Chances are, you took on some debt, maybe a lot of it, to fulfill your dream of teaching. You’ve probably read a little about your future starting salary as a teacher and are rightfully worried about earning enough money to make your student loan payments—and pay for all your other living expenses.
The good news is there are a few loan forgiveness programs that can ease the burden of high student loan pay- ments on a teacher’s salary. These include public service loan forgiveness (PSLF) and teacher loan forgiveness.
The PSLF program wipes out your remaining balance after you’ve made 10 years worth of payments while work- ing full-time for a qualifying employer (government and nonprofit). You may qualify for the teacher loan forgive- ness program if you teach full-time for five complete and consecutive academic years in a low-income school or educational service agency and meet other qualifications. As part of the program, you may be eligible for forgiveness of up to $17,500 on your Direct Subsidized and Unsubsi- dized Loans and your Subsidized and Unsubsidized Federal Stafford Loans.
Despite the existence of PSLF and the teacher loan forgiveness program, enrolling is a cumbersome process. So we’ve teamed up with SAVI—a company that created an advanced student loan calculator and comparison tool—to power the NEA Student Loan Forgiveness Navigator.
Creators Aaron Smith and Tobin Van Ostern designed SAVI to minimize the anxiety that student loan repayment causes in many recent graduates. Their goal is to make it easier to navigate the loan forgiveness process and actually help people reduce their debt.
As an NEA member, you have special access to the Student Loan Forgiveness Navigator. Simply log in to NEA Member Benefits by visiting neamb.com/login. Click “Start Your Journey Here,” and start inputting information, such as where you teach, subjects you’ve taught, your annual income, and the total amount of your monthly student loan payments.
SAVI also makes it easier to input your federal loan information into the NEA Student Loan Forgiveness Navigator. Just provide your myfedloans.org login, and the platform pulls over all the required loan information for you.
Then the SAVI tool analyzes your information and displays available repayment and forgiveness options side by side. If you choose to enroll in a forgiveness program or in one of the various income-based repayment programs, SAVI fills out the correct Department of Education application for you at no cost. This not only saves you time, but also helps prevent the errors that have caused so many PSLF applicants to be denied previously. The average member that uses the tool saves almost $1,800 per year off their loan payments!
