Thank you for your question. I am not sure of the answer though. Perhaps you can get in touch with someone within the military family program? My husband was in the Navy, and I know they had a few groups who helped out families–they might know the answer.

Quite honestly, I do not know what is out there to help out students with their current loans. I will take a look at it this week and hopefully get back to you.

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Thanks for your question.

From what I have read, it looks like this program is only for those taking out new loans starting in 2014. However, check out this brochure (and website) for information specific to teacher loan forgiveness. If you have further questions, I would definitely contact someone from this website because it is built specifically for people like you!

I hope this helps.

The first is the student who works in public service (making very little), and can have that debt forgiveness in 10 years. Let’s look at an example. If you graduate with a degree that cost $40,000 after all four years, and you make only $28,000 (net) in government service, and we assume that your “discretionary income” is somewhere around $24,000 (just throwing numbers out), then your student loan repayment would be capped at 10% of $24,000 each year for 10 years, at which point your debts will be forgiven. This means you will have only paid $24,000 after 10 years instead of $40,000. Of course, you do need to take into consideration salary increases, but it looks like you will get a break for being a public servant.

The second type of student is the nightmare scenario that you talked about in your comment, where a student with an art, social worker, or historically low-paying (but not any less important) degree takes out $120,000 in loans, and can never hope to pay them all back. Once again, their income would be low to start with (let’s use the above $28,000 to make this simpler). Over 20 years, that person would pay around $48,000, and then would have the rest of their debt forgiven.

You know someone who loves to talk about students with extremely expensive degrees and low-paying futures? Free Money Finance, so you might want to check out his blog: http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/

Thanks for your thoughts!