Episode Transcript
Brenton: [00:00:00] Your federal Student aid data file holds a treasure trove of information as it pertains to your student loans, such as your Repayment history, your public service Loan forgiveness credits, what your payment will be when student loans resume, and even errors that may exist when it comes to the relationship between the credit you should receive towards things like Loan forgiveness and what you actually have on the books with your student Loan servicer.
In this episode, we start the process of walking you through that file so you can understand how it works and how you can use it to get that much closer to having your student loans forgiven, reduced, reorganized, or expedited. Let's get started.
Brenton: Hello, my name is Brenton Harrison of Escape Student Loan Debt, and your host for the Escape Student Loan Debt podcast. We don't have a long episode for you today because what I'm going to ask you to do in this episode [00:01:00] might in some cases, take you a few days to complete. I don't want to give you too many tasks and overload you to the point where you don't take care of step one.
So what we're gonna do today is we're gonna talk about the National Student Loan Data System file that you can download that gives you the information as it pertains to every single federal student Loan you have ever taken.
No matter the school, no matter the Loan servicer, no matter the Loan, Type, and we've referenced this document in the past, and I've gone through it quickly, but today I want to just get you started with some of the basic information as it pertains to how to download that file, how to locate your current loans and Loan balances, and even the payment history that you have on file for that particular Loan.
Now the short form for this file is your N S L D S file, and there's only one place you can locate it, and that is on student aid.gov. We've talked about in previous episodes how even if you are used to getting all of your student Loan information through your [00:02:00] current servicer, the Department of Education is pushing student Loan borrowers towards the student a.gov website because over the course of the next few years, they're going to consolidate all of your student Loan information under that umbrella so that the most accurate information that you can find will always be on student aid.gov. If you don't already have a username on this site, the first step is to go to student a.gov and register for a profile.
It's going to ask you for all of your identifying information, your current address, your current phone number, but also your social security number. And your social security number is what they're gonna use to go into the Department of Education files and match up your Loan history documents with that social security number.
So that's why it's gonna take a few days. If you don't have an account already, you can register for a username today, but you will not be able to see all of your Loan information until that file is connected, which can take a few business days. So if you have an account, go ahead and log in. We're gonna talk to you about step two.
If you do not, [00:03:00] you're going to have to log in, register. After a few business days, you come back to step two and once you have either in the top right corner or the top left corner, depending on what device you're using to look at it, you'll see a menu tab and you'll also see a little emoji of a person. You can click on that emoji and there's gonna be something that says either my profile or my aid.
You're going to click on that my aid button and it will pull you to a dashboard. Now, once you're on that dashboard, it's going to give you a grand overview of your loans. It's going to tell you who your Loan servicer, or servicers are. It's going to tell you when your next upcoming payment may be.
Now, under that dashboard, when you see my aid, there's a button right next to it that says View detail. I want you to click that button and it will take you to a screen that looks very similar, but it gives you a more detailed breakdown as you scroll down the page of those particular loans, it tells you exactly how many you have.
It tells you what the balance is. It tells you what the most recent [00:04:00] Repayment plan on file was for those loans, and a lot of detailed information. But on the loans tab, at the top right corner, you're gonna see another button that says, download my aid data, and to get your NSLDS file, you have to click on that button and it's going to download a document that when you open it up, it's going to look like absolute gibberish. But if you just take your time and don't bug out when you open it, there's a lot of information here that you can see will help you locate your current Loan, your current Loan balance.
And after the break we're gonna tackle this document and over the next few episodes, go through it along with some of the now announced changes to Income Driven Repayment plans, and show you how you can use this document plus that updated guidance to see how much credit you should be given towards having your loans forgiven.
[00:05:00]
Brenton: Welcome back. Before the break, we downloaded your national student Loan data system file. If you're looking on screen, we're actually going through a sample aid data file that has been de-identified, uh, from a friend who allowed us to go through their student loans.
And at the top of this [00:06:00] file, it's just contact information. It has your name, has your address, your phone number. Which is important because this data system file is updated every single time you pull it. So if you're going through your contact information and you see an old phone number or an old address, that's important because it means that either studentaid.gov or your Loan servicer has old incorrect contact information. And as we've covered, when student Loan payments restart, it doesn't automatically restart if you haven't signed up again for auto pay. And the only way they would be contacting you is through your contact information on file. So this is just the first thing you see. If you see something inaccurate, you need to update it with your Loan servicer and also with student aid.gov.
It shows all of the loans that you took out throughout the course of your schooling. So as an example, I can see that during this person's undergraduate years, they took out a total of $25,500. But I can also see during their graduate years they took out [00:07:00] $135,723 for a total loans dispersed of 161,000.
Now I can go and I can see how much those loans have grown to, so over the course of a decade, This person's loans that started out at 161,000 in total, they now have $275,000 in principle. About $4,000 in interest, so their loans have grown over a hundred thousand dollars in a decade. This shows you the impact of having a Loan payment that is too small to meet the interest on your loans.
If you don't have a subsidy that's keeping that Loan balance at bay, you can have them grow much faster than this. But this person has seen a balance grow six figures in a little under a decade, so very serious thing. Now, I can also see if I didn't look at it on that dashboard, this person's student, Pell Lifetime eligibility used, which in this case is 0%.
That means that even if they were eligible for a Pell Grant, they didn't use any. [00:08:00] So you can actually see on this document that if they are within the income limits and the student Loan forgiveness program is approved, they will only be given 10,000 of forgiveness because they never took out a Pell Grant during their schooling.
The next section shows all of the student loans this person ever took out in their current balance. So this person took out a direct Stafford subsidized Loan, which has a zero balance, another direct Stafford Loan Zero balance, a Direct Plus Graduate Loan Zero Balance, another FFEL Plus Graduate Loan, which if they were trying to have their loans forgiven, wouldn't be eligible for any of the forgiveness programs, as we've discussed.
So if you're looking and you're saying, well, if all their balances are zero, where are their student loans? In the middle of this, I can see that they have a direct consolidated unsubsidized Loan, and they have a direct consolidated subsidized Loan. And that is where you see the total and current balance of their loans.
What this tells me is that this person probably saw that they had some [00:09:00] student loans that were not eligible for forgiveness, and they consolidated all of their loans, including those two, into these new, consolidated, subsidized, and unsubsidized loans. So that's a good thing. It lets me know that this person is going to be eligible.
But if you look at your data file and you see Perkins Loans or FFEL Stafford loans and you're trying to have forgiveness, this is the first place where you can see you likely need to consolidate because if you don't, whatever you see under that Stafford category that doesn't have direct in the title is not going to be eligible for forgiveness.
Now that we've seen where their loans are located, we have to scroll through the history of every single one of these loans, and that is the bulk of these documents. And you can see the Loan status, and you can also see the Repayment history for each of those loans, even the ones that have been consolidated.
And this is key to letting you know what you might be eligible for when it comes to credit, so that you can line it up with [00:10:00] what your Loan servicer has on file. And as you go through these details, you can see things like when this Loan was taken out, you can see when the Repayment period began.
You can see the actual Loan that was taken out. Originally this Loan was about $42,000. Its current principle because it was consolidated, is $0. And you can even, if this person is pursuing public service Loan forgiveness, see the public service Loan forgiveness credits that have been assigned to this particular Loan.
But as you go under that section, you can see the total history before it was consolidated and you start at the bottom. You see all of these dates, for example, it tells you a Loan status description, where the Loan was originated. This Loan was originated in July of 2012. And then the next status it says is that it went into grace period in April of 2013.
That lets me know that this person probably graduated in the spring of 2013 and they had a six month grace period, and I can see that because while the grace period started in [00:11:00] April of 2013, the next status change shows it's shifting to end Repayment exactly six months later in October of 2013.
So they started Repayment in October. It was in forbearance in December, which lets me know that they probably paid one month's payment, said I can't handle this, and requested a forbearance from their student Loan servicer. And their student Loan servicer put them in forbearance from December of 2013, all the way to December of 2015, where it goes to end Repayment again. Now what's interesting about this is we've talked about the fact that for forbearance, your student, Loan servicer is not supposed to let you be in forbearance for more than 12 months consecutively.
So I'm looking at this file and I can see that this person was in forbearance for 24 months in a row, which is not supposed to happen.
The rule is 12 months consecutively, 36 months cumulatively. So that extra year that this person was not supposed to be allowed to continue, forbearance is good for them. [00:12:00] Because they didn't pay, but their student Loan servicer has to amend this credit to make sure they give them that extra year. Now I can see that they did the exact same thing again. They went back into Repayment in December of that year, and the very next month in January, they went back into forbearance, and this one was for six months. In July of that year, they went back into Repayment and then they went back into forbearance immediately again.
So during this stretch, even though they're in forbearance, off and on, that's how it's supposed to work. They give you forbearance for a certain period of time. Then they say you're out of forbearance. You have to request it again.
You're not supposed to be able to go straight through. And that's what this person did up until 2019 where they went back into Repayment on August 16th, 2019. And on August 23rd, six days later, you can see the status changed to non defaulted paid and full through consolidation, Loan.
So this person went off and on into forbearance, never really had a period where they paid their loans. And when it came time to pay their loans, they just [00:13:00] consolidated them, which tells me that they're saying now that I'm about to start paying, I want to make sure that I'm getting credit every month towards forgiveness.
And the only way they could do that is to make sure that those stafford loans were lumped in with their direct loans through a consolidation Loan. Now this person, now that they've seen their payment history for their old loans, they scroll all the way down this document and they keep scrolling. Keep scrolling, keep scrolling, keep scrolling.
It's a long scroll because they had so many loans. But eventually they're gonna get down towards the bottom of the page and they're going to find their direct consolidated unsubsidized Loan and their direct consolidated subsidized Loan, which have their current balance. And in the next episode, we're gonna start here with this student Loan data system file.
Showing you what they have for what you currently owe, including public service Loan forgiveness, and how this will apply to the newly updated rules for Income Driven Repayment plan. See you then.
[00:14:00]
