Articles Posted in Student loans

The tax landscape for student loan forgiveness is constantly shifting.  Earlier this year we blogged about disability discharges of federal student loan debt no longer considered taxable.  Discharges in bankruptcy for either federal loans under a Brunner challenge or non-qualified private student loans that don’t meet the definitions for discharge protection are both non-taxable events.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program for federal loans also provides a tax free total forgiveness after ten years of qualifying payments.  Talk to us if you have questions about whether your loans qualify, your employment qualifies, or your payments qualify.  There are sticky questions that may prevent relief after years of payments if done wrong.

The IRS also allows for tax relief for taxpayers who took out federal student loans for attendance at Corinthian Colleges and other schools owned by American Career Institutes (ACI) and were granted a discharge under the Defense to Repayment program.

Just now, I got off the phone with a very sophisticated potential client who is facing a garnishment for his federal loans.  This was a very intelligent person and well respected in his field, but he didn’t really know much about how the student loan system worked.  His closing comment to me before we ended the call was “What a productive phone call!”  I often hear “I wish I had called you years ago, I’d be that much further ahead”.

I mention this because due to high demand, we now have to charge for our student loan consultations – $175.

But we offer a Guarantee:

Matt Taibbi with Rolling Stone, wrote a recent piece called “The Great College Loan Swindle” that outlines how we got here.  It started with sales pitches that colleges make to kids – comparisons of salaries of those with high school diplomas to those with 4 yr degrees.  The value of that degree over a lifetime of earnings.  Investing in yourself was a common phrase used by for-profit colleges.  It creates a vicious cycle, everyone feels obligated to go to college, most everyone who can go does, and then you have a glut of graduates which is where we are now.  And this isn’t limited to just the student.  Parents wanting to help their kids every way they can, co-sign on loans they cannot possibly repay, or sign their own loans called Parent Plus loans.  Parent Plus loans do not take into consideration the income and employability of the parent or grandparent who applies for the loan.  Not surprisingly, Parent Plus loans have been cited by the CFPB as having extremely high default rates.

So Step 1, convince everyone a college degree is necessary in life.

Step 2: make it easy to borrow the money.

The New York Times today in an article titled “Education Department Unwinds Unit Investigating Fraud at For-Profits” shows a department charged with investigations of schools such as DeVry, Corinthian, Everest, ITT, IADT etc., has only three employees now that it has all but been shut down. In addition, the unit’s members are now required to obtain special approval to contact any outside groups including the CFPB, state attorneys general, etc. who had been partners in identifying and prosecuting cases.  This alone has halted any investigative work by the three remaining employees.   So bottom line, for-profit schools are free to engage in predatory activities once again per the DOE.

We warned our clients a few months back when an Inspector General’s report came out in December 2017 that highlighted the reduction of staff of the new direction that that the DOE was taking.

We reiterate now while it is still possible to file Borrower Defense to Repayment applications for fraud by for-profit schools, a better approach may be to enroll in an income based plan with debt forgiveness – but there are several different programs and it is important to choose the right one for best results.  However, they have “staying power” and the current administration is in favor of Income Driven Plans.