Going back to school half time to defer

I’ve got about 100 qualifying payments toward forgiveness from when I was on SAVE, with around $75k in federal undergrad loans. I was counting on the 5% discretionary income payments and the forgiveness timeline, but that’s obviously gone now thanks to the current republican situation.

My AGI is about $85k and RAP is the cheapest option available to me, which comes out to roughly $600/month. That’s a pretty brutal hit with how expensive everything is right now.

At this point, I’m planning to enroll in 6 credits at my local community college this fall to trigger deferment and just keep doing that for now. This will bring my payments down to ~$175-200/month paid to the school. Additionally, this would qualify me for the Lifetime Learning credit of ~$500 on my taxes, making the savings even better. The goal is to keep payments as low as possible until something better comes along. I don’t realistically see myself ever paying this off.

Long term, I’m aiming to retire early in about 10 years and move abroad somewhere more affordable with my husband. At that point I’ll either let the loans default and just say 🖕🏻 to it (I know they can take some Social Security later), or switch to a better repayment option if anything improves down the line, which I’m hoping eventually happens.

Yeah, it feels like kicking the can, but I’ve kind of accepted the balance isn’t something I’m ever going to meaningfully pay down. Just hoping a better income-based plan comes back at some point, because SAVE was actually workable and losing it has been really frustrating.