74. Student Loan Forgiveness Current Events | Meagan Landress, CSLP

Hello everyone, I'm Dr. Darsha, and I'm Dr. Altamash Raja, and welcome to Medicine Redefined. A podcast where we will explore the often overlooked but necessary components of health, what we consider to be the fundamentals. We will investigate topics and practices that can give you and your patients the best chance to optimize a healthy lifestyle. It's time to move the needle forward and put the health back in health care. Welcome back to another episode of Medicine Redefined. We have a special repeat guest today, Megan Landres. You guys might remember Megan from Stoon Loan Planner a few months ago when we took a deep dive into PSLF and Stoon Loan's in general. And with the state of current affairs with Stoon Loan's and all the mobility, particularly the recent forgiveness plan by the Biden administration, I wanted to get Megan back on here to get her take and help us dissect really what this plan is all about, as well as touch on a couple of other important topics that we did not get to address last time. So in this show, we talk about the PSLF or the Loan Forgiveness proposed by the Biden Administration at the end of August. We talk about the Biden's new IDR plan and what that might mean for borrowers. We also talk about the legal implications and the trajectory of Stoon Loan Forgiveness, the future plans proposed by both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. We shift gears to talk about the loan repayment strategies for the non-PSLF pursuer. And we also revisit some risk mitigation strategies and tactics that some of the listeners send questions in for. So the last episode was quite popular and we had a lot of great feedback. So some of those questions will be addressed in this episode as well. And then we spend a good amount of time talking about building wealth. You may recall that Megan started off as a financial coach, in fact, she's still a financial coach and it wasn't until she realized that Stoon Loans were a critical component of every single individual's financial burden is when she started paying attention more to getting the CSLP designation, which is a Stoon Loan planter, a certified Stoon Loan planter. And so I wanted to get her take on what it means to build wealth in the context of having Stoon Loans, particularly because many of the medical professionals and healthcare professionals embark on this journey of building wealth much later than our non-medical counterparts do. We ended off with talking about the role of higher education, particularly the cost of higher education, which continues to increase year by year and is clearly putting an undue burden on the system in itself, but also on the individual, which is contributing to burnout and poor financial and mental health. And ultimately, the root cause of a lot of the problems and warrants this discussion today. So without further delay, please enjoy this repeat discussion with Megan Landers. All right. Megan, welcome back to the show. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Lots to talk about today. Oh, yeah. I was actually thinking about this before we got started. You are our first repeat guest, like officially, and backed by popular demand. The last discussion that we had was interesting, and it was informative for me, but also got a lot of great feedback from listeners as we talked about. And there are some follow-up questions, so we'll throw that in there. But I just, I want to get right into it, right? There has just been so much movement. So we're recording this the end of September. I think it was August 24th. There was this big announcement by the Biden administration about everything that's going to happen with one forgiveness. So let's go right into it. How did that come about? Obviously, you guys saw this coming from a mile away, but for those of us who don't have a pulse on it as much, what were the steps that put this into play and it's here to stay, which we'll talk about later. Yeah. So gosh. I mean, Biden had campaigned on the fact that he was going to cancel student loan debt. And so it was constantly something that kept coming back up as, can we do it? Is he allowed to do it and all the politics that go into it? So he's using his executive authority under the kind of the COVID umbrella, I guess you could say. That's what we're using right now to allow, or I say we, that's what he is using right now to allow for this cancellation to be, you know, to come forth from what we understand. Sounds like it's going to be rolling out where the application will be available in October. Do you mean to do a kind of a recap of what it is, though? Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, people say up to 20,000, but maybe 10,000. So like who does 20,000 apply to 10,000 that kind of stuff? Yes. So first and foremost, there's an income limitation to this. So if you are a single person, or if you're married filing separately from your spouse, then your income has to be less than 125,000 for either 2020 or 2021's tax year. So that was at first not known, like we thought that they might be going off of the most recently filed tax return, but they're saying 2020 or 2021. So that's cool because I think that opens the door for people who may have made less in 2020. So that's for a single person, or filing married separately for joint, it's 250,000, or if you're a household married filing taxes jointly, has to be less than 250,000, and this is only relevant to Department of Ed held loans, so federal loans. You can get up to 20,000 of loan cancellation if you ever had a Pell grant awarded to you during your schooling. And you can know this pretty quickly by logging into your student aid.gov account. There will be two numbers. If you had a Pell grant at some point, you'll see your balance, and you'll see grants. And if you see grants, that tells you that you've at some point gotten a Pell grant. So that would give you the 20,000 of loan cancellation. If you didn't have a Pell grant, you would get 10,000. And the application for this is coming out in early October. So coming up, probably right as this comes out. Of course. And then Ashley, some people are going to ask, well, you know, what if I had Pell grants and then I ended up paying them off because there was a large amount, will I get some type of refund? Yeah. So, well, in Pell grants, I think Pell grants are getting confused with Percans loans. So a Pell grant is just a grant of money that you don't have to pay back. It helps reduce the cost of your schooling. If you have Percans loans, they are eligible for this as well, but it's going to, the priority order of where the money goes is first, it's going to go to your direct loans. But if you did, let's say you paid off your balance completely and full already with the Department of Education, you can ask for a refund at this point. Anyone can ask for a refund of any payments that they've made since March 13th of 2020. You can get that money back. You probably can't ask for just $10,000 back or $20,000 back. They'll probably give you everything that you paid back, which is fine because you can then just take whatever is left and pay the rest of it off. But that's a way that you can take advantage of the 10 or the 20,000 if you've already paid loans off. If you've paid below the threshold, so let's say your balance was at like 12,000, you paid 3,000 recently. So it's down at 9,000 and you're supposed to get the 10,000 of cancellation. Well, they'll forgive the 9,000 that's left over and they will refund you automatically the 1,000 to get you up to the 10, if that makes sense. It does. Yeah. What's cool about that? I think the piece of success, the 2020, 2021 year, right? I mean, obviously those years, I think a lot of healthcare workers had their hours truncated or somewhere even laid off and so they weren't able to make what they usually would under normal circumstances and might not qualify for that income threshold. So that's, I guess that's cool about that. But that wasn't the only thing that the Biden administration put out, right? They put out this new proposition of an IDR plan and this is what's particularly exciting for me because as you can imagine, and you guys are talking about, you know, for those of us who are, who have just really large firms and against selfish thing, I'm going for PSLF so I'm like, okay, all right, great 10,000 doesn't even matter, it's going to get forgiven anyway. Right. So the second part, this is what kind of excites me and I really hope it gets put into place. So can you talk a little bit about the IDR plan? Yes. So they did propose a new IDR plan and I want to preface this by saying it is still a proposal. I try to stay pretty pessimistic about things and you all may have asked me about this with forgiveness last time. You're like, do you think it's going to happen? And I probably said no. And here we are. No, so actually, more attention is, I'm surprised to say here you say that because last time we talked about how it's just, these are your words, it's a woven into the fabric, right? The MPN note and what we talked about, the headlines are 97% and how that's just ridiculous and just not understanding it. So I'm surprised to hear you say that you're pessimistic about this part. Yeah. Well, yeah, PSLF is definitely woven into the fabric for sure. I meant more so like widespread forgiveness. I think I was a little skeptical like back then. So yeah, this cancellation, the 10 or the 20,000 is for anybody and we weren't sure if it was going to happen. But the IDR, the new IDR proposal, so it is exciting because it can reduce potentially what income-driven repayment is for everyone, meaning it just reduces the payment slightly for a couple of reasons, it increases the poverty line, so how it's proposed, it increases the poverty line deduction that goes into how they calculate the income-driven payment. So that means you're getting a larger deduction off of your discretionary income or to create your discretionary income, I mean, and it's allowing for undergraduate loans to be at 5% instead of 10% of discretionary income. And most folks who have gone to, well, I won't say most, but there are folks who have borrowed for both undergrad and graduate school. And if you have some undergraduate loans, they're not going to be a large portion of your balance, but there will be a portion that will be charged then at 5% of your discretionary income instead of 10. So both of those things could make the payment much smaller than what it is right now at the 10% for really anybody, graduate or undergraduate loans are not because of the poverty line deduction being increased. So that's good because that can help people get to loan forgiveness more efficiently, just paying less, which is always the goal when you're going towards forgiveness. The other thing that they're doing, which is not related to public service loan forgiveness, but what they had proposed was shortening the longer term forgiveness timeline. So if you're not doing PSLF, you could still go towards IDR's forgiveness after 20 or 25 years, but for the 20 years as the rules stand now, you have to be eligible for pay. And some people aren't eligible for pay because they borrowed before 2007. So this new proposal is saying that no matter what, anybody could have loan forgiveness on this plan after 20 years. So it could shorten the timeline for folks, reduce the payment for folks as well, which helps make forgiveness look more and more attractive to more and more people, which is good. So that's in a nutshell what they're proposing. Yeah, now that's a good overview. So I think last time we talked a little bit about how to calculate discretionary income. Could you use some loose numbers to just demonstrate, so the last time it was what I said, is 75% and that's 25% is that what it is? The poverty line right now is 150% of the poverty line deduction. And the poverty line, you can Google this, it changes every year, but right now, if you're a household size of one, that poverty line deduction is about 20,000, and so if you make 100,000, you get that poverty line deduction of 20, your discretionary income is 80,000. And that's what the payment is based off of. So that's what I mean by discretionary income. Right. So, but it's going to be increased from 150 to 225%. Oh, yes. Yeah. To 225. Now, I'm developing that, you know, I've listened to Travis, of course, I have a listener of the podcast and Travis, who kind of been talking a little bit about, and as you mentioned earlier, like this is a proposition. And I think what the expectation is that the opposition, right, the Republican party, is really going to push back, and they actually have started pushing back. And we're going to talk it in a moment. I heard Travis talking about the bill that they proposed, the real act. But what are the potential legal implications of this, if any? Yeah. So, well, there's, I think the most immediate legal implications are going to be for this cancellation that's coming out. And there's already been a pretty serious lawsuit that we are a little, what we're watching closely, because they, I think it makes a good point. What the lawsuit is saying right now for the cancellation, it is someone who is pursuing PSLF, so the 10,000 of cancellation, 20,000 of cancellation, not super helpful, because your payments are based off of income, not the balance, and, you know, you get 10,000 knocked off, whatever, you get less forgiven later, but nothing changes with what you pay. And the tax ability of cancellation varies. There are certain states, only five states right now that have not conformed to the federal definition or the federal guidance on how they're going to be taxing student loan forgiveness between now and 2026. So that means there are certain states, California is one of them, it's the biggest one, that would tax this 10,000 or 20,000 of cancellation. So this person's argument, or this lawsuit's argument, is it's harming people, because this person doesn't need the 10 or 20,000, because they're going towards public service loan forgiveness. They can't really opt out of it if they're automatically going to get it, because some people are automatically going to get the cancellation, since their income is on file, which most people for PSLF would have their income on file, because they're on an income driven plan. So this person would get it hypothetically, automatically, not being able to opt out, and then they would have to pay taxes on this. So a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand, they might have to pay taxes on. Right. So a lot of people, though, have it reasonable, at least shouldn't have recertified in the last maybe two years, well that's definitely the case, because the update income isn't registered, right? Right, so that's, yeah, so that's also the mechanics of this, like the argument, I could also argue against saying, well, how would they have your income if you haven't updated? But if this person, or if someone recently got into public service loan forgiveness, they applied, because we thought payments were going to kick in last year, just to get set up, then their income would be, and they would be harmed in that way. So I get the argument, I think that could be solved by maybe an opt out option, but so that's the most immediate challenge, is just, you know, it's going to cause harm to certain folks, which some folks, you're asking a lot there of the department event though at that point. Yes. Putting an opt out option. Exactly. Yeah, so it's, you know, and then there's, so there's also the question as to does Biden have the authority to make that call, and it's under this COVID umbrella, and if on one side he's saying, hey, we're out of it, like everything's fine, you know, but on the other side, he's saying, but we're, we're using it for XYZ, like that there's some contradiction there on, you know, are we still affected by COVID, and in this pandemic mind, or not, you know, so that's also a question. Oh, God, yeah, yeah, this is the never ending pandemic, and really, I mean, you know, it really depends on the map, of course, in the healthcare setting, different rules, different masking mandates, different discussion, different time, but what's your sense though, like in terms of a timeline, you mentioned earlier, if I understood correctly, that October, for those who aren't automatically enrolled and cannot now, you have to apply, right, I think early October, I might have seen in the website or later October sometime in that time, you know, if people apply and then get approved, I mean, can that be taken back? Like, what's the timeline of this lawsuit, like when they will be solidified in here to stay? Yeah, so the application is said to come out early October, it would be on studentaid.gov, and we are at this point recommending if you want this, apply for it immediately, like get in there, treat it as a first come, first served kind of thing. If you are, if you do apply by November 15th, the cancellation is said to be done by the end of the year. What could happen is there could be something, you know, this case, or there could be some kind of injunction that's filed that pauses everything, that makes this freeze. So the question is, well, if the people, you know, the people who have already applied, like what happens to them, I think, or I think it's the opinion that it'll probably just freeze everything, where no one's getting anything canceled quite yet, but that would also be reason for them to pause payments again, or to extend payments further. Yeah, so if that happens, I think people aren't going to be harmed in that way, in the sense that, you know, they were counting on that to come through, because they'll just pause payments for longer and have the 0% interest for longer, which, you know, there are certain parties that don't want that. So it's, we're balanced, it's like a balancing act, it's like, you know, what do we want to have been coming up, and what's the result of that? So not to put you in the spot, but what's your gut say, do you feel like we're going to be in that frozen limbo period one more time, which I wouldn't mind to go on to be more extension of my payments, do it all famous, but I know, or do you think it'll go through? My gut says it's going to go through. I think it's going to go through, but I could completely be wrong, and then, you know, the plan B would be, I do, if they were to pause everything or, like, freeze everything up, where no cancellation was issued, I definitely think that they would extend things again, and, you know, we'll just be in this limbo for longer. So obviously this is dynamic, I have to say at least, and very controversial, depending on which side of the aisle they're sending on, or really anywhere, but, and you mentioned that you're somewhat pessimistic for just general loan forgiveness. So I kind of want to get into, like, just the future of loan forgiveness, right? We talked about the Republican Party putting out this new bill called a real act. The Democrats have kind of put the, it gets us alone, I forget what the full thing stands for. What can you say about that, these new bills that are being proposed into Congress? So yeah, so the, I think the new income-driven plan, well, so that, I think it doesn't spark anything, because there's always been new proposals coming in and across, you know, Congress for discussion. They've been talking about the tax implication for the longer term forgiveness forever. So there's been a lot of proposals there always has been, but the new IDR waiver was meant to simplify things, or that was what everyone wanted for a long time. They wanted just to simplify the student loan system. Well, the new proposed plan doesn't seem like it's going to simplify anything. It almost seems like it's going to make things. It might make it more simple in the sense of, you know, that might be the cheapest plan just for just about anybody, but it doesn't make it simple on how they calculate things, or who should then be considering forgiveness versus a payoff approach. It just adds another layer, especially if they don't take certain plans away, which may not be a good thing to do. So all that to say, I think this is sparking a lot of conversation about the future of student loans and the future of what should be happening in the student loan repayment side of things, and we'll have more to come on this. I think that'll be a big topic, so I think that's something to come back to in the future. Hey, maybe I'll be your third time guest in the future. Just kidding. I won't invite you. I mean, no, it's probably going to be necessary, so I'm glad that you've already volunteered for that. I can hold you. So yeah, I don't want to spend too much time talking about the PSL because I feel like we did the bulk of the conversation last time was about that, but I didn't mention there were some follow-up questions, so I want to take this time to kind of ask that. You know, as some of these were from my closest friends in training, who just happened to be brilliant physicians, and they're financially savvy people, too, unlike majority of the physicians that can take that shot, I am one. And you know, one of them comes to, for a close friend, who asked that, you know, what happens if someone, okay, let me back up, so we last time we talked about one of this core requirements to qualify for low and forgetments is the consolidation process, right? For loans or like with Mojila, well, now Mojila's not a good example, but now let for somebody and you have to get them at the time to vet loans, right, now Mojila. But what happens if somebody coming out of medical school going through four or five years never actually consolidated, but face-of-grace period started making repayments through that time, are those payments still being counted, like, what's the process for them? So short answer is yes, now consolidation, I think is ideal right after you graduate, because it really just simplifies your loan situation, bundles all of your loans into a direct consolidation loan, make sure that all loans are eligible, because for PSLF, we have to have direct loans, and this is less common now, but if you have some older loans that are from like 2010 and before, called FFEL loans or family federal education loans, those have never been eligible for PSLF up until the PSLF waiver, which that's the environment we're in right now that expires October 31st. This is where people can consolidate now to now go back and get credit for those payments. It's not going to be possible after October 31st, but if someone already had direct loans, they just had 12 different direct loans from their schooling, and they've been making payments on them since they exited their grace period, then yes, those can definitely still count towards PSLF, they would just need to submit an employment certification form, and if you have the wrong types of loans, you have until October 31st to consolidate, to make sure that you get credit for those prior payments. And that's the case even if it's not with FFEL loans, there was no need for somebody else. Yes, so let's say your direct loans are all with no net, that's okay, they all have to report their payment history to Department of Ed, and so that'll show up in your NSLDS file or the National Student Loan Data File. So you submit your employment certification form, so this might be no need to consolidate so your next step would be to submit the employment certification form, you would send that to Mojila, and that triggers Mojila to go and grab your loans and bring them over to them. Right. Mm-hmm. I'm wondering if I want to put them on spot here, yeah, whatever. So in your expense, I know historically, and just found loans didn't notoriously just not have good reviews, although I must say that in my experience, every time I've called them or contact support, I've had a somewhat decent experience, certainly not a negative experience. But Mojila has also been around for a long time, working with loan serviceors, have they been easier to deal with, give better information in your experience, how does that process? It's definitely gotten better, yes. I think they've improved their processes, and actually literally yesterday, they revamped the Student Aid.gov website, so it's a lot more simple. Like if you click on public service loan forgiveness on Student Aid.gov, it takes you to the employment certification form. It's like really simple now, instead of like pelting you with information. Yep. That's exactly what I was going to say. The website, at least, it's a bit easier to navigate. Yeah. Another question that comes to mind, somebody wanted me to ask was, you know, what happens to those that are already in training, but then want to pursue further education, even beyond the graduate degree rate? So you've got your doctor, you've got your medical degree, but then a lot of folks are now pursuing an MBA while in training and residency fellowship, and then they take they need more student loans, like is there, you know, is there a cap, like at some point where you can't take more student loans out? Not for graduate programs, the cap is just the cost of attendance. So you could be a forever student and always borrow and have the, you know, you could borrow up to the cost of attendance, really. So in that case, what we recommend, if someone's going back to school, the question is, are you still working full time? And sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answer is no, if they are and they think they're going to be going to public service loan forgiveness, then there's a decision on if you want to keep your existing loans, like not for your current program, but for your old programs, if you want to keep them in repayment or not. And the, you know, why you'd want to keep them in repayment is then they're continuing to go towards PSLF, because you let, if you let them go into the end school deferment, they can't be accumulating credit towards PSLF. But on the other end of that is the loans that you just borrowed for your new degree, they cannot go into repayment until you graduate from that degree. So you would have two different timelines towards PSLF. So another part of that discussion is, you know, is that amount that you're borrowing right now small enough to where you could just pay that off to not extend your timeline towards PSLF? Or do you just want to keep all the loans in end school deferment and go into repayment when you're totally done, when all of the payments can count towards PSLF and the whole balance could be on the same course. But does that make sense how I explain that? It does. Yeah. Now, I'm trying to think of an instance where somebody would want to go into deferment, especially when they're in training, I mean, because those are, that's the time that you want to max. Because again, as we spoke about last time, most residency programs tend to be 501C3 and do qualify and you'd have the lowest payment. So, you know, I mean, can you think of a situation where somebody would want to go into deferment? Obviously, if you can't afford it, but if you're working full time, that's most trainees are. Yeah. You still want to continue getting those, those 120 payments, right? I think so some examples that come to mind for those who should go into deferment is someone who's clearly going to be going towards public service loan forgiveness because you're going to add more loans to your loan profile and you're adding a little more time if you're not making payments towards PSLF right now, but it makes more sense to have all the payments count for something or count towards the 120 and like the whole balance be going towards that timeline versus putting yourself in repayment now, being done, let's say in eight years, and then getting yourself in repayment on the rest of the loans two years later and being in repayment for two more years, that's, you know, like a 12 year window of payments. Oh. So, for someone who's clearly going to be doing public service loan forgiveness, it makes sense just to take advantage of the deferment, go into repayment when everything can count. But for those on the other side of that, on the flip side is if someone's not sure that they're going to be doing PSLF long term, that's when I would probably suggest, well, go ahead and keep your loans in repayment now because you could get to PSLF on the balance that you already had and you'll have a remaining balance, but then, you know, because you'll have one chunk forgiven sooner than the next chunk, but then you could decide, you know, do I want to go private sector at this point or, so at least you'll have something forgiven. So, those are some of the conversations. That's a hard, that's a hard decision though, and it helps to just talk it through with what someone wants to do. Yeah, and I'm also trying to think about it, that's a difficult calculation to do because if it's like six months that you're giving off, you can essentially you're paying, that six months of attending pay, that you're going to calculate off of down the road, and, you know, what's the actual loan amount you're going to take out for a master's degree? It's not going to be the same, hopefully, it's not going to be the same as a medical degree. Yeah. We'll talk about the cost of our education a little bit later as promised last time, but we didn't get to, but all right, so let's move on from loan forgiveness because I think we've given, it's very short of love here, but I want to talk a little bit about loan repayment strategies for the non-PSL of pursuers. You know, again, a lot of close friends who, so, you know, as we maybe spoke about last time at Karl Plymouth at some point, and I'm a physiatrist, so one of the ways, some specialty places you can go even to sports medicine, and you can do interventional pain management in spite, and most folks who end up going down that road for interventional pain and procedure heavy, I mean, they tend to make a lot more, and rarely is it the case that they're not, you know, again, the math that we usually do is like pay, and your student loan burden is at least 1.5x greater than your income, maybe PSL, make 4 cents, I know, different people have different thresholds for that, but these folks tend to, again, because there's the average salary is a lot higher for them and usually makes sense to refine it, and so, you know, how do you advise people to think about the loan repayment that take private practice jobs, and don't want to pursue PSL app, or just, it doesn't make sense to them because of financial reasons, you know, is it pay off aggressively, is it a 20-year plan, 25-year, whatever it is, what's the conversation like? Yeah, I think, so I think early on, if we're talking to someone who's about to go into training, or they are still in training, but they clearly know they're going to be going private sector route, then the thought process then is, okay, well, how can we reduce your cost now? Like, what are the easiest ways we can reduce the cost of your repayment now? And oftentimes, those who are going private sector, they still can't throw a ton of money towards the loans and residency or in training. So we talk about repay in the benefits of the repay subsidy, or the interest discount that that plan has, because the, you know, repay what it does is it allows you to pay based off of your income, so if you're in residency, that payment would be proportionate, of course, to your residency salary. And then that payment, we know, is not going to cover interest, if your balance is still pretty large, so you're making a payment, it's probably going all to interest, but you're still probably not paying off all the interest that's charged that month. So in a normal world, that would mean your balance is growing at whatever you didn't pay, but repay what it does is it will waive half of that accruing interest. So the balance will still be growing while you're in residency or fellowship or training, but it'll be growing a lot slower than it could be, definitely than it could be if you just put the loans into deferment or forbearance while you were in training, because then it's growing at 100% of what your interest cost is, instead of maybe like half or a little more than half. So that's a strategy we use early on, take advantage of repays subsidy early on to just reduce the interest cost or interest growth over time. Then when they get into training or into attending, that higher income starts coming in, that's when you can pull the trigger on maybe looking into refinancing. And refinancing is a permanent decision, so we always talk about it carefully, because once you leave the federal system, you cannot come back. If someone who's going private practice knows that they're going to stay that direction, that's okay, because then the game plan might be to pay it down to zero. And refinancing is the only way you can reduce your interest rate once you no longer have the repays subsidy. The repays subsidy kind of acts like you have a reduced interest rate by how much it charges, but in the attending world refinancing is the only way you can reduce that rate. So we recommend you going that direction, and should you be super aggressive, I think that depends on the goals that you have and what interest rate you get. Because if you refinance and you get a 3% interest rate, there's not really an incentive to throw a ton of money towards that loan anymore when you could be making, you know, 7, 8, 9% investing or putting money towards your retirement, because then you're missing out. And though that debt is costing you 3%, you're missing out on potentially 5, 6, 7% of growth. So those are some kinds of conversations. Yeah. I mean, even better paying off credit card debt. Oh, yeah. 20%. Yes. Yeah. Prioritize other higher debt first, but if you have 3% as your interest rate. Yeah. Absolutely. And so you run up the interest rate. And I think that raises the question. That's just, I think, the last week or the week before, and at least, you know, we were just kind of the real estate market and I'm here and now interest rates are in the 6%. And I imagine for student loans, it's maybe not as high, but what kind of interest rates are you seeing right now and, you know, how is that changing that conversation for you? Yeah. That's a great point. Inflation has definitely impacted any debt, any debt interest rate. It's positively impacted like high-yield savings accounts, though. People have been happy about seeing those go back up. But we have seen an impact in the refinancing space. So some company, well, we actually had one situation two days ago where someone, a physician who had really great credit, great income, was looking to refinance, a pretty good debt to income ratio, but looking into refinancing, gearing up for 2023, and he got offered a 6% interest rate. And that, to us, is high because we were seeing like 3%, 2.5% like a year ago. So it has definitely taken a hit. We think, you know, as inflation starts to chill out a bit, we think things could also climb their way back down. And you know, when interest rates kick back in with federal loans, these private student loan companies are going to have more of an incentive to be competitive. Because right now, there's no competition with the federal loan interest rates. It's at 0%. So, you know, these private companies, they've probably been hurting. Some of them have been combining or absorbing each other. But there are still a lot of them out there. There will always be a lot of them out there. But when interest rates get turned back on, they have an incentive to look attractive for people to then start refinancing again. Because if your federal interest rate is 6.5% or 7%, you know, the attraction there is to get a lower interest rate to get your business. So I think there's some checks and balances there too that we'll see in 2023. But rates are not great right now. That is true. So, you know, with that, what are some resources where you point people to when you're suggesting that they shop around for getting the best possible rates, you know, even given this market and what we talked about before? Yep. So, I do think studentloneplanar.com is a good resource. We track most, I think almost all of the big jumbo companies that are out there right now. The two that are brokers, there is credible and splash. Those two companies are what's called brokers, which they will shop up to 10 to 12 different companies to include also credit unions in your local area. So those are definitely worth a shot because it casts a really wide net. And then you can, of course, shop as many as you want, but really what you're doing is you're just trying to shop for the best rate. Awesome. So, yeah, and we'll link all that, especially the SLP website that you recommended, because I do think that this has been a wealth of resource, and I know that just as I mentioned at the outset, just because of people asking to have you come on, they're going to benefit from all the awesome content that you guys are putting out there. Yeah. All right, so I know we just have a couple moments left here, but I want to spend some time talking about building wealth, because if people go back to the archives, you started out talking about how your career really started as a financial coach. And it wasn't until later when you realized that every single person, I think you said with the exception of one, who you didn't have student loans in the conversation, and it was a significant piece of the puzzle. And so, we spent a few hours talking about this, but we often, myself included, right, my financial education journey started because of the anxiety of student loans. And sometimes, I think we have to figure out, hey, what are we going to attack first? And for some people, the student loan burden is a bigger part of the puzzle, others is smaller. And so, before we talk about some strategies of how we can continue building wealth with the context of student loan in the back of our mind, maybe let's define some roles. Because you did a recent podcast on this, and I only just recently came to learn about how a financial coach is different than a planner than an advisor, then I love how you call them. What did you do that with? Who was your colleague with you? Oh, that was Sam. Sam honored team. Yeah. I love that you call them sales representatives or something of that nature, and it's a clear distinction. I'll let you take that away and define some of those terms, so people understand what's the role of each of these folks. Yeah. So I'll start with coaching, because I think that's in my realm. So coaching is what I do. A financial coach, there's no license for this, so that's one thing to know, and that's also something to be careful about when you're looking for someone to work with. A coach, it is a up and coming niche in financial planning, or like a practice area in financial planning, I would say, and coaching, I think, is designed for people who are not quite ready for the big, complicated tax planning strategies, retirement planning strategies, investment strategies, like those are, of course, going to be important one day. But these, I think the basics are what a coach is helpful in helping someone establish for themselves. So a budget could be student loans paying down other kinds of debt, really getting a handle on just the cash flow that's coming in, what's going out, emergency savings, starting to save. I think that's a big part of what my job is, too, as a coach is, I want to start building those habits now, because it is so hard to grow into a nice big income in the future without saving, and then have to whittle yourself back down into forcing yourself to save again. So a big goal in my process is, let's get these things, these basics done right. Let's get the habits established so you can grow from here. And then folks graduate from me and start working with investment advisors or certified financial planners is what I typically recommend. So I think the coach in summary is for the basics, getting the foundation of your plan in place. A certified financial planner is who I recommend folks work with if they want to do some more retirement planning, investment planning, really comprehensive financial planning. They're kind of the doctors in the financial planning space. It's a well-known designation, CFP. We also recommend going for a fee-only advisor or a fee-only CFP because that means that they only charge a fee for their services, and that can be either a flat fee, like X amount for working with them for the year, or it can be a flat percentage off of assets. So if they manage assets for you or investments for you, it can be just one percentage off of whatever you have invested with them. So there's two different ways to do that, but it keeps the compensation question or the compensation easy in the sense of there's no question as to if they're getting compensated to recommend something to you, such as a product or a service. I want to jump in right there, actually. So as I mentioned, I think I started off learning it, so it was that month after medical school. So 2017, June, and I just somehow landed on White Coat Investor, and I went down this rabbit hole, and then I was just addicted. And since then, I think that's kind of been the basis of learning all my financial education to start off with, or just like the steep learning curve that you have. So they entered a financial education with White Coat Investor, Ryan Inman. You guys obviously been white from student loans and Mr. Money Mustache, all these guys that the blog passive and commandeer that I think about. And time and time again, what the consensus amongst all these folks is exactly what you mentioned, go for fee only. I've been thinking about this a lot though, just because somebody is fee-based or does AUM models, doesn't necessarily mean they're going to, for lack of better work, honor those disclosures, right? I mean, just, there's a potential for conflict, but I think you might have mentioned this before. There are a lot of great people who work under that model, but will give good advice, non-biased advice. Yep. Right? Would you agree with that? Oh yeah, definitely. Yep. So then the question becomes is, how does one figure that out, that you have somebody who potentially has a conflict, but that's a good professional in that regard, right? Are there questions or are there tactics? I think there are questions, and I think all, all of this to say too, like interview the person that you want to work with or interview a few people, just like a job, like, you know, you want to interview the person that you're going to let handle your money or help with these money conversations. You want to make sure you're driving with them, personality wise, that you like their process. So that's important. But some, some really key questions to ask is the compensate, that's the easiest question, you know, how are you compensated? And you can follow that up with, are there any conflicts of interest, which they can provide you like a more formal disclosure on these things, but are there any conflicts of interest and how you're compensated? And what you're looking for with that question is, you know, if they, for example, if they make a recommendation for life insurance, are they going to get compensated on whether or not you implement that life insurance? Is there an incentive, incentive of some kind for them to upsell you, you know, instead of, and I think whole life insurance gets a horrible rep in the financial planning space? Are they going to sell you whole life or term when you really just need the life insurance coverage? So asking those questions, I think asking just anything about their process is helpful. But you know, being a CFP or being fee only, you're exactly right, doesn't always mean that you're always going to serve it, you know, that, that person in a fiduciary capacity because the CFP designation does obligate that individual or that professional to have a fiduciary standard when they're working with you. So that, I think that is important with the CFP is that they are, they are required to act in that capacity. If not, they lose their licensure. And that's similar to in the medical space too, right? Like you'll have, oh, you'll don't. Oh, okay. No, no, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, you're required to. Yeah. But you know, so I guess the follow-up question naturally would be, is there like a reporting process? If somebody feels, quote, unquote, wronged in that saying, hey, that my financial planner, in this instance, there was a conflict of interest, wasn't disclosed or whatever the reason is. And I don't think they act in, you know, in my best interest, like is there a reporting process? Can you report to an agency or like, how does that work? You can. We're not encouraging anything, but just asking. Yeah, for sure. So you can, you can report it to their firm. You can report it to the CFP board. And there is a process that that individual would go through for some kind of resolution. And there would be something, some kind of review that would have to happen. And the question is, do they keep their license or not based on that complaint? So there is a process. But I'm willing to bet, though, it's going to be hard, because anytime you sign up with somebody, they're making you sign a million things, and I'm showing the fine plant that all the disclosure are listed there, and rarely do people end up reading all those things because, again, as we've talked about before, they're just written in jargon that we're not trained to interpret at all. But yeah, the reason I was thinking about this, because, you know, as you might know, we spend a lot of time talking about topics related to other aspects of physical and, you know, emotional health, and especially nutrition, right? We spend a lot of energy and time talking about that, and, you know, it's just a highly contested and debated topic on social media and really anywhere. And one of the things, the opponents of, you know, things that are not pharmaceutical based or supplementation and that kind of stuff, you know, they'll say, okay, well, you have to look at the disclosures and the authors of the study are doing research, but they're funded by XYZ Food Company, or they're funded by this supplement company. And I think about that, you know, again, this is kind of a little tangential, but, you know, these things aren't, they're not getting NIH funding. They're not getting funding from large academic institutions. There isn't an incentive to study these things, and that's what makes it challenging. So, you know, a previous guy, Dr. Sean Arnt, came and talked about how it's more important for us to look at the methods, and rather than, you know, who funded the study. I mean, that's the biases should be acknowledged, should be appreciated. And that's kind of what I'm hearing from you. If this analogy is making sense, that transparency is critical, right? And so when, if you ask that question, if I ask that question next time I have a conversation, and I ask somebody, hey, how do you get paid? And I get the sum roundabout answer and something really complex that I cannot understand straightforward. And I think I'm somewhat of a smart person, then that's a red flag to me. And I think that that's kind of what I'm hearing from you as well. I think transparency is definitely the right word. And I think you're exactly right. Like if something can't be explained very simply, that is a red flag. And that deserves a little more investigation or you moving elsewhere. Yeah. Which is what's awesome about the fee-only model, right? It's like, this is the hourly rate. This is the yearly rate. This is the monthly rate subscription, whatever model people just decided to go by. I want to go back to the coaching aspect. I love that because it is start at the, you know, the whole aspect of, you know, the personal finances, the behavioral aspect, right? That's the budgeting you talked about buzzwords, right? Budgeting, saving all these things are extremely challenging, especially when we go from residency and all of a sudden you've three extra, four extra, five extra, your income and you've delayed gratification. Those two words, right? You hear that throughout the training for so long. And you want to live a little more of a lavish lifestyle. And, you know, I mentioned Ryan Inman before, he kind of talks about give yourself a 50% raise. Like, so if you're making 50,000, spend $75,000 next year, right? But then there's the other side of the coin that are like, live like a resident for five years after residency or you pay off that debt. And so I mean, all these movements, you've got fire, you've got fat fire, you've got all that kind of stuff. So, you know, speaking more tactics, are there budgeting apps or techniques that you like to people to really get a hone in on their finance and tracking that kind of stuff? What do you like to use? Ooh, that's a great question. So, there's a lot of free apps out there like Mint.com is for free. I use that to just pull a lot of my personal data together. They're a little clunky though. They are clunky. It's also reactive in the sense that it can only gather and a lot of budgeting apps are going to be like that. They can only gather the information that's happened in the past. They're supposed to have those things and there's a couple like features of Mint where you can create budgets, but it is clunky. It is also free. But you get what you pay for, I suppose. Yep. I like you need a budget or YNAB. YNAB? YNAB maybe. That's a great one too. You are treated as the CFO of your household, which I love. We actually had a podcast episode on YNAB with the founder, which I thought was pretty cool on student loan planners podcast. Awesome. That's a good one. I think the awareness is a big part of the budgeting conversation, almost always when I ask folks to collect their numbers on how much they've spent on average over the past couple months on certain areas, like almost always. It's, oh my gosh, I did not realize how much I was spending in that area or, you know, and there's certain areas that are naturally going to be higher. There are some common areas that are just higher, maybe when you're younger or when you're going through residency or when you have children, there's just categories fluctuate over time, but the awareness is important and also, you know, starting to understand the flow. Like, are you overspending? Are you spending above your means? Are there some areas that you can cut or reduce? So the awareness and the behavior around, like, why we spend our money on certain things is really important, is part of the coaching process. Yeah. What do you use personally, Mint? I use Mint, but I actually have, so similar to how I work with my clients, I have a Google sheet that I use personally, so I know it is old school, but it works for me, and I think that's the, you know, budgeting has to work for you, like it can't be too complicated, so. Yeah. No, much like anything else. Yeah. You know, we used to use YNAB, and what I loved about it is just the actual app on our iPhone was really nice, and there is a steeper learning curve, though. Like you have to kind of get used to the with it, because it's this concept of zero cost, budgeting, or something they call it, where every dollar is assigned a job, so we might end up going back to we're doing Mint right now, but anyway, that's what you said, it was clunky, you're like, I'm going to beat you. So other things that, you know, you talked about kind of the investing piece of it, when you first start working with a client, so setting those, the behavior aspect, do you use some type of like a risk assessment, like an investor profile questionnaire, or is that more of the financial plan or aspect when they're going to be starting to work with numbers? That is more of the financial plan or aspect, so the risk tolerance questionnaires, the starting to really fine tune the investment strategy, that's when you graduate from a coaching program. We start to get the habit of saving and investing during the early stages, so, you know, definitely getting the match, like starting to invest with your employer for a 1K, I encourage a lot of my clients to start maxing out their 401Ks as soon as they can, because a lot of the folks I work with have student loans, they're going towards loan forgiveness, so the more they put in pre-tax buckets, the better for their student loan payments. So we talk about that, we talk about how getting that habit early on is great, because then they just don't think about it in the future, like it's just, it's already not part of their budget, and they've set themselves up nicely to save really early and often, which is key. So that's about the extent that I get into coaching, is just getting the habit established now, starting to put some numbers to things, but the investment strategy comes later. How does someone become, like, or qualify, or how do you determine that somebody is fit to graduate from coaching and moving on to a financial planner? I would say, I've had a lot of really fun, like, graduates recently, that I get really excited about thinking about, so I think it's time for someone to graduate from coaching when they're pretty spot on with their spending, like they don't really, they don't have, let me make me back up and rephrase that, they're really on par with where their money is going on a month to month basis, they're checking off their goals each and every month, so if they had a goal to put x amount and savings for their house down payment, or, you know, do XYZ, like they're checking their boxes for their goals every single month, or pretty close to it, everyone's not perfect, it's not going to happen every month, but they're pretty darn close to every month, and they're starting to, I think also the interest in starting to learn a little bit more about investing, that's important to me to know that they're ready for those conversations, so I think some of those things, like checking the boxes for the goals that they've already set, being on track with where they are finding, like, where we thought they were going to be, based on our planning, and then the interest in starting to take the next step. Yeah, I imagine there are sometimes where they're still continuing to work with you, but also using the services of financial planner simultaneously. Yeah, so it's very common where someone will graduate from coaching, but still need help with student loan stuff, because we know that that changes all the time, so. Yeah, where do you stand on emergency funds? Oh, so for my coaching clients, I pretty standardly want folks to build up a three month emergency savings. Three to six months, usually it's three months, I don't work with a lot of entrepreneurs or folks that have very variable income, so I think six months is a great bucket for those that have very unexpected income or life circumstances, but three months I think it's perfect, I think it also shows the grit for them to get there, like the determination for them to get to that number. Do they keep it at three months? Always, maybe not, if they're very responsible with their money, they, you know, there's other goals that we're working towards, maybe we relax the emergency savings a little bit, maybe we have that in a different bucket, like a higher yield savings or like a brokerage account of some kind, but that's where I'm at right now, depends on the person, but generally three months. There's some folks who may argue that, you know, again, as I mentioned, we come out with so much debt, and often because our training can be anywhere from seven to 12, 13 years depending on what kind of program you're in, you know, our colleagues that we graduated, I mean, they have this head start, and we know that time in the market beats timing, the market all the time, right? I mean, you kind of mentioned that's why it's important to start saving early, like very early investing, because yeah, confidence is just this a powerful thing. And so just when we're trainees, there's a thought that maybe you could put it into the Roth because you'll qualify for it at that time, and it's a little bit easier to pull that money out. So using that as an emergency fund, what do you say to that? I've definitely heard this approach. Do I like it? No, because it is a little more complicated to get that money out. It's not as easy as moving it from one savings account to your checking, or even a high yield savings to checking. So it's it's not as instant, which might be good if someone is testing if it's really an emergency. But, you know, I could see the arguments for putting it in a Roth because it is accessible. There are still some rules around like having the account open for at least five years. Right. So there's some things that you have to pay attention to there, but I could see someone who you know, who gets frustrated with money just sitting in savings wanting to use that Roth approach. But that might be for someone who's already graduated from coaching. And that's that's a good place to be. So, you know, it's speaking of the Roth that you did mention maximizing the pre-tax accounts so we can reduce that AGI. We can reduce the the student loan payments, right? That's kind of what we talked about last time as well. But there's this age-old debate. And I do have to get your take for Roth versus pre-tax, especially. And I want to get it in the lens of somebody who is just graduating. This is a little selfish because this is me. Somebody who would just graduate from training and are they're going into the attending hood. So there it's a half a year and they still qualify for both, but always keeping the student loan part in the back of our mind. How do you how do you approach that conversation? Yeah. So I think I do when it comes to student loan planning like in the back of my mind, we have the conversation about pre-tax buckets like 403B, 401k because it reduces adjusted gross income. It reduces your tax bill today too. So for student loan planning purposes, if you're trying to go for the lowest payment, then pre-tax is the way to go. If you're someone who's going into private, well, and there's also the conversation of what do you think taxes are going to do by the time you get to retirement? And no one knows that. I am on the stance of I think you should have money in both buckets. At some point you should have money in raw, money in pre-tax because that gives you options and retirement where if the tax environment when you go to retire is taxes are on sale, great. Pull from your pre-tax accounts. You haven't paid taxes on that yet. If taxes are in a really low environment when you go to retire, then you can use those assets first. What does that mean? Taxes are on sale, what does that mean? As in, if tax brackets and general income tax is low, for example, in the 60s, 70s, we were in a horrible tax environment. Income taxes were up to 70%. If you went to retire and you had a bunch of 401k pre-tax money, you're being taxed quite a bit once you go to retire on that money. So raw money in the 70s would have been great because you were already taxed on it, maybe in a lower tax environment. Of course, that's a really aggressive example. That was probably a really horrible economic time for our nation. But having options and retirement is key. I think having money in both is good. You have the auction and the discretion to choose which buckets to pull from and when. I think this last couple of minutes that we talked about, and really just the last couple of hours that we've had a conversation with, it just gives people a sense of how complicated this can be. Just assume loans by itself, but then when you look at the global picture of financial health, and we look at investing and doing the calculations of, first of all, we don't know what 20 years from now, 40 years from now, when one's going to retire, what the tax market's going to look like, or taxes what bracket you're going to be in. But also, how does that affect your student loans? Is it more financially beneficial to go ahead and maximize one account versus another? That's exactly why I think there's a lot of utility to not bury our head in the sand, educate ourselves financially, as Ryan and Edmund previously came back and talked about. But if not, if this doesn't interest healthcare practitioners, and they do have to go out and outsource and hire somebody who's doing it the right way, you guys are clearly one of those folks. But there are a lot of the great professionals out there, and I'll find some of those people that I think, and I'm sure I'm going to miss them and link that in here. I do want to get your giving opportunity to talk a little bit about your pre debt coaching or counseling that you guys call. Because I heard you talk about, maybe it was with Lauren or somebody else, about like one of the listeners who was asking about whether or not they should get married because their fiancee had like a really large debt burden and how confusing that was. And I mean, those type of horrifying stories or their student loans should not dictate that, right? And another, so that's like the negative aspect of it. And the other thing is Travis recently had somebody on the podcast where this person was a teacher, I think, and she had like the income of 70,000, but it was able to get like 80,000 of debt. And at that point, he said, you might, there's a loophole, you might be able to take out all that they're offering you, because if you're going to go for loan forgiveness, at that point, the, you know, the marginal cost of dollar is zero for you because they're going to get forgiven anyway. And he mentioned that that's something you guys discussing your pre-dead counseling as well. So what's that program about, you know, how did it start and like who should consider it? Yeah, you are awesome. You are all, it's your SLP fan, you're a true fan. I really appreciate it. But yes, we do have a pre-dead consultation. So this came about a little later. We, our bread and butter has always been student loan repayment planning. That's the majority of our work still. Most people come to us after they already have the debt, but pre-dead planning has become more and more important, really because school is not getting cheaper. And I think I'm glad there's starting to be more conversation about the value of school and the cost of programs and comparing those things. So our, our pre-dead consultation helps people take a look at, you know, if they're going to school for being a veterinarian, for example, you know, what is the estimated cost based on the school that they're going towards or going to? And usually they have these numbers handy because they're, they're looking at these opportunities already. So we look at the cost of attendance, we look at the potential income opportunity in the future for what area they want to go into, which this is all using assumptions, but I think we can make some pretty educated assumptions on that. And then we take a look at, okay, so if you were to borrow the full cost of attendance, what does this look like when it comes to repayment? And, you know, we walk through, should someone go the forgiveness path, like PSLF or longer term forgiveness, or is this path going to take you more towards like a pay it down to zero approach with your student loans? And we just kind of have those conversations. And that was a good example with with Travis's conversation about, you know, borrowing the most that you have access to, which sounds like really scary and irresponsible to say, hey, just borrow everything that they give you. But there does become a point where it just doesn't matter how much you borrow, because if you're going to be going towards loan forgiveness, your payments are based off of income. And so if you borrowed 200,000 and get 100 forgiven, but, you know, you pay based off of income over that timeline, so it doesn't really make a difference if that makes sense. So we have those conversations, really to help just paint the picture instead of going into school blind, worrying about the money side of things, thinking that you're going to have to graduate and, you know, sacrifice everything to pay the loans off within 10 years. Like that doesn't have to be the the approach and we just use math to try to figure out how you should be thinking about your schooling. And if that to you or to that person makes sense. And, or it, you know, if that sits well with them, like if they are a forgiveness case, are they okay with having the loans around for, you know, 20 years, 25 years to go towards the income driven path? Or are they okay with committing to public service? So those are some of the things that we weigh and we talk about in that. Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think it's an awesome resource. It's a thoughtful approach. I think as we've highlighted multiple times, I mean, these decisions, if you make the wrong one off the start, it can be thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousand dollars in some cases, depending on, you know, what plan if you're in the wrong plan or whatnot. I know I mentioned that we're going to wrap up here, but I do want to, do you have a couple more minutes or you want to talk about the cost of higher education? Sure. So I think part of the reason we're even sitting down here and we're in this mess in the first place is because the cost of higher education graduate programs just exponentially has been rising over the past couple of years. And it doesn't seem like there is an end near, right? I've got, I've got a baby daughter now and, you know, I start thinking about the 529 and whatnot because I need to start, you know, saving for her college. And, and I was just kind of, I pulled up some, some rough numbers here. And, you know, I'm sitting in New Jersey, that's where I went to undergrad and just the data for the state tuition. Since 1990 to 2008, the average in-state tuition has tripled and this is for the state schools. Then I looked at some of the medical schools, my medical school in particular, you know, I am articulated in 2013. So, coming up on a decade and a decade later, the tuition, just the tuition in itself is $20,000 more. And, you know, what particularly, and that's just one example, right? I imagine some of the, the schools out on the, on the west coast in California, and, you know, this is particularly southern California, that's got to be twice as much as that. But what's particularly frustrating to me about that specifically, medical school in general, is that, you know, third and fourth years are being charged the same amount of tuition. And I don't know how familiar you are with what kind of happens during the third and fourth clerkship years as we call them when they're doing rotations, especially fourth year when most of the students end up doing their rotations at outside institutions, outside hospitals, we call them audition rotations or sub internships where they're trying to, you know, really shine for their program. And so, for like seven to nine months out of the year, they have no connection with their home institution, yet they're being charged anywhere from 60 to 70,000 dollars. And that's just like, it makes no sense to me. So, all that being said, why is this happening? Tell us. Why is it happening? Well, because it can. In the sense of there is no limit on how much you can borrow when it comes to federal direct loans, because the Department of Education has given schools the ability to dictate their own, well, they can, they can dictate their own cost of attendance, and you can borrow federal student loans up to the cost of attendance. So, if, you know, that third and fourth year, the college tells Department of Ed, hey, it costs 60, 70,000 for my third and fourth year folks going through this program, you can borrow that. You can borrow that. If it was 30,000, you can borrow up to 30,000. If it was 100,000, you can borrow up to 100,000. So, the schools have figured it out. And I may have said something similar to this when we talked about it last time, but the schools have figured out that they have no incentive to keep the costs of school down because they know that forgiveness exists with student loans for those who don't make enough post graduation to pay the loans off. And that, you know, is now getting some attention because we're now getting to a point where forgiveness is definitely part of the conversation, but we also haven't gotten to the point yet where mass income driven forgiveness has, like, timed out, meaning 20, 25 years. This all started early, or let's say 2007 when some of these income driven plans started coming out. So, people haven't gotten to 20 or 25 years yet of loan forgiveness based on these current plans. So, it's not, I think there's going to be a bigger blowback on these, you know, on the cost of attendance conversation when people see it. Like, when people see how much student loans are getting forgiven after 20 or 25 years. But right now, it's just, it's kind of like a, you know, it's a fake number. It's a fake, not fake conversation because it's real. It exists. It'll happen. But no one's actually seen the forgiveness yet. And so, you know, I think, you know, in summary, I think schools just don't have any incentive to keep the cost down and they could borrow, you know, they can, they can dictate what it is. So, and yeah, I think just to put some numbers on it, I mean, we're talking, I currently, even though you mentioned that really is the 10 year program, now folks that have gone through that program, we're talking in the several upwards of several billions of dollars, right? I can't remember exactly what I heard. Are we talking in the tens of billions? Or is it much more than that that the current forgiveness has been? Do you have a sense of what it is? So I think 145 billion was estimated. Yeah. So estimated 145, but we're not there yet. I think we're climbing towards that. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so I guess if the more important question is, how does it stop kind of what I'm hearing from you is when that bill gets to be large enough and enough people actually do get forgiven. And we talked about it is here to state, despite what the headlines said four or five years ago, like it's going to happen. Yeah. And when, you know, several hundred billion dollars they'd forgiven department ed's going to realize, oh, hey, this is not a bad idea. This is not a good idea. We don't want to get rid of PSLF. Maybe they will. They keep talking about restructuring it over and over and over again, depending on which parties in in in command. But the other way to look at is maybe reduce the cost of education. I mean, do you are you more optimistic about that? I think I think there will be some. So it's it's a tricky because D does government or do you know, are there going to be limits on how much a business a school is a business can charge for their services? Like that's a really tricky conversation. So, you know, maybe there's some kind of I think what might happen first is more accountability on the schools where they have more skin in the game for people who get loan forgiveness. Like if they have put their students in a position where they had to go towards loan forgiveness and they get X amount forgiven, well, maybe the college picks up, you know, half of that bill or something. This is just like me talking rambling. But, you know, I think more things like that would happen first than dictating or putting caps on how much the cost for school can be because then that really leads us down a slippery slope to putting constraints on what businesses can do and that's probably not a good place to go to. Yeah. Well, we're certainly not going to get to the bottom of it today. I don't think anybody really knows, but I do want to give people something to think about and I want to open up that conversation because I do think that's a serious problem and it's somewhat of a frustrating problem. And, you know, we always talk about getting to the root cause, right? And I think that this is certainly one of them. Megan, I want to thank you again for sitting down with us and talking student loans is taking a deep dive. And also, I'm glad that we got to touch on a little bit about financial coaching and financial health in general because I think as much energy as we spend talking about student loans and it's important. It's forefront of everybody's mind. Overall, this is a big part of the financial plan and financial health as we talked about last time. So thanks so much and can't wait to do it again. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for listening to another episode of Medicine Read and Find. As promised, if you'd like to dive further into any of the topics we discussed today, please be sure to check out the show notes where you have a lot of great resources to learn more about student loans but also personal finance and financial health with a focus on healthcare practitioners. As always, please remember that everything in this podcast is for educational purposes only and it does not constitute the practice of medicine, nor should it be construed as a medical advice or financial advice of any sort. No physician or client patient relationship is formed and anything discussed in this podcast does not represent the reason of our employers. We recommend that you seek the guidance of your personal physician, your personal financial planner, your financial coach, like Megan for any health or financial related advice. I cannot stress the importance of working with a good financial professional if you don't have the interest yourself to educate and learn about these somewhat complex, if not highly complex topics, especially when it comes to the student loan landscape which is constantly changing and constantly evolving. However, if you enjoyed this show, please be sure to subscribe, review, and share with anyone who you think both gain value and as always, we are happy to hear feedback. You can reach us at medredefinedatgeema.com or on social media or handle as med redefined on all the usual suspects. So please be sure to reach out and until next time, thank you for listening.