Student loan advisor by day and musician by night, Bridget Haile uses her own experience navigating student debt repayment to work at Summer, which partners with large employers, financial institutions, and unions to help their populations navigate and reduce student loan debt. Summer is a certified B Corporation.

The Summer staff uses specially designed tools to analyze an individual’s loans and provide customized recommendations that utilize existing programs and services that are difficult to manage on your own. The service is free of cost to borrowers, who engage Summer through organizations that understand that student debt support is a valuable benefit to offer to members and employees. Bridget spoke to Nikki about the small changes currently happening in student loan reform and how borrowers’ can make a plan to prepare for when federal student loan payments resume. Find Summer online here or on Instagram @savewithsummer.

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Transcript –

Nikki Nolan: Welcome to the podcast. It is so good to have you here.

Bridget Haile: Thank you so much. It’s so great to be here. Very excited.

Nikki Nolan: We’re going to get into it. Like we always get into it. How much student debt you have right now?

Bridget Haile: I have about $125,000 in student debt. That is all federal. My interest rate is between, it’s about 6.5%. These loans are from grad school. So, unfortunately, higher interest rate than the undergrad loans.

Nikki Nolan: What has sort of been the impact of student debt on your life?

Bridget Haile: It’s had a pretty huge impact in that now this is what I do for a living. I don’t think I ever would have gotten here, had I not had the student debt of my own.

I actually went to school. My graduate degree is in music. I’m a professional singer and did that full-time for a while. As you and I’m sure many others know that is very difficult to make a living, especially when you have to pay a lot of student loans, which is a cycle that a lot of folks find themselves in.

So my need to pay my student loans led me to start working in the finance world. Initially in wealth management and, at the end of the day, making a gillionaire, more of a gillionaire, maybe isn’t the goal you want to be working toward at some point.

So found my way into kind of mission-driven start-ups and then into Summer, which was trying to help people manage their student debt.

This entire journey I think, would not have happened without my own student debt, which is probably both a good and a bad thing.

One of the things I like to say is you shouldn’t have to do this full-time for a living to know what you should do with your own student debt. Because even when I was working in finance before Summer, I didn’t really know how to handle mine because the existing advice out there is really scammed.

So this is what has brought us here. And my goal is that other people do not have to do this in order to manage their own student debt.

Nikki Nolan: What is some of the advice that you’ve seen out there that is just like not great.

Bridget Haile: Okay. We all know about refinancing, right? Which is when, you know, you take either private loans or your federal loans, you sell them to a private servicer for a lower interest rate. I think a lot of people see that as the only viable path to manage student loans but refinancing, it’s also really hard to qualify for a lot of people, especially out of school can’t immediately just go to a private lender and refinance their student loans. It’s also not the best option for a lot of people because you lose out on all of the benefits that come with having federal loans if you have them. So I think of the financial world, the only advice that kind of exists is “yup pay them off”. Maybe refinance, right? It’s even, it’s even hard to rank them in between other financial priorities. Right? Cause no one is approaching student debt in a vacuum. It’s part of how you’re looking at, you know, how you’re paying your credit cards, how you’re saving for emergencies, for retirement.

I’m sure if he’s both seen a lot of articles out there that are, you know, how I ate ramen noodles for three years and never went on vacation to pay my student loans. And here’s why you should too. Right. And I think you can see Nikki shaking her head at this. I think right, as part of what Summer is trying to do is kind of challenge that prevailing narrative.

That’s for some people, a great option and they should do that if they want to. And for a lot of other people, not an option that’s viable for them. There are other things you can do. You can lower your student loan payments. If you need to, you can look at other financial priorities, right? Just because you have student debt doesn’t mean it has to define your entire life, what you’re doing. I say this as the person who works in student debt, but it doesn’t have to define your entire life and your entire financial priorities, and you can have a life and have student debt. Which I think is kind of what we’re trying to get to.

Nikki Nolan: So I feel like this leads us really well into, like, what is your story? How did you get so interested in student debt?

Bridget Haile: I got so interested in student debt because I have it, which I think is the case for a lot of people. I was actually very lucky to not have student loans from undergrad. I did, however, decide to go to a graduate school for music. So it was a conservatory. Those are very expensive.

You know, I did have some scholarship, but it involved a significant amount of student loans. They were all federal loans, which did give me some options. And do you know, this is, I think probably something that lots of people experience, which is, you know, when you’re 18 or when you’re 22 or whenever you’re taking out loans, you, you really don’t know what you’re signing yourself up for.

You really don’t know, for a lot of people, you know what it’s going to be like on a month-to-month basis, you know, once you’re an adult paying these back. I’m not sure if I would’ve made a different choice. I certainly don’t regret the wonderful experience I had in graduate school. You know, the singing I’ve been able to do, you know, afterward and still continue to do.

I really couldn’t have done that, without having that graduate school experience, however, you know, you graduate, you do this exit counseling, you see this tremendously huge number. Right. It’s very scary. I think fully, and you know, this isn’t the case for everyone, but I was thankfully able to enroll in an income-driven repayment plan.

So for those who don’t know, this is an option you have for federal student loans. When you graduate from school, you usually have, they give you what’s called a grace period. You have six months where you don’t have to make payments. After that, they’re going to give you a monthly payment that’s designed to pay off all your loans in 10 years. Depending on how much of a balance you have for some people that’s five hundred, a thousand $1,500 a month, which for someone just graduating from school is not often an option to just say, great, I’ll just pay that amount every month for 10 years. And that’s no problem. So the other option, right, is income-driven repayment. So, you basically tell the Department of Education this is what my income is. And your monthly payment is a percentage of that.

If anyone’s listening and you don’t have any income, you could actually have a $0 monthly payment under income-driven repayment. So, it’s a great option for a lot of people who can’t afford that monthly payment, don’t want to go into default on their student loans. This is a way to make it affordable.

The monthly payment. Isn’t tied to a particular timeline, but the way it works on income-driven repayment plans is that if you are on the plans- I say plans, uh with an S because there are several different income-driven repayment plans, which is a little confusing, depending on which one you’re on whatever’s left of your loan balance is discharged after 20 or 25 years.

So, the idea with income-driven repayment is you’re paying less, right? So because of interest, your balance may be growing. So, to prevent you from paying that, you know, for the next many decades, right? They say, you know, your payment’s going to be lower. And if you’re still on this plan in 20 years, the rest is discharged.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, but we’re, we are seeing the, it’s not true, but, but we’ll, we’re going to get teaser alert. We’re going to get to that later. Let’s get back into your story.

Bridget Haile: We have a lot to say about that.

Nikki Nolan: So, you decided to go onto the income-based repayment plan. Keep telling me about your story.

Bridget Haile: So thankfully I did enroll in income-driven repayment, so, my monthly payments were affordable. This is kind of the challenge with interest on student loans. Right? You know, when I was looking at my loan balance to come to talk about how much it was, I owe about the same amount that I borrowed from when I graduated school and I’ve paid about $40,000.

So, I’ve basically paid $40,000 to not go into default on my loans. So, this can be a challenge and I’m lucky in the sense that my income has increased, right? I’m not just a freelance musician anymore. You know, I have a job. And it’s unlikely that I would get if the payments stayed based on my income, I probably wouldn’t have anything left to forgive.

If I waited the full 20 years, which I think is a boat that a lot of people fall into. So, at some point, you know, you have to make a switch in tactic, and this is, you know, kind of what I tell people that we work with too. You know you might choose one strategy because it’s the only one you can choose at the time.

At the time, I could only afford to pay what I could pay. Right? Now I am in the more fortunate situation of being able to make a choice of right, how do I approach this? So for someone like me, I’m actually probably not going to make it the 20 years I would need without paying off what’s left. So, you know, now I’m kind of switching my strategy to just try to pay the loans off. But this becomes, convoluted and complicated.

Nikki Nolan: I would actually love to, I was going to tease into this, but I’m glad that you brought it up. What are, so you work in this space, what are some of the tactics out there or strategies, or like, walk me through some of the thinking that you have personally with changing your tactics and like, what are things that you’ve thought of and how do you coach people? Like, give me all the things!

Bridget Haile: A situation that we find ourselves in sometimes, right? If someone will come to us and say, I want help with my student loans. And we say, great, that’s what we do. We’d love to help you with your student loans. Are you looking to lower your monthly payment, or do you want to pay off your loans more quickly?

And they’re like, I want to do both. Which of course I wish that everyone could do. But the reality is that those are kind of two different strategies, right? Because of the way interest accrues. If you pay less, now you’re going to pay for longer and you are probably going to pay more over time because of the interest accruing.

If you go for the second option, you want to pay them off more quickly. That means you’re going to be paying more now, and less over the long term. That is kind of a trade-off, you know, there are some exceptions to this, the biggest one being public service loan forgiveness, which I know you’ve talked about public service loan forgiveness.

If you do, you know, all of the million trillion steps correctly, ideally allows you to do both. It allows you to pay less now and pay less overall because you’re getting forgiveness. Of course, we know, and you know, kind of what you referenced before in student loans, there’s always the rules as they’re written and the rules as they’re applied. Those are often not the same thing. But when we get back to kind of those two main tracks for debt repayment, you know, the nice you know, I will say nice- none of this is really nice, but you know, the nice thing about it is that you do you, most of the time do not have to commit irrevocably to one track. A lot of people, when they’re graduating from school, don’t have the option to just pay a ton of money every month to their student loans. They’re getting their first job. They’re figuring it out. They need to lower their monthly payments. And that’s just where they are right now. So they enroll in income-driven repayment. They pay, you know, say 10% of their salary toward their student loans, which hopefully makes it more affordable for them. And then, you know, down the road, maybe you’re making more money.

Maybe you’re not having trouble affording your monthly payments. You may decide actually at this point, I really want to just get my loans paid off. So maybe I, at that point, make the decision to refinance my loans for a lower interest rate and just really aggressively pay them off.

And I think, you know, to your point earlier about income-driven repayment, you’re, you’re not locking yourself into this plan for 20 years, right? You have choices down the road and sometimes those tracks change, and you have to kind of make a decision based on where you are specifically in your timeline of, you know, job and life and loans and all of those things.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, let’s get to, where you were then when you started making your strategy to where you are now, and then we’ll get into, what are some of these policy things.

Bridget Haile: I was on income. I have been on income-driven repayment for a long time. I think like many people, the pause in payments, that we had had on a lot, not all, but a lot of federal student loans for the last 18 months, it has been really great, right? For someone like me, who now has made the decision that I’m trying to pay my loans off, it’s allowed, you know, most of my payments to go to principal, which is really impactful. You know, before the pandemic, you know, when interest was still accruing on my loans, they accrued about $700 in interest every month.

So even if I was say paying $1,500 a month toward my student loans, only about half of it was going to the principal. The ability to have interest paused has been very useful and impactful for me as I’m sure it has for many, many other people. You know, and as we start to think about solutions for how the government can step in and try to address this problem. I think many people are looking around and saying, hey, why does the federal government need to collect interest? You know, on top of me making my monthly payments?

This is one of those things where, you know, both from myself, my friends, the borrowers, who I work with professionally, right? I think there’s never been more attention on student loans as a problem. I think there’s so much buy-in to the fact that this is a major structural issue.

You know, politicians are forced to take a position on it because it’s so the top of mind for their constituents. So, I think the attention level is at an all-time high.

Nikki Nolan: Yes.

Bridget Haile: I think what that can lead to, right, is there a lot of policy proposals out there and you know, a lot of media publications report on kind of anything a politician says they’re going to do about student debt.

Right? What we know is what they say they’re going to do, and what actually happens are very different things. And, you know, we just talked about the Cares Act and the pause in payments and interest. Of course, there’ve been tons of headlines floating around about student loan forgiveness. And I think the danger in that is that a lot of people who don’t live and breathe and do this day in and day out and just have their student loans, they haven’t had to look at them for, you know, a year, which has been nice- But they see the headlines and I think I’ve talked to a lot of people who assumed that forgiveness was happening or that it was already part of the Cares Act or that they should be expecting it, or they don’t actually need to do anything on their loans because forgiveness is going to happen.

The worst-case scenario there is, as we know, you know, not all federal student loan payments were paused. Most were, but a lot aren’t. It’s very common for people to have multiple different types of student loans. You know, say you have an older type for your undergrad. You have a newer type for your grad school.

We saw a lot of people who had, you know, a mixed bag of loans who just thought, oh, well, all of my payments are paused, right? They stopped making payments and the older loans went into default. So the lack of communication around these intricacies can have huge impacts on individual people.

So to kind of get back to the question that you initially asked me, you know, what have we actually seen so far in terms of concrete change?

President Biden’s administration extended the pause in payments, interest collections through the end of September. They have also made some relatively small, but positive changes to existing federal student loan programs. So one of the situations we just talked about is, you know, older loans like FEL loans, not being eligible, for some of the current benefits. They’ve actually gone back and said for FEL loans that are in default, we’re going to put those back into good standing and we’re not going to collect payments and interest on those loans.

Nikki Nolan: Oh, when did

Bridget Haile: that was, I’m going to say about a month ago. And so again, these are relatively small changes, but good ones, right? So that’s impactful for a lot of people, again, if implemented correctly. I’ve already talked to one borrower this week, who’s in that exact situation and it just hasn’t been applied to her.

So, you know, we very much hope that they, you know, take that down the ladder of not just announcing it, but making sure it actually happens for everyone. Those are kind of different things. I know you recently did an episode about Borrower Defense, so they also announced a change to the Borrower Defense program.

So one of the issues that happened under the previous administration and to back up a second, Borrower’s Defense to repayment is a federal program that can forgive your loans if you attended, for example, a for-profit school that may have defrauded you or misled you when it came to taking out that degree.

The change they announced to that program is that under the previous administration, some people got notices that said you are approved for Borrower’s Defense to repayment, which is great. Your forgiveness amount is $0.

Nikki Nolan: Yes. Yes. Or a small percentage of a fraction. Like we, we know you’ve been defrauded, but, you still have to pay it.

Bridget Haile: Exactly. So right, not a great outcome. So they’ve also said they’re going to be making some changes in expanding the amount of forgiveness that’s given to individual people under that program. You know, I say relatively small because that change only applies to people who’ve already been approved. So I would say we are seeing good, small incremental changes to current programs.

I think. A lot of us know that we need a lot more than that. We need big solutions to a big problem. So of course, there are lots of proposals all around there about forgiveness. You know, you have Democratic congressional leaders pushing for $50,000 of forgiveness per borrower. We know that President Biden in the past has supported $10,000 of forgiveness per borrower.

He seems to waffle on whether he has the executive authority to do that without Congress.

Nikki Nolan: He absolutely does have the executive authority to do it. Where is the memo? Do you know? What, have you heard anything? Cause you are closer to this in terms of doing it as your day job. Secretary Cordona is supposed to give us this memo. The Debt Collective has legally proven that he can, without Congressional approval, sign away. And I think what’s interesting here is like the $10,000, the $50,000. And then there are some studies that show that you have to forgive at least $75,000 to get racial equality in debt.

It is so great that we are here from when we, when like the Debt Collective and strike debt and all these things started talking about 10 years ago, that now it’s actually being, talked about publicly. That’s so wonderful. And I would like to stop there and like, transition back to you about other policies that you’ve sort of seen.

Bridget Haile: Yes, absolutely. So, I mean, I think, you know, totally agree, right? This is a huge problem, and it needs big solutions. Right? And it’s needs solutions for people who have student loans currently and are trying to repay them. And it also needs a solution for the root of the problem, which is college costs and how those are funded, and how the costs are born by an individual.

There are some real structural changes that need to be made here. This is one of those things. I really hope that we see them. Do I know for sure? I certainly don’t. You know, from what we have heard, the new administration is using this payment pause extension as a timeline for them to figure out what they’re going to do. Because I think they know, right, that it would look very bad to announce everyone’s got to start paying your student loans again, and we haven’t helped you, or we haven’t done anything. We haven’t made it any changes to make this easier for you. So I do think we will probably see a few more announcements before payments resume.

Do I know whether those will be that, those kinds of small incremental changes or something more meaningful? I don’t know. But as a borrower and you know, on behalf of the borrowers I work with every day, you know, I certainly hope that there’s a commitment to some real impactful forgiveness and other solutions.

Nikki Nolan: That makes a lot of sense. What are some of the cool things that you specifically have done in this space? Cause like you’ve done some really cool things. And I want to hear about those.

Bridget Haile: I’ll give a quick little intro about Summer. So Summer is a startup. We’re based in New York City. Although now, many of us are remote and working in different places. But we are trying to simplify student debt. So the goal is that in coming to Summer, a student loan borrower gets helped with every aspect of the situation.

We know that when you call your servicer, they may tell you the wrong thing. They may give you unreliable information. They may not have enough to help you trade-off multiple different approaches or options. So, you know, we’re really the one-stop-shop in terms of, we help you with your student debt to see it all in one place.

Based on information about yourself and those individual nitty-gritty details of every single loan, we make recommendations about what we think would be the best program, whether that’s public service loan forgiveness, income-driven repayment, you know, teacher loan forgiveness. These are all different federal programs that of course, all work together and intersect with each other.

So we make a recommendation for what we think might be best for you. And then we also help you enroll in the program. So we’ve built this to do it online. You can sign online. You’ll have my team; a team of student loan experts reviews your application before we send it in. If we see that your servicer has made a mistake, which happens all the time, we will help you fix it.

So, for example, you know, I’m thinking of one particular borrower where we worked with, who went through our process to submit an income-driven repayment form. His loan servicer gave him a payment that was double what it should have been. For a lot of people, when they get something like that, you know, they don’t even know they can push back. They’re like, wow, that’s a lot more than I thought, but I guess that’s what I have to pay. So thankfully he told us about it, and we were able to get them to, you know, halve the payment to where it should be because they just made a mistake. The analogy that we like to use is, you know, doing this student loan navigation on your own is a lot like filing your taxes.

And dealing with the incredibly complicated tax code. But accountants and online tax software don’t exist. Right? You’re up against these really complicated federal programs that, when done in a way that they see as incorrect can have really negative consequences on you as an individual.

So we are trying to fill that, right? We want to help make recommendations for what could work for you, programs you may not know about, and then help you actually get into those programs and help your servicer enter you into those programs the right way.

I think one of the things that I’m most proud of, to at work to have worked on at Summer is a tool for a program called Teacher Loan Forgiveness. So teachers are probably familiar with this. It’s a program that’s been around for a while, you know, like all of these programs has some quirky requirements.

And of course, because none of this is simple. You can’t use it at the same time as Public Service Loan Forgiveness. So most teachers who are eligible for Teacher Loan Forgiveness are also eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. You can’t do both. You have to figure out which one you should do.

So the Department of Education actually doesn’t have an online tool for this program. So one of the things I did at Summer was to build an online tool for this program. So it’ll help you assess your eligibility. So find out if you’re eligible, fill out the form and get it signed online by yourself and you know, the principal of your school, or, you know, whatever employer needs to sign your form.

And the nice thing about doing this through us, is we know all those nitty-gritty rules, right? We know that your servicer is going to reject the form outright. If it has a slash instead of a dash in the date fields, like that is what they will reject a form for. And they won’t say, oh, turn into a new form with a slash instead of a dash, they’ll say you’re rejected from this program.

So, unless you have someone working with you on this, how do you even know to say, actually I do qualify? You know, make sure we get this. So actually we’re up to 95,000 dollars of forgiveness under this program for teachers that we’ve gotten since building the tool last year. So I think that’s been. Such a rewarding experience because some of these programs, you know, the timelines are 10, 20 years, so you’re helping someone with them. But the finish line is so far away.

So to be able to have already locked this in, for teachers who deserve it is a pretty incredible feeling and one that I’m so proud to have worked on.

Nikki Nolan: That’s so cool. It’s interesting. So they didn’t actually have a process for Borrower’s Defense either. And the Debt Collective created the form for Borrower’s Defense.

I actually just recently heard a story about a person who was in federal student loan forgiveness, and then transitioned into the teacher thing and it killed all of their payments. So there’s like all these things that you just do not completely fundamentally understand because it’s so opaque and not transparent. And like, this person basically was I think, five or six years into federal forgiveness filled out the paperwork for the teacher one and can’t get back into federal and is now stuck with another 10 years of pay.

Like there’s like some awful things. And I also met a woman who, who has Parent Plus loans, and she is trying to qualify for the federal loan forgiveness for the Parent Plus loans- I didn’t realize was I’m going to bring this person onto the show- but I didn’t realize that they, that you could Parent Plus loan qualify for, and this person has worked in like some kind of, qualifying employment for the last 30 years.

Bridget Haile: Oh, my-

Nikki Nolan: She had her form rejected because of the slashes and the dashes so, but, but she figured that out going back. It’s, it’s so complicated. A lot of these companies that are out there are scams. And a lot of these companies out there that talk about wanting to help you are only out for their best interest. Tell me why Summer is or is not.

Sorry to throw a loaded I also like to make sure, you know, for everybody, like how is summer funded? How does somebody get involved with this? Like, tell me a little bit more about that to give people more information.

Bridget Haile: Absolutely. And the scams are out there, and they are very convincing. And I think part of what leads to the environment that, you know, leads people to be involved in these kinds of scams and is that there’s so much information flying around. Do you know, is there forgiveness? Isn’t there forgiveness? I’ve gotten these letters from companies and the voicemails where they say you could be eligible for forgiveness. Just give us all of your personal information. So, you know, in an information vacuum, you know, people are trying to latch on to something that they think is going to help them. And that’s understandable.

So Summer is absolutely not a scam. So we’ll get that out of the way at the beginning. But you know, these companies will also charge you a lot of money.

They will ask for your bank account information, they will make you pay them on a monthly basis. Those are definitely things to look out for. You know, and these are federal programs that you can enroll in for free. So you don’t need to pay anyone to use these programs. You know, part of what we’re offering at Summer is the additional guidance, right?

The recommendations, the review, and, you know, part of something, something that’s been part of Summer’s DNA since the beginning is that we don’t charge borrowers. So the way Summer works is that we partner with organizations to offer it to their members for free. So for example, we partner with several national unions.

So the unions pay Summer, so that can, it can be a benefit for them, their members. We also partner with employers, you know, student loan benefits are a very exciting, emerging area of employer benefits that people are offering to their employees. So an employer might contract with Summer so that their employees can use it for free as part of their employee benefits program. So that’s how Summer works, if you’re listening and you would like some help, I will put in a note to, you know, come to our website, go talk to your employer. Tell them that it’s important that you have help navigating your student loans. And we would love to figure out how to come to your employer’s office.

But that’s how Summer operates. We are a public benefit corporation. We’re a certified B corporation. Okay. So the commitment to not just our stakeholders, but the borrowers we work with is really built into the company from day one. which was one of the reasons I was really excited to come here, to know that this commitment is there and is really at the bedrock of what we’re trying to do.

Nikki Nolan: What is a B corporation for people who don’t know what that is?

Bridget Haile: A B Corp certification, is a private certification for, for-profit companies, that distinguishes a business, as having a commitment to social and environmental performance. So a lot of companies that you admire, are B corporations. Companies like Ben and Jerry’s, companies like Patagonia, like Bombas socks, like Eileen Fisher and Lemonade.

So these are companies that go through a rigorous certification process to show that they have commitments outside of profit and toward broader societal impact.

Nikki Nolan: So we’re, we’re getting kind of close to the end. Is there anything I didn’t ask that you would like to talk about?

Bridget Haile: We have spent a lot of this talking about student loan policy and, you know, some of the incremental changes, some of the bigger changes we’d like to see. I think one of the challenges here is, as you were saying, right, these programs are so complicated that often when changes have been made in the past, it leaves people behind.

So you not only have to decide what you want and by you, I mean, policymakers have to decide what they want you to choose change to be, but also how it’s going to apply to all of the people who are currently in the process of figuring it out. One of the examples I like to use is something called spousal consolidation loans.

So at some point, the federal government said, you know, it would be nice if married spouses could combine their student loans and repay them together. So they allowed people to do that. Combine them into one federal loan under two people’s names. Later they decided we’re getting rid of that program. You can no longer combine your loan with your spouse, but in that, they never made a provision for people who had already combined the loans.

So we’ve worked with people who have these loans with their spouse. They’ve been divorced for years. They say my spouse isn’t paying. My credit is wrecked because this loan is in my name and there’s no way to separate it. Because the policy just didn’t account for the realities of people’s lives. And there’s still no way to separate those loans.

So in a sense, I am glad that they’re using this time. I, in the best case, I hope the administration and current policymakers are using this time to be that specific about the changes they need to make. And being intentional about the fact that as we’ve talked about, all of these policy changes have real life implications every day, for people who are struggling with this, and you can’t make major changes without accounting for those.

So I think the best case scenario they’re using this time to make sure that the changes they make are actually going to be beneficial for people. Grandfather people in and not leave people behind. So if there are any policymakers listening to this podcast, I would hope that’s what they’re taking this time to do.

And I would hope that the broader changes are on the horizon and I know that you’ve talked to many, many people who are working tirelessly to make that happen. For those listening who are looking at the looming deadline of their payments resuming, my advice is to make a plan now. You can enroll, for example, you can enroll in income-driven repayment now, even though your payments, aren’t due to make sure that you have an affordable monthly payment in October when your payments are due again. So you still won’t have to make payments, but you know, who knows what’s going to happen? As you said, do servicers know how to restart these loans? You know, they are not particularly organized.

We do not have a higher degree of faith in them. Is that, are there going to be a ton of people, flocking to enroll in these programs, once loans are due again, you know, you don’t want to be caught in a paperwork backlog, so always better to do it sooner. Make a plan now. I hope that there’s a major sweeping change that happens for the time payments start again. But we really don’t know, and we don’t know for sure if forgiveness is happening. So unfortunately for this exact moment, we’re stuck with the programs we have now.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, it took me three months to get into the based repayment plan and what happened for me, and I try not to talk personally about myself that much, but, and let the other person’s story come through is, but I switched over, and then I accrued so much interest in that period between moving between the things. And so right now it does seem like, and again, not an advice show, but, it seems like when your payments are paused is the best time to like switch the programs. Cause you’re not occurring interest on, on those, on those set loans.

Is there any advice you would give to your younger self knowing what you know now?

Bridget Haile: I definitely wish I had had more information before I made the decision to take out student loans. I don’t know if I would have made a different decision.

Student loans themselves are certainly not a feature of my life that I enjoy having, but, you know, attending graduate school, you know, being able to be a professional musician, continuing to be a professional musician, even in addition to my current job, those are all things that I also value and treasure very highly. So I wish I had more information. I wish more adults around me have given me more realistic information, but I don’t know that I would’ve made a different choice and I certainly can’t regret things that lead me to what I do right now, which I do care about very much.

Nikki Nolan: Awesome. Well, you’ve sort of already done this before, but is there anything you want to promote?

Bridget Haile: Yes. So I have plugged it. I will plug it again. But we are www.meet summer.org. So come check out our website, you know, talk to us. See if your employer, maybe your union already partners with us. If not, it’s a great time as HR leaders figure out a return to work and what their budgets are going to be to say, hey, I would like to have a student loan benefit as part of my employee benefits package, so that we can help you and your coworkers, you know, face what’s coming together and make sure you have the most accurate information and are taking the best next steps you can.

Nikki Nolan: Well, thank you so much for being here. This was a lovely conversation. I learned a lot.

Bridget Haile: Thank you. I did really enjoy it. I always get fired up talking about this.

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