Ep 475: Worried About Your Student Loans? The Steps To Take NOW
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For wage garnishment, turning that system on takes a little bit longer, so people probably won't get those notices for several weeks, and the process probably won't start until the summer. But again, keep an eye out for it, and contact the default resolution group. Do what you can to get out of default, and so you can avoid that.

Hey, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us today on Her Money. I'm Jean Chatzky, and we are recording this episode during the first week of May, which is also not at all coincidentally the week that the Trump administration officially restarted collections on defaulted student loans, marking the end of a five-year pause, a historic pause.

five-year pause that started back in his first term. And during this pause, borrowers who were going through the pandemic like the rest of us, at least at the beginning, were not penalized for falling behind on repayment. That continued for one year, two years, three, four, five, and now the administration is saying it is time to pay up. And if you don't,

You could see your wages garnished, your Social Security payments reduced, even your credit scores take a hit. This all comes at a time when we are, many of us, feeling really worried about the economy. We're bracing ourselves for a possible recession that, by the way, the CEO of PIMCO, which is a big investment house, said last week that we

may already be in. And all of this flip-flopping on student loan repayment has made people wonder, is this really happening? Is it true this time around? Or will the administration walk this back? To help us make sense of all of it, we've got student loan expert Jillian Berman. She is assistant managing editor for news and enterprise at MarketWatch. She's also got a great new book out. It's called Sunk Consciousness.

Who's to blame for the nation's broken student loan system and how to fix it? We're going to take a quick break. If retirement's on your radar, or even if it still feels far off in the distance, you need to know where your money's going today, because here's the truth.

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an extra 25 cents for every gallon on your first tank of gas using promo code HERMONEY. We are back with Jillian Berman. Jillian, thank you for being here. We roped you in and we said we have to talk about this now, so we appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. As I just mentioned, President Trump has restarted student loan debt collection again this week.

Tell us what this really means to people who have federal student loans. Yeah. So one thing to be clear about, and this has caused a lot of confusion and I think fear for a lot of people, is that these sort of efforts and harsh consequences that you mentioned only apply to borrowers with defaulted student loans. So those are borrowers who have not paid in...

roughly a year. And they're not borrowers who are in a forbearance or some other pause. These are borrowers who are in default, and there's about 5 million of them. And so what that means is these 5 million borrowers who were all likely in default before the pandemic will now face the consequences of that, which include, like you mentioned, having your wages garnished, Social Security benefits and tax refunds offset, things like that.

So when you say these are all people or many people who were in default before the pandemic, are

Are you saying these are not people who took the pause when it was offered and were on time payers before then, but maybe got confused and didn't pick it up again? Right, exactly. So the 5 million who are sort of going to start facing consequences, not quite immediately, but the soonest of anyone are people who were in default before the pandemic as part of the pandemic, the Trump administration and then the Biden administration.

these harsh collection activities. So these were people who were in default before. There was a pause to the collection activity. They didn't experience it. And now we've turned those consequences back on. Then there's another roughly 4 million people or so who are

fallen behind since payments resumed following the pandemic. And those people are at risk of falling into default if they don't do anything or take any action later this year. So you know, we could see another wave of people defaulting on their student loans in the fall as well. But those borrowers who are behind, they're not at risk yet.

How do you know where you stand? How do you check the status of your student loans? And once again, I want to be really clear. We are talking about federal student loans. We're not talking about your private loans here. But how do you check the status of these loans? What's the difference between being current and forbearance, delinquent or in default?

Yeah, so the best way to check on your federal student loan status is to log on to studentaid.gov. If you sign in there, if you're in default, it should be pretty clear to you. So default is basically you have not made a payment that you owed for more than nine months. That's one status and that's a status that's facing these really harsh consequences.

Delinquency means you've fallen behind. You're about three months behind on payments, but you haven't yet hit that nine month window. That means you're in default. And for delinquency, you will see credit score consequences to that. So if your credit score takes a hit, that's a signal.

And it's because of your student loans that may be a signal that you need to address them. Forbearance is a temporary pause in payments that your servicer will put you in sometimes if you're struggling to manage your loans. Or what we're seeing right now is there's a lot of borrowers in forbearance because

there's litigation surrounding student loan repayment plans. So about 8 million borrowers are in kind of like a forced forbearance and they've been in it for months. And so if you're in forbearance, you're not in default. Forbearance is supposed to protect you against the consequences of delinquency and default. If you're in deferment, that's the same thing. If you're in a grace period, which is after you graduate from college,

your program, you have about six months before you have to start repaying your loans. That's not in default. So there are a lot of people out there who maybe haven't made a payment in a long time, but they're not actually in default. They're sort of in some other protected status. If you go online and you see you're either in default or maybe you are delinquent, what's the next step? How do you right that ship? Yeah, so if you're in default, for most people, the best next step is going to be to contact something called the default resolution group.

And if you Google it, you can find their info. But basically, you know, that's a group at the Department of Education that will kind of help you get into the different programs that can cure your default. There's two ways that people typically do it. One is called a rehabilitation. One is called a consolidation. But those are two ways that can help you cure your defaults.

It's possible that we'll see some long call wait times or things like that for that group, but get on the phone and do what you can to get out of default. If you're delinquent or you're behind, but you're not yet in default, that's when you should call your student loan servicer and try to get into an affordable repayment plan. For most people, that's going to be something called income-driven repayment, but there are other options too that could help.

So income-driven repayment is what's kind of up in the air. The Biden administration pitched a new form of income-driven or income-based repayment called the SAVE program that lowered the amount of money for a lot of people, the amount that they had to come out of pocket with, and also increased forgiveness in that it fast-forwarded it a bit.

Where do we stand with the SAVE program? And if you tried to take advantage of it, or if you thought you were taking advantage of it,

What happens to you now? Right. So the SAVE program is currently mired in litigation. It's been temporarily blocked by federal court, but it's possible that it will be fully knocked down sort of in coming weeks, months. The people who were in that program, there's about 8 million of them. They're in a forbearance to sort of hold them harmless while the situation gets litigated.

In the meantime, though, because of the litigation, there were some challenges for borrowers accessing the other types of income driven repayment plans, which have different names, but they're sort of tied legally in some ways to save. So for a while, people were not able to fill out those applications. The Department of Education was not processing them.

The Department of Education has said that as part of this restart of debt collection, they're going to start processing those applications, or the servicers that they hire to do this work are going to start processing those applications. There is a roughly 1.8 million application backlog. So yeah, so it's going to take them a while to get through it. But if you apply for that, your servicer should put you in a forbearance. If they don't, call and ask them to just to make sure that you're not

experiencing any penalties or consequences while you wait on a decision there. Meantime, I've been reading that the Trump administration is planning to roll out its own version of an income-based repayment program. When is that supposed to happen? And if you're a student coming out this May, you're not making a ton of money, and you would like to get into some form of IBR, is that even an option at this point?

Yeah, so actually, there's two sort of like parallel things going on that Republicans are doing here to revamp income driven repayment. One is the Trump administration sort of through the Department of Education has started this like regulatory rulemaking process, which is kind of like the wonky term for writing new rules and doing what it takes to get a new repayment program out there. And that process will take

several months to pan out. So that's something to watch. At the same time, Republicans in Congress have proposed their own new version of income driven repayment. It's tied to the budget reconciliation. So there are questions of whether it will go through and sort of the Senate and the House can agree and all of that. But you know, they're also looking to put their own stamp on student loan repayment. If

If you're somebody who's graduating now and you want to access these plans, you should apply to whatever is available. And the thing about student loans is that if you apply to what's available and things change, you can switch. What congressional Republicans are talking about doing would sort of, if it goes into place, push people into their new version of income-driven repayment next year. But if you are looking for a solution now, you should definitely apply for what's available now. Okay.

There are a lot of people who were able to coast because they didn't have student loan repayment in their budget. It was a big line item that they didn't have to deal with for a very long time. That's not true anymore. How are you seeing students adjust to having to add this back in to checks that they write every month?

Yeah, I mean, I think, like you said, there were definitely some benefits to students and families' bottom lines during the pause. Like we saw people pay down other debt. We saw people actually even in some cases take on more debt in other directions and assign that they maybe had more borrowing capacity to buy a home or a car or something like that.

Some people also took steps to just for much of the payment pause interest was actually paused on federal student loans. So a lot of people took steps to like really pay down their student loans aggressively. But yeah, you know, it's definitely something that that people are thinking about now trying to to fit that bill in. And then the other thing that that's been going on for a while, but

that's also picking up is people are just trying to sort through the logistics of fitting the payment in. And so getting in touch with our servicer, making sure that they're on a repayment plan that makes sense for them, all of that. Sometimes that can be taxing, can take a lot of phone calls or emails or things like that. And making sure you get that right is important because that's how you stay current.

We don't talk much about wage garnishment or having your tax refund withheld on this show. It hasn't been that much of an issue in the recent past. But for 5 million people, potentially another 4 million people who are in default, it looks like it's possible. How does it work now?

And is there any way to get around it? Yeah. So for all of these consequences, you're notified before they happen. So when the Trump administration said that they're restarting debt collection this week, what they mean is that this week they are sending out the notices to people who are set to have Social Security benefits and tax refunds taken away.

So you get a notice. And if you get that notice, then you should try to contact the default resolution group and do what you can to either rehabilitate your loan out of default or consolidate out of default. And that can help you avoid those consequences. For wage garnishment, turning that system on takes a little bit longer. So people probably won't

get those notices for several weeks. And the process probably won't start until the summer. But again, keep an eye out. If you see one of those, keep an eye out for it and do what you can. Contact the default resolution group. Do what you can to get out of default. And so you can avoid that from happening. Let's talk about your book, Jillian, because broken seems to be the best word.

at least it's a really good one for the state of the student loan system. It is so hard to navigate all of this flip-flopping, pausing payments, restarting five different... I mean, I've been covering...

personal finance for a very, very long time. I can't even tell you all the names of the different income-based repayment plans that I have seen over time. Was there ever a point at which this system was not broken? And how did we get here? Yeah, I mean, I think part of what makes the brokenness of it

evident, right, is that so many people rely on student loans now to go to college. And so so many people experience the pain points and consequences of it. Sort of, I argue in the book that the design of the system really allowed for sort of all these different interests to come in and try to get what they could out of it. It wasn't always designed to be sort of in the best interest of borrowers and taxpayers. And so that's created problems that

kind of over time have built up. I mean, in terms of like big causes where we really see it break down. I mean, I think one thing is that's been well documented is over time states have pulled back from funding public colleges, which has meant for many students tuition has gone up. You might have to take on more debt.

We've seen over time just challenges for people with dealing with servicers. So even though you have these programs available that are supposed to make your payments more affordable, it can just be hard to access them. And I think a really big moment, you know, for student debt that really kind of just exposed how broken the system was, was the Great Recession. We had this dynamic of families obviously had less money to spend on college and maybe were less likely to like borrow from their home equity to pay for it.

And then we had this dynamic that I mentioned already about the states pulling back that really ramped up during the Great Recession states pulled back from funding their public colleges. And then sort of like on the other end, students were coming out and they were dealing with stagnant wages, a tough job market. And so they had this debt and they couldn't get the jobs that would pay enough to help them pay it down. So that was kind of a moment when really was like all the assumptions we had about how this worked and how effective it would be really broke down.

How do you think about the value proposition these days? I was reading the Wall Street Journal, I think it was this morning. You can never tell what day a story comes out anymore because you read them online and I get the paper in print on Saturdays. I've already read everything in it. It's so frustrating.

But I was reading a story this morning about kids graduating high school and being offered jobs at $70,000 a year. And they're going through vocational training programs. I went to a high school like this. I grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia. We had welding in the basement. We had auto shop. Our students could come out with skills that they could actually use to get jobs. And clearly that is starting to happen in some places again, which just really

raises the question of who should be A, going to college and who should be borrowing to go to college. Yeah. I mean, I think the tax that student loans place on people, that really does make the question of value much more salient. And I think we for a long time had this sort of like mentality of everyone should be striving to

towards college without really asking the follow-up question of what is college giving them? Are they getting out of it what everyone is telling them they should be getting out of it? Now we're really seeing a moment sort of politicians on both sides of the aisle are questioning that mentality. And like I saw an op-ed in the New York Times, I think yesterday from Randy Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, a big Democrat saying we shouldn't be

pushing college on everyone. And then obviously, you have sort of the Trump administration is sort of pushing that narrative as well. So it's definitely something that that everyone's raising questions about. And I think the cost is really one of the reasons why. And that's, that's kind of part of the history I explore in my book, it used to be that

You could go to college because the government kind of, whether it was state or federal, subsidized it. You could go and just try it out. It wasn't so risky to see if it worked for you, to see if this was your path, if you could find a career out of it. Now we really ask students and families to take on most of the risk. And so they really feel the need to be prepared. And if they don't think it's worth the risk, then they may not do it.

Well, and the price is not just the price of tuition and room and board. We've seen, and you write about reverberations of student debt on homeownership, on marriage, on starting a family. Talk about that a little bit. You know, while students are in college, they are not necessarily shielded from all the other like economic forces that go on outside. So, right, we're in a period of sort of relatively historic inflation. So that affects students in terms of their cost of living. So that's something they have to think about.

And yeah, and then when you get out, what we see is student loan borrowers, the debt can affect their life decisions. There's a lot of stats out there about how much more somebody with a college degree makes on average than someone with a high school degree. And those are true. But that doesn't mean that the debt doesn't sort of weigh on these other aspects of your balance sheet, your budget. And in a way that for other generations,

It didn't necessarily as part of conversations around this book. I was speaking with a law school professor who was talking about when he went to college in law school, he had to take on loans. But he was like, after law school, he said, I really buckled down for two months to pay those off, you know, which like now would be unbelievable to have law school student loans that you paid off in two months. So these things just really can affect young people's trajectory and the way they think about their households and their budgets. Yeah.

I think we often don't talk to our children enough about life.

what taking on this debt is going to mean and about the fact that there are other choices. I always think I have a cousin, Andrea, who adopted a baby years and years ago. The baby grew up. My cousin puts a lot of money in a 529. She was fortunate to be able to save for college. And her brilliant daughter graduates from high school, gets into Harvard, but gets a full ride to the University of Delaware where she decides to go.

They took the money from the 529 and she bought a fixer upper that she is going to restore and flip and have this incredible start on life. And I just thought a lot about, boy, if I had gotten into Harvard, which I did not, and the University of Delaware, which I probably could have, would I have been brave enough to go to Delaware? I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, I think we're seeing more and more students and families recognize the burden that the debt can have and think about it a little bit differently. I've talked to college counselors and high school counselors who

who say that actually they're almost concerned sometimes about how unwilling students are to take on the debt. Obviously, you don't want to overload yourself, but if you need a little bit of help to pay for school, sometimes borrowing can be better than taking on so many jobs that it makes school impossible to do. So there's definitely more of an awareness out there of what happens if you take on this debt and if it follows you around that I think people are reckoning.

with. They're reckoning with it and they're reckoning with it for a very, very long time. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, I want to talk about how student loan debt is affecting retirement.

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We are back with Jillian Berman. She is a reporter with MarketWatch. She's also got a terrific book out called Sunk Cost, Who's to Blame for the Nation's Broken Student Loan System and How to Fix It. So in the book, you write about the fact that a huge portion, 20% of student debt is held by borrowers over the age of 18.

And people over 60 are the fastest growing population of student debt holders by age. What's up with this? You would think they would be out from under at this point. Are all of these Parent PLUS loans?

So some of them definitely are Parent PLUS loans, which are loans that parents take on to federal loans that parents take on to help their kids pay for college. That's definitely a factor. But there are a couple other factors going on. One is people just going back to school later in life to retool. And so then the debt sticks around into retirement.

I talked to, actually had a conversation with a borrower last week who, when she was in her 40s, she decided to become a teacher. And so she had to get degrees for that. And then the debt has stuck around into her retirement. That's a relatively common scenario. And then the other thing is, you know, these income-driven repayment programs, as they are now, people are not supposed to be

sort of the max repayment term is 25 years. But for a long time, there was a lot of evidence that there were a lot of people paying beyond those 25 years that like the programs weren't really working as intended. So, you know, there's just some people for whom the debt can hang around for a long time. It's not as common, I would say it's like the parent plus situation or they went back to school later in life. But I've definitely spoken to borrowers who they've just been dealing with it for a

have struggled to access the benefits of the student loan program that could help them get rid of it more quickly. For this audience, I think in particular, going back to get a new degree is a question that is on a lot of people's minds. We don't just have one career these days. We often have three or four different ones. We may need reschooling. You point out that the ROI on graduate degrees hasn't really budged.

since the early 2000s. Are there fields where going back to school is actually paying off? Are there certificate programs that can sub in for graduate degrees? How would you do it? Yeah, I mean, I think if I was trying to go to graduate school, I think a lot about it

where you go and how much it costs. Graduate school is one of those situations where you can sort of really find, I don't know, like, depending on the field, comparable program in different places that will cost you different amounts of money. I mean, I think

When you look at certain fields where graduate school is totally necessary, for example, health care or law, when you look at those, I think that pays off. You're going to make more money. You need the degree to do the job, so it makes sense to do. I think with certificates and things like that, the evidence on those is still mixed.

And so it's sort of worth doing your research about whether a certificate program can get you where you want to go. But at the same time, with a full-on graduate degree, it's also important to do your research. Like we've seen sort of explosions in depth for things like a master's in social work, which you need a lot of times as a practitioner to do that job. But

those jobs typically don't pay very well. And so that's a degree where it's maybe important to look at your options and see, okay, where can I get this at a relatively reasonable cost? Because I know that's not a job you do for the money. And so I need to make sure that this is worthwhile for me. We mentioned, I mentioned recession earlier in the show that the CEO of PIMCO is out with the comment that we might already be in one. And, and

He might be right. I don't necessarily believe that he's right, but I do know that often we are well into a recession before the economic indicators actually say that we're in a recession. So it's possible. But if we do end up sliding into recession later this year, as a number of Wall Street analysts believe that we will, do you think that could shift student loan policy again? Or do you think these rules that are being passed

rolled out now are in fact the way it's going to be? That's a good question. I mean, I think that if we do end up in a recession, right, it is likely we'll see people struggling more with their student loans, sort of just logically that that makes sense. That's what would happen. The last recession really did in some ways shift policies on student

loans, the Obama administration took a look at what was going on and said, you know what, this is a kind of like a temporary problem for borrowers. They're in a temporarily economically bad situation. We need to make it easier for them to manage during this time. And at that time, they really expanded income driven repayment.

So that was kind of a response to what was going on in the economy. I think, you know, the Trump administration probably has a little bit of a different view on student loan borrowers and how they should approach repayment. So I don't know that kind of like widespread challenges with student loans will necessarily change their approach, but we'll see. I mean, one thing also that'll be interesting to watch is student

Typically, during a recession, the number of people in school goes up, which would also indicate a swelling of student loan borrowing as well. But because of the things we talked about before, where there's kind of a lot more questions surrounding higher education right now, I don't know that necessarily we're going to see that reaction.

The questions around higher education right now, many of them are swirling because of the administration's stance on public education, on higher education, and the moves that are being made, whether successful ultimately or not, to pull funding, question tax status,

What will that do to the price of going to college? It's a good question. It's a little bit too early to tell. I think sort of at the schools that the administration has kind of really targeted, they have the means and have already kind of made the commitment to funding low-income students, even middle-income students. So we probably won't see an immediate impact on them.

But if this spreads to colleges that are less wealthy, that are really kind of operating on a tight yearly budget cycle, that could have an impact. I mean, I think another thing, too, that I document in the book is that rhetoric also can really make a difference. So during the Reagan era, really when he was actually governor of California, not

president, he raised a lot of questions about what was going on at the University of California, that this was like the height of Vietnam protest era. And he raised a lot of questions about that sort of portrayed some of the students protesting as like almost freeloading or whatever. And then that helped lay the groundwork to start to move people in the direction for supportive charging tuition. If you charge these people, maybe they'll think twice about the kinds of activities they're engaging in. So I think that rhetoric is

could have an impact on the way that schools are funded and the funding that we give to students to go. I want to end this conversation, which has been a little bit of a downer, on an up note. You end your book with some long-term solutions, some ideas for long-term solutions. How would you fix the system? I mean, it's a toughie. And I think sort of finding the

the political will really to fix it is going to be hard. But you know, there's a couple of things that I think a lot about. I mean, one is bringing the cost of public college down. So at least people have an affordable option. Maybe they decide like it's worth it to take on debt to go somewhere more expensive. But

at least they have an affordable or even free option that's more accessible. We've seen some progress on that. There are some states that offer free community college or even sort of some version of free four-year college. And there's some evidence from the College Board that at least over the past few years, the cost of public college has come down a little bit. So we're sort of starting to move in that direction.

I think the other thing too that struck me in reporting this book is, as we talked about at the top, the consequences of falling behind on a student loan are really harsh. And so some policymakers and lawmakers in Congress have thought a little bit about what can we do to still hold people accountable for the debt, but maybe not put them in these kinds of really, really intense

situations that can be even counterintuitive to actually repaying the loans. So I think reckoning with that and why the consequences are so harsh and do they need to be this harsh is something that policymakers should consider.

Jillian Berman, you're terrific. This was such an interesting and I think necessary conversation. I hope that you'll come back as the story continues to unfold. Definitely. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for being here. If people are looking for more of you and your work, where should they go? Yeah, so you can find me at marketwatch.com. And that's where most of my recent news articles are. And then, like you said, I have a book out. It's called Sunk Cost, Who's to Blame for the Broken Student Loan System and How to Fix It.

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Her Money is produced by Haley Pascalides. Our music is provided by Video Helper and our show comes to you through Megaphone. Thanks for joining us and we'll talk soon. There are some departments that if you go into them, you have to have really thick skin. And HR is one of them. Here we go again. I know. Here we go again. Right. But you're licking.

Everybody had to attend a mandatory Bible study because that supervisor was a minister and it was approved by HR. Her picture was also on there and her nickname was Do Me Decimal. Oh my God. I also had a college librarian. Her nickname was Big Tits McGee. Have you ever worked the full day with your kids hidden under your desk? No. No.

No. Allow yourself. Give yourself the privilege to be human. That's what it is. Just feel it so that you can go through it and come out the other side. Mic drop.