A couple weeks ago, sources reported that President Trump was about to issue an executive order to shut down the Dept of Ed. That order got mysteriously shelved, but that didn't slow anything down, as half of all workers got fired from Department of Ed last week. Now, we're hearing that the actual shut down order will be issued later today. Borrowers can expect a significant impact from this. About a third of all the folks who worked at Federal Student Aid (FSA) are gone. Complaints made to...
14 days ago • 5 min read
Now that we have SLP Insiders, whenever I think up a cool new calculator, I'm going to build it quickly and share it with you. I'm sure I'll make mistakes and you'll find errors with some of them. If you do just let me know. Today, I've got a financial advice calculator that I think will be really fun to use. Here's the excel version below. financial advisor fee calculator.xlsx And here's the google sheets version in case you don't pay for Excel (you have to click "use template" while being...
16 days ago • 1 min read
Before I jump into my weekly newsletter, here's a quick SLP Insiders update. I'm aiming to put an exclusive SLP Insiders bonus tip at the bottom of 3 out of the 4 weekly newsletters I send out every month. Regular subscribers won't see my bonus tip, but you will (there's a bonus tip at the bottom today for example that only you're seeing as an Insiders member). You'll get additional bonus content too with separate dedicated emails. Right now I'm thinking those will happen once or twice a...
21 days ago • 3 min read
As an SLP Insiders member, once or twice a month, I plan to share something cool with you that took me a fairly long time to put together. This is on top of the bonus tips you get at the bottom of the free newsletter that others don't get. This month, my special piece of content is detailed salary reports from 2024 by profession. For each profession, we used anonymized Student Loan Planner consult data from many thousands of clients from 2024 to create average income and debt data overall, by...
24 days ago • 1 min read
This is gonna be a stressful update to read. But I'm going to do my best to reduce your stress and explain really what's going on. Please read this to the end because there's a LOT of info in this. Order to close Dept of Ed incoming As early as today, the White House will issue an executive order to close the Department of Education. But that's not the whole story. The order will likely focus on primary and secondary schools. Student loans are statutorily required to be managed by Dept of Ed....
28 days ago • 3 min read
The student loan chaos continues. The big shocker this week was that the Dept. of Ed took down the online consolidation and online IDR applications. I've seen that happen before even during the Biden administration. But what I haven't seen before was them taking down the live IDR paper application. That suggests they're about to roll out huge changes with how online and paper applications for student loans get processed. Why did they take these applications down? The 8th Circuit Court made...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read