Managing and Escaping Student Loan Debt: A Practical Guide

Summary. Build the inventory, verify the loan type, pick the plan, certify every year, never take forbearance when income-driven repayment is available, and know the exits.

For the rules — the statutes, the discharge categories, the undue hardship standard — see Student Loans. This guide is what to do.

The single organizing insight: the borrower who engages does dramatically better than the borrower who avoids. There is no statute of limitations to outlast on a federal loan, but there is almost always a payment you can afford and often a path to forgiveness.

Step 1: Build the inventory (one hour, and it is the whole foundation)

You cannot manage what you have not listed. Make a table with one row per loan:

Where the information lives:

• Federal loans: the federal student aid database lists every one — type, servicer, balance, disbursement dates, status.
• Private loans: your credit report, which is free and should be pulled from all three bureaus.

What people find when they do this: loans they forgot, a servicer that changed without effective notice, a loan in a status they did not know about, and — most often — that some or all of their loans are not Direct loans.

Do this before anything else. Every decision below depends on the type column.

Step 2: Fix the loan type

If you have FFEL or Perkins loans and forgiveness is anywhere in your future, consolidate into a Direct Consolidation Loan. It is free, it is done online, and it takes under an hour.

Understand what consolidation does and does not do:

• It converts non-Direct loans into a Direct loan, unlocking the best plans and forgiveness programs.
• The new interest rate is a weighted average of the old ones — so it does not save interest, and it does not reduce the balance.
• It can affect payment counts. Rules on crediting prior payment periods have changed more than once; check the current treatment before consolidating loans that already have qualifying payments.
• It is generally irreversible.

If you have private loans, consolidation with federal loans is not possible, and refinancing federal into private is a one-way door you should walk through only with a written list of everything surrendered.

Step 3: Choose a repayment plan on purpose

The decision tree:

Can you comfortably afford the ten-year standard payment, and is forgiveness not in your future? → Standard repayment. Lowest total cost. Done.

Are you pursuing public service forgiveness? → An income-driven plan is generally required. Standard and extended payments may not qualify.

Is the standard payment more than you can manage? → Income-driven repayment, always, before considering forbearance.

Do you have a very large balance relative to income? → Income-driven, and expect eventual forgiveness of the remainder.

The three facts about income-driven repayment that matter most:

1. The payment can be $0, and a $0 payment counts toward forgiveness. If you are unemployed, this is the answer.
2. You must recertify income and family size annually. Missing it raises the payment to a standard amount and can capitalize accrued interest onto the principal.
3. Household size includes everyone you support — frequently under-reported, and it lowers the payment.

If married, run the payment both ways. Filing separately can substantially reduce an income-driven payment, at some tax cost. It is arithmetic with a definite answer; do it once a year at tax time.

Step 4: If you are in public service, protect the count

Four requirements, all simultaneously true:

1. Direct loans.
2. A qualifying repayment plan.
3. Full-time work for a government or 501(c)(3) employer — the employer qualifies, not the job title.
4. 120 qualifying payments, which need not be consecutive.

The four habits:

• File the employment certification form now, and every year, and whenever you change jobs. It is the only mechanism by which the count is tracked.
• Request the qualifying payment count in writing annually and compare it to your own records. Do not assume it is right — for years, it frequently was not.
• Never accept forbearance when income-driven repayment is available.
• Save everything. Screenshots of the count, PDFs of every certification, every confirmation email.

If your count looks wrong, dispute it in writing with your own records attached. Reconstructing employment from a decade ago is possible but miserable; contemporaneous certifications make it unnecessary.

Step 5: When you cannot pay — the most important paragraph in this guide

Do not accept forbearance. Ask for income-driven repayment by name.

A forbearance and a $0 income-driven payment both cost nothing this month. But:

Servicers steered enormous numbers of borrowers into forbearance because it takes five minutes and an income-driven application takes twenty. The cost of that convenience, to borrowers, was years of forgiveness credit.

Deferment is better than forbearance where you qualify — on subsidized loans, the government pays the interest during deferment. Check the categories: unemployment, economic hardship, in-school, military service, and others.

Say this on the phone: "I would like to apply for income-driven repayment based on my current income. I am not requesting forbearance."

Step 6: If you are already in default

Default arrives after roughly 270 days of non-payment, and it triggers acceleration, collection costs, credit damage, tax refund offset, Social Security offset, and administrative wage garnishment with no lawsuit and no judgment.

First, if a garnishment notice has arrived and the deadline has not passed: request the hearing. Requesting it in time generally suspends the garnishment. Financial hardship and the existence of a repayment arrangement are both relevant. Almost nobody requests it.

Then choose an exit:

Choose rehabilitation if you can wait ten months and the credit repair matters — a mortgage, a lease, a job that pulls credit. Choose consolidation if you need this resolved now — before tax season, to restore aid eligibility, or to meet a deadline.

Either way, the rehabilitation payment is based on income and is frequently very small. People assume the exit requires paying the accelerated balance. It does not.

Step 7: Check whether the debt should exist at all

Five administrative discharges, all free to apply for, all under-used.

Closed school discharge. Did the school close while you were enrolled or shortly after you withdrew, and you did not finish through a teach-out? Full discharge plus refund of what you paid.

Borrower defense to repayment. Did the school misrepresent job placement rates, accreditation, credit transferability, licensure eligibility, or cost? Apply. A pending application generally pauses collection. Describe concretely: what you were told, by whom, when, and what you did in reliance. Gather the enrollment agreement, marketing materials, and recruiter communications now — they disappear when a school dissolves.

False certification discharge. Did the school certify you when it should not have — no high school diploma where required, a disability making the trained-for job legally unavailable, or a signature that was not yours?

Unpaid refund discharge. Did the school fail to return money it owed after you withdrew?

Total and permanent disability discharge. Available on a physician's certification, a qualifying Social Security determination, or a VA determination of service-connected unemployability. Some borrowers are identified by data matching, but not all — apply if you qualify. See Applying for and Appealing Social Security Disability Benefits.

And death discharge. Federal loans are discharged on the borrower's death; Parent PLUS loans on the death of the parent or the student. Send a death certificate. If a collector suggests a family member must keep paying a discharged federal loan, they are wrong.

Step 8: If bankruptcy is on the table

The old rule of thumb — "student loans are never dischargeable" — was always an overstatement and is now materially wrong.

What is true: discharge requires a separate adversary proceeding within the bankruptcy and a showing of undue hardship, usually under a three-part test asking whether you can maintain a minimal standard of living while repaying, whether that will persist, and whether you have made good-faith efforts.

What has changed: federal policy has made the government's posture in these cases considerably less adversarial in appropriate circumstances, with attestation-based processes.

And a distinct argument for private loans: loans that are not "qualified education loans" — those exceeding the cost of attendance, or made for programs not eligible for federal aid — may fall outside the discharge exception entirely, and be dischargeable like ordinary debt with no hardship showing at all. This argument is genuinely under-used.

Talk to a bankruptcy lawyer rather than assuming. See Chapter 7 Liquidation and Creditors' Rights.

Step 9: If your loans are private

Different tools, and you have fewer — but the ones you have are real.

• There is a statute of limitations. Know your state's period. Never make a payment on a stale debt without knowing whether it restarts the clock.
• Collection requires a lawsuit. No administrative garnishment, no tax offset. Do not ignore a summons — a default judgment is the worst outcome available.
• Make them prove it. Private portfolios have been sold repeatedly and chains of assignment are often incomplete. Demand the note and the complete chain. See Defending a Debt Collection Lawsuit.
• Look for a cosigner release provision in the promissory note. Many exist; almost nobody applies.
• Ask about hardship programs. They exist at lender discretion and are granted more often than borrowers expect, particularly before delinquency.

Step 10: When the servicer is wrong

Misapplied payments, wrong plan enrollment, lost paperwork, bad forgiveness counts, and bad advice are all common.

The escalation ladder, in order:

1. Written complaint to the servicer, through its message system, which creates a dated record.
2. The Department of Education's ombudsman.
3. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose complaint process produces responses at a rate that surprises people.
4. Your state attorney general.
5. A consumer lawyer, where the harm is quantifiable.

What makes a complaint work: dates, dollar amounts, the specific instruction you received, and the document that contradicts it. "They keep messing up" produces nothing. "On 14 March I submitted an IDR application, confirmation number X; on 2 April I was placed in forbearance without my consent; the attached screenshot shows the application status" produces a correction.

Step 11: Avoid the debt-relief industry

Every federal application is free. Consolidation, income-driven repayment, employment certification, rehabilitation, discharge — all of them, filed directly, online, in under an hour.

Red flags: an upfront or monthly fee; claims of a special relationship with the Department; urgency; a request for your federal student aid credentials (never give these out); a power of attorney; a request to route payments through the company; and promises of immediate cancellation.

If you have already signed up: change your federal aid password, contact the servicer directly to confirm your plan and address of record, revoke any power of attorney in writing, stop routing payments through the company, and complain to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and your state attorney general.

Reading a statement and spotting what is wrong

A monthly statement contains six numbers, and four of them are worth checking.

Principal balance. Should decline every month you make a payment above the accruing interest. If it is rising while you are paying, either interest is capitalizing (which happens after forbearance, after leaving a plan, or after missing recertification) or payments are being misapplied.

Interest accrued since last payment. Compare it to your rate and balance. Daily interest on a balance is a simple calculation — balance times rate divided by 365, times the number of days — and it takes two minutes to check. Servicer arithmetic is usually right; the exceptions are worth catching.

How the payment was applied. The order is normally fees, then accrued interest, then principal. If you paid extra intending it to hit principal, verify it did. Many systems default to applying an overpayment to future payments instead — advancing the due date rather than reducing principal — which is almost never what a borrower wants. You must instruct otherwise, in writing, and then confirm.

Repayment plan and next recertification date. These should match your intent. A plan that silently reverted to standard is the classic sign of a missed recertification.

Two things statements do not show, and which you must request separately:

• Your qualifying payment count for forgiveness.
• Your loan type — a statement rarely distinguishes Direct from FFEL clearly.

A five-minute monthly habit: open the statement, check that the balance moved the right way, confirm the plan and the recertification date, and file it. Once a year, download the full history. That habit has caught servicer errors worth years of credit for a great many borrowers, and it costs an hour a year.

Five borrowers, five plans

Jules, 27, $61,000 in Direct loans, teaching at a public high school

Inventory result: all Direct, one servicer, current, on the standard plan.

Problem: the standard plan payment is affordable but it is likely disqualifying for forgiveness, and Jules has been making it for two years without certifying employment.

The plan:

1. Switch to an income-driven plan immediately. The payment drops substantially, which also frees cash.
2. File the employment certification form for the entire period of teaching, retroactively, and confirm what the count shows.
3. Set two annual reminders: recertify income and certify employment.
4. Investigate Teacher Loan Forgiveness as an alternative — a smaller amount after five consecutive years in a qualifying low-income school, but faster. The same period generally cannot be counted twice, so decide which to pursue and sequence it deliberately. For most borrowers with a large balance and a long public service career, public service forgiveness is the better instrument; for a smaller balance and an uncertain career, the five-year program can be better.

Value of one hour's work: possibly tens of thousands of dollars.

Sam, 34, $19,000 in private loans and $8,000 in Direct loans, working in software

Inventory result: the private loans carry a higher rate than the federal ones.

The plan:

1. Keep the federal loans on the standard plan. Forgiveness is not in play, income is comfortable, and the standard plan minimizes total interest.
2. Attack the private loans aggressively — highest rate first. There is no forgiveness coming for them and no benefit to stretching them.
3. Consider refinancing the private loans only, never the federal ones. Refinancing private-to-private surrenders nothing, because private loans have no federal protections to lose.
4. Check the private note for a cosigner release provision if a parent cosigned. Sam has the payment history to qualify, and nobody has ever applied.

The general principle: federal and private loans deserve opposite strategies. Federal loans reward patience and enrollment; private loans reward speed.

Bea, 45, $140,000 across Direct and FFEL, at a nonprofit hospital for eleven years

Inventory result: roughly half the balance is FFEL. Eleven years of payments, none of which counted on the FFEL portion.

This is painful, and it is also the most common single fact pattern in student loans.

The plan:

1. Consolidate the FFEL loans into a Direct Consolidation Loan now. Every month of delay is a month that cannot count.
2. Investigate current rules on crediting prior payment periods. These have been adjusted more than once, sometimes generously. Do not assume the eleven years are lost — but do not assume they are saved either. Ask in writing and keep the answer.
3. File employment certification for the whole eleven-year period, which she can document from tax records and employment verification letters.
4. Enroll in an income-driven plan on the consolidated loan.
5. Request a written payment count and audit it against her own records.

The lesson she would give someone younger: check the loan type in year one, not year eleven.

Marcus, 52, in default on $34,000, a tax refund just intercepted

The plan, in order:

1. Check whether a garnishment notice has arrived and whether the hearing deadline is still open. If so, request the hearing immediately — it generally suspends the garnishment while pending.
2. Choose the exit. Marcus wants to buy a house in two years, so rehabilitation wins: nine income-based payments over ten months, and the default notation comes off the credit report.
3. Get the rehabilitation payment set on income, not on a collector's opening demand. The amount is frequently very small, and collectors frequently open with something much larger.
4. After rehabilitation, immediately enroll in an income-driven plan so the loan does not simply re-default. Rehabilitation restores eligibility; it does not set a sustainable payment by itself.
5. File a review request on the offset if there is a basis — a pending discharge application, for instance.

Priya, 61, a Parent PLUS loan from 2004, retired, Social Security being offset

The plan:

1. Resolve the default — rehabilitation or consolidation. This stops the offset.
2. Consolidate into a Direct Consolidation Loan, which is the only route by which a Parent PLUS borrower reaches an income-driven plan.
3. Enroll in that plan. On a modest retirement income, the payment may be very small or zero, and zero payments still count toward eventual forgiveness of the remainder.
4. Check disability discharge eligibility if her health qualifies.
5. Confirm the death discharge rule for her records: the loan discharges on her death or her child's. Nobody in the family inherits it.

The emotional point worth saying to any parent in this position: the loan is not a moral failure and it is not permanent. It has an exit, and the exit is administrative paperwork rather than money she does not have.

What to do in the first hour, the first week, and the first month

Hour one:

• Log into the federal student aid database and download the loan list.
• Pull all three credit reports and find any private loans.
• Fill in the inventory table.

Week one:

• Identify every non-Direct federal loan and decide about consolidation.
• Apply for an income-driven plan if the current payment is unaffordable or forgiveness is in play.
• File an employment certification form if you work for a government or nonprofit employer.
• Set two annual calendar reminders.

Month one:

• Verify that the first payment under the new plan posted correctly.
• Request a written payment count and file it.
• Apply for any discharge you may qualify for — closed school, borrower defense, false certification, disability.
• If in default, start rehabilitation or consolidation.
• If private loans are delinquent, call before the account is charged off and sold; hardship options shrink sharply after that.

How to talk to a servicer

Most of this guide runs through a phone call or a message to a servicer. Four habits change the results.

1. Ask for the thing by its name. "I would like to apply for income-driven repayment" gets an application. "I'm having trouble paying" gets a forbearance. The words are not interchangeable, and the second answer costs years of forgiveness credit.

2. Put it in writing. Use the servicer's secure message system rather than the phone where you can. It creates a dated record with a confirmation number, and it survives the servicer transfer that will eventually happen.

3. Get a confirmation number and a name for every interaction, and write down what you were told. If you were told something that turns out to be wrong, that record is the beginning of the remedy.

4. Verify the outcome yourself. Two weeks after any change — a plan enrollment, a consolidation, a recertification — log in and confirm it actually happened. The failure mode is not usually a refusal; it is an application that quietly never processed.

A script for the most important call:

"I'm calling to apply for an income-driven repayment plan based on my current income. I am not requesting a forbearance or a deferment. Please tell me: which plans am I eligible for given my loan types, what documentation do you need, and what is the application confirmation number? Also, please confirm my loans are Direct loans and, if any are not, tell me which."

And for the forgiveness call:

"Please provide, in writing, my current count of qualifying payments toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and tell me which months in my payment history did not qualify and why."

That second question is the one that catches errors. A count without a reason is not auditable; a list of disqualified months is.

What documents to keep, and for how long

Student loans run for decades and servicers change hands. The records that matter are the ones you keep yourself.

Keep permanently:

• Every promissory note you signed.
• Every employment certification form and its confirmation.
• Annual payment count statements.
• Every consolidation application and confirmation.
• Every discharge application and its supporting evidence.
• Proof of the default exit — the rehabilitation completion letter is the document that proves the credit report should be clean.

Keep for the life of the loan:

• Annual income recertification filings and confirmations.
• Payment history, downloaded once a year.
• All servicer correspondence.

Screenshot before every servicer transfer, and again after. Balances, payment counts, and plan enrollments have all been known to move during transfers, and the borrower with a before-and-after screenshot is in a completely different negotiating position than the borrower with a memory.

Store it somewhere that outlives a laptop — cloud storage, an external drive, a folder someone else in the household can find. Ten years is long enough to lose a computer twice.

When to get professional help

Most student loan work is self-service and should be. Four situations genuinely warrant a professional.

A bankruptcy adversary proceeding. Discharging student loans in bankruptcy is a lawsuit. Get a bankruptcy lawyer, and specifically one who has done these.

A private loan lawsuit. A summons is not something to handle alone if the amount is significant. Consumer defense lawyers frequently work on fee-shifting or contingent arrangements where the lender's proof is defective.

A contested borrower defense application with complicated facts — recruiter misrepresentations, altered documents, a school that disputes the account. Legal aid organizations and law school clinics do this work.

A servicer error with real quantifiable damages — years of misapplied forgiveness credit, a wrongful default, a credit report ruined by a servicer's mistake. Consumer lawyers take these.

What to bring: the inventory table, the promissory notes, the payment history, all servicer correspondence, and a one-page timeline. A lawyer given that package can assess a case in half an hour. One given a shoebox cannot.

And what not to pay for: filing a free application. That is the entire business model of the debt-relief industry, and it is worth nothing.

Fitting student loans into the rest of your financial life

A student loan is one obligation among several, and the sequencing questions are real.

Should I pay extra on my loans or save for retirement? In almost every case, capture the full employer retirement match first — it is an immediate return that no loan interest rate matches — then decide. If you are pursuing forgiveness, paying extra is actively counterproductive: it reduces the balance that would have been forgiven while doing nothing to shorten the required number of payments. Borrowers on a forgiveness track should pay the required amount and not a dollar more.

Should I pay extra or build an emergency fund? Emergency fund first, to a few months of expenses. A borrower with no cushion who hits a car repair ends up in forbearance or delinquency, which costs far more than the interest saved.

Should I pay extra or pay off credit cards? Credit cards, essentially always. The rates are higher and there is no forgiveness, no income-driven plan, and no hardship architecture. See Debt Collection and the FDCPA if collection has begun.

How do student loans affect buying a house? Mortgage underwriting counts the payment in the debt-to-income ratio, and the treatment of an income-driven payment — the actual payment versus an imputed percentage of the balance — varies by loan program and has changed. Ask the lender specifically how it will be counted; the answer can move the qualifying amount by a large margin. See Buying or Selling a Home.

What happens if I get married? Marriage does not make a spouse liable for premarital loans absent a cosignature, but it can change an income-driven payment considerably. Run the payment under both joint and separate filing each year.

What happens in a divorce? A decree can allocate responsibility between spouses, but that agreement binds the spouses, not the lender. The borrower stays liable to the lender regardless. Build enforcement into the decree. See Divorce and Dissolution.

What about taxes on forgiveness? Sometimes taxable, sometimes not, depending on the program and the year's law. Public service forgiveness has been treated as non-taxable; long-term income-driven forgiveness has been treated differently at different times. Ask before the forgiveness year arrives, because an unexpected tax bill on a forgiven balance is a bad surprise with a short runway.

If the loans are not yours — identity theft and forged signatures

Occasionally a borrower discovers loans they never took out: a relative who used their identity, a school that signed the paperwork, or a straightforward identity theft.

What to do:

1. Get the promissory note. Request it in writing from the servicer. Compare the signature, the address, and the disbursement records to your own history.
2. File an identity theft report and a police report. The federal identity theft report is the document that unlocks the strongest remedies. See Identity Theft and Credit Reporting.
3. Apply for a false certification discharge on the ground that the loan was made in your name without your authorization — this is a recognized category, not an argument you have to invent.
4. Dispute the credit reporting with all three bureaus and with the furnisher, and request a block of information resulting from identity theft.
5. Place a fraud alert or a security freeze, so it does not happen again.

Do not simply stop paying and hope. A federal loan you dispute but do not formally challenge will go to default, and default triggers offset and garnishment without anyone reviewing the merits. The dispute has to be filed.

The same procedure applies to a loan taken in a child's name by a parent, which is more common than people expect and is genuinely difficult emotionally. The legal analysis does not change: if the signature was not yours and you did not authorize it, the loan is not yours, and there is a discharge category for exactly that.

A word about the emotional part

This is a legal guide, but the practical obstacle in student loans is rarely legal. It is that people stop opening the mail.

The debt is large, the balance frequently grew rather than shrank, the servicer letters are confusing, and there is a persistent cultural message that owing money on an education is a personal failure. The result is avoidance — and avoidance in this particular system is uniquely costly, because the consequences accrue automatically and the remedies require an affirmative filing. Nothing good happens by default. Everything good requires a form.

So the useful reframe is mechanical. The system has defined exits. The exits are administrative rather than financial. Applications are free. Income-driven repayment can produce a $0 payment. A default can be cured with nine small payments. A school that lied to you can produce a discharge. None of this requires money you do not have; it requires opening an envelope and filling in a form.

And the ordering is forgiving. If you do nothing else from this guide, do the inventory. Everything else follows from knowing what you have, and the inventory takes an hour.

Twelve mistakes

1. Not knowing the loan type. The first and most expensive error.
2. Accepting forbearance instead of income-driven repayment.
3. Missing annual income recertification, raising the payment and capitalizing interest.
4. Never filing employment certification and discovering at year ten that nothing was tracked.
5. Assuming the servicer's forgiveness count is correct.
6. Refinancing federal loans privately for a lower rate, surrendering everything.
7. Paying extra while on a forgiveness track.
8. Letting a default sit because the accelerated balance looks impossible — the rehabilitation payment is income-based and often tiny.
9. Never applying for a discharge you plainly qualify for.
10. Making a payment on a stale private debt and restarting the limitations clock.
11. Ignoring a private loan summons, producing a default judgment.
12. Paying a company to file a free form.

The one-page version

• Build the inventory. Type, servicer, balance, rate, status — every loan.
• Fix the type. Consolidate FFEL and Perkins into Direct if forgiveness matters.
• Pick the plan deliberately. Standard if you can afford it and forgiveness is out; income-driven otherwise.
• A $0 income-driven payment counts. Forbearance does not.
• Recertify income every year. Certify employment every year. Audit the count every year.
• In default: request the garnishment hearing, then rehabilitate (credit repair, ten months) or consolidate (fast, no credit repair).
• Check every discharge: closed school, borrower defense, false certification, unpaid refund, disability, death.
• Bankruptcy is possible — and some private loans may not be excepted at all.
• Private loans: limitations period, proof of assignment, cosigner release, hardship programs.
• Never pay for a free application.

Helping someone else with their loans

Many people reading this are doing it for a parent, an adult child, or a client. Four practical notes.

You will need authorization to speak to the servicer. Federal privacy rules bar a servicer from discussing an account with anyone but the borrower. There is a third-party authorization form; file it before the first call, not during it. A power of attorney may also work, but servicers process their own form faster.

The borrower must sign the applications. Consolidation, income-driven repayment, and discharge applications require the borrower's signature or electronic authentication. You can prepare everything; you cannot file it for them.

Do the inventory first, together. The single most useful thing a helper does is sit down with the borrower, log in, and build the table. Most borrowers have never seen a complete list of their own loans, and the conversation changes once the list exists.

Watch for shame. Student debt carries an emotional weight that keeps people from opening the mail, which is precisely how a delinquency becomes a default and a default becomes a garnishment. The useful frame is mechanical rather than moral: this is a system with defined exits, the exits are administrative, and the paperwork is free. A borrower who believes there is a path will open the envelope.

For an older borrower, add two questions: is Social Security being offset, and does a disability discharge apply? Both are common, both are fixable, and neither gets raised unless someone asks.

Frequently asked questions

What is the very first thing to do? Build the inventory and find out whether your loans are Direct, FFEL, Perkins, or private. Everything depends on it.

I have no income. What do I do? Apply for income-driven repayment. Your payment may be $0, and $0 payments count toward forgiveness.

Should I consolidate? Yes if you need to convert FFEL or Perkins into Direct for forgiveness. Check first whether consolidation affects existing payment counts.

Should I refinance privately for a lower rate? Almost never for federal loans. You surrender income-driven repayment, forgiveness, deferment, disability and death discharge, and rehabilitation — permanently.

They are garnishing my wages. Can I stop it? Request the hearing if the deadline has not passed, and pursue rehabilitation or consolidation.

My school closed. Do I still owe? Apply for closed school discharge, and consider borrower defense. Do both.

Related documents

• Student Loans
• Student Loan Repayment and Relief Checklist
• Student Loan Toolkit
• Defending a Debt Collection Lawsuit
• Debt Collection and the FDCPA
• Chapter 13 Bankruptcy
• Filing and Appealing an Unemployment Claim

Educational only, not legal advice. Student loan rules change frequently by regulation and litigation. Verify current terms before acting, and never pay a company to file a free application.