As soon as my law degree was in hand, Sallie Mae started asking for $2,000 a month, which wasn’t even in my budget on a good day. To say my student loans stressed me out would be a massive understatement. Yes, I’m a lawyer, and yes, I make six figures, but six figures ain’t six-figuring like it used to!
Fast forward to summer 2022: Beyoncé had just released the Renaissance album and I was beginning to hear rumblings about the TPSLF waiver dispensing with some of the requirements of the original Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. The original PSLF program forgave federal student loan debt for borrowers who made 10 years of payments while working in certain public service jobs.
The TPSLF waiver was actually introduced the year before on October 6, 2021, but I hadn’t heard about it until the next year. Either way, I didn’t think I qualified. I had been working in public service for ten years, but I hadn’t made anywhere near 10 years’ worth of payments.
It was my dad who kept telling me to look into the waiver further. And in true dramatic fashion, it wasn’t until the month before the October 31, 2022, deadline that I actually began to look into the program. And that decision changed my life.
About My Debt
All of my debt came from law school. I’d borrowed a total of $177,055 in federal loans (Graduate Plus Loans) at interest rates that varied from 6.8% to 8.5% — that’s three years of law school at $60,000 per year.
When I graduated from law school, I consolidated my loans into a Federal Direct loan with an interest rate of 7.75%, which remained the same until I applied for the TPSLF waiver in 2022. The federal interest rate caps varied between 7.90% and 8.5% during the time period that I applied for my loans. Compare that to the 5% home mortgage rates in 2022 that had every news outlet lamenting at how expensive interest rate hikes were making homeownership.
My resulting loan balance when I actually applied to the TPSLF waiver in 2022 was $330,726, and a whopping $153,671 of that was purely interest!
Needless to say, that debt felt insurmountable.
How I Applied & Received Debt Relief
That month before the deadline, my dad sent me a webinar hosted by the Department of Education to educate potential applicants about the TPSLF waiver. That was the game changer.
During the entire webinar, my jaw was literally on the floor. It seemed entirely too good to be true. But the speaker explained that many of the requirements (including 10 years’ worth of payments) were being temporarily waived.
The Department of Education created the waiver to address some of the issues borrowers were experiencing with the original PSLF program. There had been so much chaos and misinformation surrounding the original PSLF program, and the rollout of the first qualifying applicants in 2017 was — as Forbes called it — a mess!
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that 99% of applicants who applied in those first two years were denied. This was an attempt to rectify that. Under the program, you still had to have worked in public service for 10 years, but there were massive waivers of other requirements.
The application required me to certify through prior employers that I’d worked for them during the requisite 10 years (I had to hit up my old bosses and HR departments and ask them to physically sign a document), and then I had to complete a written application and send it all in. For some reason, the application had to be faxed like it was 1989, but I would have sent it via pigeon if they’d asked. I applied in October 2022. Then waited. Wondered. Doubted. Then waited some more. And then in April 2023, out of the clear blue, the letter that caused the scream that nearly took out my vocal chords came.
Literally everything about my life changed after my debt relief. Since 2013, I’d been trying to buy a home and couldn’t. The student loan debt was making that incredibly difficult. To this day there are homes that I couldn’t close on that have almost tripled in value from the contract price I had. (Yes, I too am a Zillow stalker.) I still cry Jordan meme tears over these lost opportunities. But this debt relief, I suppose, was my blessing, and that home equity was someone else’s.
My debt was something I’d been incredibly ashamed of; even writing this piece was a difficult task, but at times, it felt like I’d never get ahead. I was this professional on paper, but that my net worth kept saying otherwise. It even affected how much I shared with friends and romantic partners about my debt. Receiving the news was like having this huge weight lifted off my chest.
It even opened the door to me finally being able to purchase a home — albeit in a post-pandemic, overpriced housing market — but it’s my overpriced home. And I am grateful for the opportunity. Today, in 2024, I’m a homeowner and officially student loan debt free, all thanks to the government’s student debt loan forgiveness plan.
The moral of my story: Always, always, always look into any government announcement about student debt relief. Maybe it’s not this one, but it could literally be the next one that changes your life.
