Have a bunch of student loans? Teach special ed? Or in a low income school? Or maybe you’re in an area of shortage? Then read on! You may qualify to have part or all of your student loans forgiven!Teacher student loan forgiveness is a real thing! I qualified for over $7,000 in forgiveness, and you might too!
The federal teacher student loan forgiveness program is the real deal! I received $5,000 in loan forgiveness. (I’d already had all of my Perkins loans forgiven a couple months ago – for about $2,400.) Anytime someone wants to give me roughly $7,400 in FREE money, I’ll take it!
You will want to read the official websites provided here, but I also want to give you my take and a few pointers.
Perkins Loan –http://www.studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-
cancellation/charts/teacher#teacher-cancellation
Here is my experience with teacher student loan forgiveness. I
spent my first five years teaching in several different low income schools. Each year I was teaching I had to contact my undergrad (and later grad) school to let them know my Perkins loan were in deferment. Yes, it was a bit of a pain – but it saved me about $2,400. I’ll take that for a couple hours worth of headache anytime! Make sure you get the appropriate signatures and have everything filled out appropriately. It’s a royal pain – and slightly embarrassing – to have to send your administrator something twice when you make a mistake! {Yep, live and learn!}
I made copies of EVERYTHING regarding payments, deferments, and anything else for my teacher student loan forgiveness! I would date when I sent items to my college. It’s not that I don’t trust the college or the post office, but this was an incredible amount of cash when I was a teacher making just $26,000! (And I may be a bit OCD)
Make sure you keep your address up-to-date at your college or university! That way they can send you the deferment/cancellation amounts each year. Every year they cancel a different percentage, which increases each year until it’s gone. So even if you only teach in a low income school for a year or two – you can still get money forgiven!!
After five years (and another form with administrative signature’s each year) my Perkins loans were totally forgiven! =) Any time I had questions in the five years, I just contacted my colleges directly and they were super helpful. And I even worked with two different colleges during this time frame, so I know how juggling it all can be…
Federal Stafford Subsidized and Unsubsidized Loans –http://www.studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/charts/teacher
No joke – this teacher student loan forgiveness was a bit harder to get. Thankfully there wasn’t paperwork to do each and every year, but the final product was more work and headache than all five years of work on the Perkins. =(
When my five years of teaching were up, I had to get information from each of the administrator’s I’d worked under (which happened to be at three different schools for me by then). The form is roughly five pages to fill out. The tough part was determining which of my loan providers to send the loan to. One of the providers literally gave me the run around for over two months. I would call and talk to “Bob”, and he would say he would call me back tomorrow to let me know if the company would forgive my loans. No call from Bob. So after 3-4 days I would call back and ask for “Bob” and of course no one could locate him so I’d talk to someone new. This time it might be “Joe” and the cycle would repeat. This happened for nearly a month before I got fed up and called the Department of Education directly!
The woman I talked to from the DoE was more than accommodating. She informed me that the loan provider could not deny my application if I were eligible. I should simply send it to them. (However, I had another friend who had sent her application to the same place and they informed her they never received it! Twice! HA!) This sweet DoE woman went on to tell me that she could contact them and take care of it. However, it may take awhile (read – months!). She then asked if I had any other loan providers. Which I (thankfully?) did. So I called them, talked to a real person, finished my paperwork, sent it off, and within a week had a notice via e-mail and mail that they were reviewing my application!
At this point is took almost two months for my application to go through. But during this time frame my loans were deferred so I didn’t have to make any payments! =) Then one day I got this sweet note in the mail and this is what I saw —-
To summarize this long post, it was well worth the paperwork, phone calls, headache, etc to get about $7,400 paid off! I strongly recommend teacher student loan forgiveness to any teacher who qualifies!
Feel free to leave me a comment with any questions you may have. I’m no expert, but I’ll do what I can to help! And make sure to check out the comments for more great information! There are a variety of options when it comes to student loan forgiveness for teachers.
~HoJo~
Want to learn even more about teacher loan forgiveness? Contact Heath at Student Loan Insider. Heather has talked to him extensively, and she’s heard personal testimony from other readers that Heath was able to help them out.
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This post is not a guarantee that your student loans will be forgiven. I was not given loan forgiveness in exchange for writing this post. It is a real government program that may allow teachers loan forgiveness. Go to the Federal Student Aid website for further details and limitations. I wrote this post because the letter I received stated, “We hope that this payment will allow you to continue in this noble service and that you notify other eligible teachers about this program.” I hope other teachers can benefit from me writing it!
