“This would be a much better world if more married couples were as deeply in love as they are in debt.”
A Student Loan Fix for a Teacher, and Many Other Public Servants
Source Date:
Friday, March 30, 2018
Categories:
In October, I wrote a column about Jed Shafer, a teacher in Oregon who found himself on the wrong end of the student loan repayment bureaucracy.
Mr. Shafer thought he was following the rules to qualify for the public service loan forgiveness program, and spent years communicating carefully with the loan servicers who collected his payments on behalf of the federal government. But it turns out he hadn’t been doing it correctly after all.
The result? He learned he was going to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars extra. After many months of pleading his case to his loan servicer and the Department of Education, he’d pretty much given up.
“They have the power, regardless of my service and full payments, to make me look inept,” he told me then. “They will surely win based on their documentation.”