up a credit card account at Chase for this. This was back in January of 2020. And it was used for some basic things like paying for Intuit's Quickbook file and things like that. 80 bucks a month and some other stuff. Well, we essentially closed down that credit card. We didn't literally close down, but we stopped using it in December of last year. And we knew there were a few more payments. We paid everything off through March. And the account, I wasn't involved on this at all. I'm not doing the accounting on this. But because it was a startup company, it was attached to my name personally as an owner. And so it was, it was showing up. I actually didn't know this, but it was showing up on my Experian credit report. Well, the accountant thought that it was all done and paid for. And then QuickBooks charged their final $80 automated charge on that Chase credit card. And he didn't know about it and he didn't look and I didn't look. I'm not checking this regularly. And it became 30 and then 60 days late. Now, there was zero other balance. It was an $80 charge. We had a $60,000 credit line on this thing. 80 bucks. I have for 25 years, never missed a single payment in my life ever. And I have a very low debt to income ratio. And.

And so $80 caused my credit score to go from 8:30, which is near perfect, down to a 670.

That's terrible.

670. And so here's what happened. I call Experian and I'm like, you got to see this in context. Here's the circumstance. I got a letter from the account explaining, you know, just a simple error on their side. We paid it off. We even got the late fee refunded from Chase. We did everything we could. It was a speck on the map. And yet it completely tanked my credit score. And if I had that credit score and I was trying to buy a dental practice, I probably wouldn't be getting a loan. It just canceled my ability to go be able to buy a loan. So I said, okay, I'm going to go through the dispute process with Experian. I submitted everything, I called them, I did everything they want me to do. And not only did they reject it, but during that time I crept back up to 690. And then on the day when they finally got to it and they rejected it, they dropped me back down to 660. And then it wasn't actually attached to my TransUnion. TransUnion somehow didn't have that credit card attached to my TransUnion account. Suddenly on that day, TransUnion it pops up on my TransUnion and my TransUnion credit score dropped. So it's like they're notifying each other somehow. I could be wrong on that. But I don't think it's coincidence that on that day TransUnion adds that credit card to my account and it plunges over there as well. And so now I've ended hiring a credit repair company to try to solve this. But my main point is there. Borrowers, dentists, don't make a mistake on this. Don't let an error come up, because it will. These credit reporting companies, they are, they have no mercy whatsoever. No mercy. And it can take me, I suspect this, this may take me four or five, six months to repair that. And even then I don't even know the outcome. It may never get fully repaired and it's just going to take another two, three years of building up good credit history in order to dilute out that tiny late payment to get me back up to hopefully a respectable credit score. It's the silliest thing I've ever seen. It is, I feel like, I feel like some company or tech innovation needs to come out of Silicon Valley to solve this darn problem of FICO score not really accurately representing people's credit worthiness. It's a, it's, it's actually a big problem.

We've been talking about thousands of dollars a month payments on income driven plans and an $80 a month payment could haunt you. And also, not to mention take up your time, which is, it has, it's.

Already taken up about six hours of my time. You're right. Place a price tag on that. That's pretty, that's pretty valuable. When I'd rather be spending that with my kids or doing something in the business. And so. And they don't care what the late payment balance was. It's just simply, it was a late payment, it could have been a dollar and it still would have had the same effect on my credit score. So mine. And the funny thing is I've literally presented courses on maintaining a healthy credit score. Like I'm the professional on this subject and I just got tagged for this and I feel guilty of, I don't know, maybe I, maybe I need to be checking it on a weekly basis or something. I don't know. But anyways, okay. This has been so valuable. Dan, thanks for this. How can people get connected with you if they have questions on their student loans? You do a consult for them where you gather their information, you get their, maybe their file off of financialaid.gov, you do your analysis, you give them just very direct personal consulting on this. How do they get in touch with you?

Yeah, the best place to get in touch with me and the other consultants at Student Loan Planner is go to studentloanplanner.com and then at the very top there's a get help button along the ribbon and you can book a consult. Any one of us are, we're all certified student loan professionals. And we'll take you through a one hour consult where it's one on one or one on two if your spouse is there. And make sure to fill out the form right after booking. That tells us the brief set of questions that we really need to know to form a baseline. And then send to your assigned consultant your student loan data file that Wes has just mentioned. You do that one hour we'll go through for the student loans piece and solve that situation. So you can go back to your financial planner, go back to Wes and continue on working on the other things that matter just as much or more.

And when they choose on that at the top, can they choose you specifically? Are you in like a drop down list of consultants?

You know, if you, if you want to work directly with me once, once you're assigned to a consultant, email them and ask them. I can also send my direct link to Wes after the show and include that. I do have a direct booking link. We're all kind of like, for example, right now is the recording beginning of August. We are booked out for the month of August. So. And I'm in the same boat. But I would love to work with a dentist listening to this on this show. That is incidentally, most of the people that I do consults with. So if you want to book with me, then either say that after you book to help studentloanplanner.com or.

Look for look for my booking link through Wes.

Okay, Excellent. Well, you're clearly an authoritative source on the subject. Dan, thank you so much for your time and being on the show. And I'm sure I would love to have you on the show a year or two from now. And so many rules have changed again and been updated, and we'll want to keep our listeners current on this really important area of their finances.

Thanks, Wes. It was a pleasure.