Hil Kaman came to his career as a lawyer through a circuitous route, working as a chef, scholar, and poet for many years before law school. After passing the bar, he took a job he loved as a municipal prosecutor and began paying down his six figures in student loan debt. Because income-based repayment plans combine the salary of both spouses, neither he nor his then wife benefited from an income-based plan, so he never signed up. This meant that when a 10-year public service forgiveness program was announced a few years later, he was no longer eligible to sign up. That is until the US government announced a Temporary Expanded Public Service Loan Forgiveness (TEPSLF) in 2017, which allowed him to sign up retroactively.

And so, in February 2020, after ten years of payment he discovered the new #TEPSLF program, Kaman applied for full loan forgiveness. When his request was denied he discovered a data entry error by FedLoans that took over a year to correct. After many phone calls and emails later, Kaman finally won forgiveness on the remainder of his loans in late 2020

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Transcript –

Nikki Nolan: I’m Nikki Nolan, and this is Matter of Life in Debt. A show about people in the United States and their student debt. Today’s episode, Successful PSLF. I talk with Hil Kaman, a lawyer, and poet.

In March of 2020, he applied for the public service loan forgiveness program and was denied due to a clerical error. Learn how he won this administrative battle that resulted in a successful student debt cancellation in December 2020.

This is his story.

Welcome to the podcast!

Hil Kaman: I’m so glad to be here. I’ve been listening to all your episodes. I wish I had known this stuff a long time ago. And I was so financially naive for so many years that there were things I just didn’t know, particularly what I was doing when I took out a student loan debt.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, so how much student debt do you have right now?

Hil Kaman: As of December of 2020, I have zero student loan debt.

Nikki Nolan: How did, how did you do

Hil Kaman: It still is sort of shocking to me, but I paid off a lot of it for 10 years. And then my last amount of $40,000 was forgiven through the public loan forgiveness program.

Nikki Nolan: How much student debt did you have?

Hil Kaman: About $125,000. From law school. And then I had about $7,000 from graduate school that I had gone to before law school.

Nikki Nolan: Oh, wow. You paid off a lot. Actually. The fact that only $40,000 was forgiven.

Hil Kaman: Yeah, it was a lot of my resources. Because I became obsessed with paying it off and it just, I wanted to be debt-free. There was something about once it got to a certain amount, I just felt like, okay, I could do this. I can actually pay it off. Which was a real shift from early on. There were years where I just had this mindset of, I’m never going to pay this off. It’s just a bill that I pay every month. It’s just there. I didn’t even think it would ever be gone.

Nikki Nolan: Do you know what shifted? Cause that happened to me too. There was a big pivotal moment where everything shifted and I was sort of just praying for loan cancellation, and then tried the route you did, and just gave up four years in. But then I was like, okay, I have to do this.
What happened with you?

Hil Kaman: I got divorced a couple of years ago. And from that settlement from our house that we had bought together, I had some money and I used that to pay off all of my private student loans. I’ve benefited from having gotten equity in that home. And, based on that, I could just pay off my private student loans and then it just made it seem more reasonable.

I don’t remember what my total amount of fed loans were at that point, but it was like $45,000. And I decided, that seemed like a more manageable amount. It seemed doable, for so long, it seemed like it was just insurmountable. And I think that really shifted in my mind.

And plus, when I separated from my ex-wife, I was forced to finally learn something about personal finance. As I said before, I was like really naive about it and she took care of a lot of the bills. I didn’t have to think about it, but I was in this situation where I had to learn it.

I went to the library and checked out all the books on personal finance and was like, okay, how do you do this? This is a skill that I never learned. And I wanted to be better about it. I talked to people and I figured out here’s what you pay first. And here’s how you kind of save for the future.

So I started putting together more of a plan and becoming more sophisticated. And once I had a plan, then I felt like it was manageable. And once I had emergency savings saved up, I was like, I’m going to pay off the student loans.

Nikki Nolan: I would love to know what has been the impact of student debt on your life?

Hil Kaman: I think it was pretty big early on in those years, right after law school and actually during law school. I- it was really expensive to live in Seattle. It still is, it’s an expensive part of the country. And I felt like I had to make decisions based upon the fact that I had student loans and that I had to pay them off.

And so I think I made decisions about where to live and what jobs to take based upon that, that would have been different if I didn’t have that kind of bills looming every month that were coming due within the first , you know, four months or something after you graduate from law school. So, I also know, like, I’ve been at the same job since law school, so I’ve been there for 13 years now and there’ve been times where I was just so fed up with it.

I was just like- so I’m a, I’m a lawyer for the city where I live and I mostly do criminal prosecution. And it just like, it’s great work. I’ve, I’ve gotten to do so many awesome things. I’ve gotten to- I really like the work, but it wears on you and I’ve been worn out. And at times I just wanted to quit and go do something else, but it was always the things I wanted to do were either much lower paying. Or, like, I thought about going and starting my own law practice and starting when you’re already in the hole for your student loan debt is like an extra barrier to taking those kinds of entrepreneurial steps.

And so I always, I just stayed in the job and um, always in the back of my mind was this idea of loan forgiveness. Like if I stick it out, you know, I’ll also be able to have my loans forgiven. And so I think I, you know, I just tended to, to make decisions that were going to allow me to make those loan payments more than I took, would have taken risks, I think, if I didn’t have them.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I’ve heard that from a lot of different people, is that it keeps you stuck a little bit. And it makes you a little fearful to take risks.

Hil Kaman: I, yeah, I think it definitely makes you more risk averse when you have them.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. So I would love to learn a little bit more about your story.

Hil Kaman: Well, I never imagined I would be a prosecutor. I was, or a lawyer. That was never on my radar. I never had something that was really my passion or something that I loved. I think I kinda just get into different things for a period of time and be really into them. And then I’d get into something, something new and go in a different direction. So I really took this meandering path.

I was lucky. So, I’m a child of two educators. So my mom was a professor at Colorado State where you went to school. And she was the, she was actually the first female full professor in the business college there when she was teaching there. And so she- you know, they got a real strong emphasis on education. And my dad was a Dean of community college, also in Fort Collins. And going to college was part of the culture of our family. And they loved college. They loved universities. So it wasn’t really a question of whether I would go to college.

I went to CU- Boulder, he didn’t go with a plan. I think a lot of people end up in debt in the same way. For undergrad, they go to college cause it’s the next step in their life. And there you are, you don’t have a plan, like, I’m doing this to get to this position.

So I was lucky. I mean, my parents had saved and they helped me with my undergraduate degree.
And I was just talking to them about it. They had saved, they told me $25,000. So this was, I started in 1995 and that was what they had planned- they didn’t have all of it, but that was their goal to pay for four years.
I just talked to a financial advisor for my two kids who are eight and 10 and he recommended that much per year, for each of them. So for-

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. I was going to say like $200,000.

Hil Kaman: Twenty-five thousand per year, per child. So it’s four times the amount as it was back then. And I also talked to my parents about the cost of college when they went. And so my mom went to college for free. She went to City College in New York as a resident of the city, she got to go to college for free. And then she transferred to SUNY Albany, where she met my dad and he was going to school there and he was an RA. And when you were an RA during the late sixties, early seventies, you got free tuition, room and board. So they- it’s this- I mean, isn’t that amazing.

Nikki Nolan: Oh, it’s amazing.

Hil Kaman: Yeah. So they both went to college, graduate school. They both have a PhD. And their total collective debt- to my dad who had had to take a student loan debt out was $2,000 for that collective education.

Nikki Nolan: Wow. My, my last guests has collectively 150,000 of household debt between her and her husband. And I talked to a woman who has $500,000 of collective student loan debt for her family. I can’t imagine having $2000, $2000, $2,000 in student debt.

Hil Kaman: One generation ago.

Nikki Nolan: One generation-

Hil Kaman: generation. And, I’ll get back to, you know, it’s kind of the story, but I will have often talked to people of a generation before me and were hanging around court and I would be talking about student loan debt. And a lot of them had to take out loan debt to go to law school. This is in the early eighties. But the whole way that it happened back then, you’d get out with like $10,000. And basically for everybody, you paid that off in your first three or four years of practice.

So you worked really hard for three or four years. You saved. You paid it off and then you gotta just build your practice for the rest of your career. So this is like within one generation, we’ve gone from student loan debt as a sort of reasonable way in which you can take it out, finance it with the first couple of years of work and then begin to grow your wealth. And that is just not the case now.

Nikki Nolan: Not at all. I talked with this one woman and she was talking about really a lot of this has been in the last generation or so of folks having this debilitating amount of student debt. And , it wasn’t always like this. And you’re talking to really elevate that information. The system was built to put us into debt right now and we can fix it. We need to fix the system because it’s clearly not sustainable. Like, it’s turned into a semi-crisis for a lot of folks.

Hil Kaman: Exactly. And I’m so grateful to my parents for having been able to save to pay for my undergraduate. And I was not able to do that until- for my kids- until I paid off my student loans. And so it begins to compound, right, where, you know, they were able to afford college. So then they were able to save to pay for college. But if people aren’t able to do that, sort of, down the line, they start to build this generational debt versus generational wealth. And so that’s really- we’re going in the wrong direction.

So after undergrad, where I didn’t have any debt and I graduated and, much to my parents’ disappointment, I just sort of wandered around the world for a little while and didn’t have any direction in my life.

So, what a lot of directionless people with degrees in human entities do is go to graduate school, which I did. Also at CU for, I got a master’s in German literature. I studied the poet Rilke and philosopher Nietzsche. Those were sort of my, where I wrote my thesis and, I was able to teach, had a TA-ship.

And so I had a lot of that school paid for, but I wasn’t able to live on the stipend they gave me. So I took out a $7,000 loan for that degree. So then, I graduated and then again, kind of didn’t know what I was going to do with my life still. And so I was working in restaurants and I was paying that student loan off. And I thought I wanted to be a chef. And so I was kind of going down that path.

And one day my, my girlfriend at the time, was applying to law school. And everyone I worked with in the restaurant- which was a really good restaurant and they like took care of their employees. They gave people health insurance, like was really unusual for the industry.

Nikki Nolan: What!?

Hil Kaman: It was a really sweet gig. If you wanted to go and learn to be a chef, that was the place to do it. Nobody who worked in the kitchen was over the age of 40. I was like, where, what are all these people doing when they turn 40? It’s such a grueling, physically demanding profession. And so I just, I say like that I applied for law school on a whim and people don’t believe me. But it kind of was like, I mean, my girlfriend was applying and I was like, ah, I mean, that sounds kind of interesting. I don’t, I don’t really know what law school is all about. I guess I should just apply. And so I took the LSAT and applied to all the same schools that she applied to and got into Seattle U and went there. Decided to go. I really, I did not know what it meant to be a lawyer. I only knew two lawyers my whole life before then. So I, like, Oh, I better learn what it means to be a lawyer. So I like to watch The Paper Chase and read this book.

Nikki Nolan: I don’t even know what the Paper Chase is.

Hil Kaman: It was like this classic movie from the seventies about people in law school at Harvard. You should, you should watch it.

Is it accurate?

It’s, like, part of law school lore. There’s this whole lore around being a one L, which is your first year of law school. And I was so ignorant about law school that I didn’t realize that you pick your, you pick your seat for your classroom on the first day, and you’re in that seat, the rest of the year.

I showed up to our first day of school at like five minutes till eight, when the class started, the whole lecture hall, 150 , it was packed. Everyone else has been there with their pencils sharpened and their laptops open, their notebooks out. And I’m like in my Vans and my hoodie, like, Oh, I have a, was I supposed to be here early? So I like the one seat left was the very front row on the far right corner. And so that was my seat for my whole first year of law school.

And this lore on law school where the first year they, they try to scare you. And the second year they try and work really hard. And the third year they bore you. That’s like this saying about law school.

And so like they, the lectures, but it’s like they intimidate you and they cold call you and make you feel really humiliated about what you know. So I was really just, I was naive about law school and I was naive about loans. So like, you know, I was making hardly any money working in a restaurant and I applied to law school and I applied for a student loan.
I filled out the FASFA and, you know, they tell you-

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, the FAFSA.

Hil Kaman: They tell you how to do all this stuff. And I just, I kind of had this idea. That I was going to go to law school. And within a couple years I was going to be driving a Porsche 911. Like, like, I don’t even, I don’t even like cars. Like, I’m not even a car person.

I drive a Kia. Like, I’ve never really wanted a sports car, but this was the image in my mind. No more living paycheck to paycheck. I would eat at the restaurant sometimes. Cause I couldn’t afford food. So like that’s what all these restaurant people do. They don’t pay you very much. So you like, you know, the perk is you get food there. But I thought like my problems are going to be solved and I go to law school, like, I’ll, I’ll be, I’ll be driving this Porsche within a couple of years. That was like the image I had.

And when they said apply for student loans, I just applied for them. I just filled out the application and just asked for as much money as they would give me. And I got it and when that first student loan check came in, I was almost out of money.

I just moved to Seattle. I had to like rent a truck to move out there. And I had to put a first payment down on the apartment. And my old job at the restaurant had accidentally paid me an extra paycheck. I quit and they forgot to take me out of payroll. And they paid me an extra two weeks. And it was like the only way that I made it through those first couple of weeks before the student loan checks came through.

And then I got my student loan check and I called them. I was like, ah, I think you made a mistake. I’m going to send you back your, this check that they had paid me. Those student loans just felt like they were a godsend. Right? I’m gonna take out this money and I’m going to be fine because I’m going to be a lawyer. Like, I’ll be, I’m set. That’s kind of the attitude that I went into law school with.

Nikki Nolan: That’s that’s really, It’s interesting that most people, you know, when they’re younger, from what I’ve been talking to, not everybody, they have this dream and college was their solution. It sounds like law school. You were like, I’m going to be, I’m going to be that person, that person that’s not living paycheck to paycheck, but what happened? What was your reality after you graduated?

Hil Kaman: Well, I actually, when I went to law school actually really liked it. Like, I found a job in my third year at the city where I’m working now. I walked into court on the first day there, and it was this criminal calendar and there were like 50 people in there and it was just so raw and real. And I was like, I love this. This is so cool.
And I started doing trials and I really loved just being in the courtroom and talking to jurors and doing the whole trial thing was so much fun that I really loved it. So I, I graduated and, I had, so my ex-wife was also a lawyer. We met in law school. And so we did, we had both of our student loan debts at the time.

One of the perks, even though I loved that I had this job, I got a job where I had interned. I was at the city, and my loan started to come due. And there was this new student loan forgiveness program that I knew about. And you had to make a decision at the beginning of which payment plan you wanted to go into.
And this was 2008 and that loan forgiveness program was brand new then

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, 2007. That’s when the, when it started. So you went to choose your repayment plan.

Hil Kaman: I went to choose, this is 2008, and I learned that in paying back your student loans, they consider your joint income of your household for how much income you have. And so that if you want to get into an income-based payment plan, that sets the amount that you pay. And so even though we had two people’s law schools debt, like $250,000, that, like, we have all that debt. They don’t count both people’s debt and sending the payment plan. They just count both your income. And it, it wasn’t feasible at the time to be able to be on an income-based repayment plan. It was too high. And so we just had to make a call to go on the regular payment plan.

Nikki Nolan: Oh, no, I see where this is going. Like, it’s like-

Hil Kaman: You see that? Well, and plus the payment was so high when you calculated that out over 10 years, you practically paid off everything. So there was no benefit to the loan forgiveness based upon that.
I was a little bitter because I was so excited when I heard about this forgiveness plan. And yet when I looked into the details of it, it seemed like it wasn’t really going to work, and I just felt bitter about it. And that’s where I got this mindset of just, okay, I have this debt. We can afford it. But I’m just going to have to pay for it.

We’re just going to pay these loans or they’re going to be there forever. But it began to impact things around what house we could afford, what neighborhoods we lived in, you know, what jobs we could take. And so I do think it we’ve talked about those, some of those impacts, and I just sorta got into this mode of getting into the routine of life.

And I didn’t think about it for a long time.

Nikki Nolan: And just so that listeners know, if you don’t go on the income-based repayment, you can’t qualify. And because you didn’t qualify, you lost a few years of being able to qualify for the federal forgiveness, correct?

Hil Kaman: That’s right. And so every couple of years I would log on and , I would say, okay, should I look at this again and try and get on the income-based repayment plan so that I could qualify. So I probably had been at the city for two or three years and I get back on, I put in all the numbers and it’s still doesn’t work out because if you get a raise, then you know, your payment is going up and it’s not, it’s not really keeping up with inflation.

And plus your payment gets high enough that you eventually, you’re going to be paying off your student loan before you ever get forgiven. So then I would do I redo all these calculations every couple of years and came to the same conclusions every time that it just didn’t make financial sense.

Now in hindsight, I was rewarded because they created this temporary fix a couple of years ago that allowed for forgiveness. So I’m going to get into that in a minute. But in hindsight, if I was giving anyone advice or if I was giving my younger self advice, I would have just gotten into the income-based plan when I first started out, because I think that would have made more sense, and scrimped in other ways.

But I wasn’t so interested in paying it all off early on because it just seems so insurmountable. At that point I was just lowest monthly payment. Let’s move on and, like, move on with our lives.

So about, like, eight or nine years into my loan payments, I learned about this temporary expanded public service loan forgiveness program.

Nikki Nolan: that?

Hil Kaman: And, it’s this program for people who were in the wrong payment plan that made them not eligible for the public interest loan forgiveness. And the idea was there were all these people who were in a similar situation as I was that were in government service, believed that they were- either believed that they were making payments correctly or were not able to, but yet wanted to be forgiven. Or stayed in these government jobs because they were hoping to have their loans forgiven, but then realized that they weren’t going to be able to because they had so many years in the wrong payment plan..

Nikki Nolan: When did this happen? Like, what year- is this still a thing?

Hil Kaman: It is still a thing. I think it started in 2017 or 2018 and it’s temporary. Because there are, there is a limited amount of funds and it’s first come, first serve basis. So if you are eligible for this, you have to do it as quickly as possible because once the funds are gone, you won’t be able to get access to this.

Nikki Nolan: Okay. I’m going to link to that. I’ll link to that so that people can find that. Cause, what!?
So you’re the first person that I’ve been able to find. I’ve been looking for you, or a person like you for so long, so this information is some information that I actually haven’t had access to because I haven’t been able to find a person like you. So, so exciting!

Hil Kaman: Well, nobody believed that I would ever get my loans forgiven. And when I was sitting around with my colleagues in the office one day pre-COVID, we were in person and I said, I’m going to try and get my loans forgiven. They all laughed. So the ones who were, had been out of law school longer than me who had been paying for longer, they just laughed.

They said, forget it, just get used to paying them. You’re going to be like us. You’re going to be paying them. And then the people who were, had gotten out of school after me were like, Oh, please, like, give us hope because we still have five years of public service ahead of us. But nobody believed that it would happen.

Cause they had also never heard of anyone who had had their loans forgiven and we are all in government service. So that, like, that was part of why we were there. Not only did we love being trial lawyers, but we, you know, took these jobs in, in small part because we wanted to have our loans forgiven. So what- the way the program works is if you have.

Been in a qualifying employment for 10 years and have 120 payments while you were employed as a government, you know, in the government and then, or nonprofit- anyone else who qualifies- and then get into a qualifying payment plan and make 12 consecutive payments in the qualifying payment plan, you can apply to have your loans forgiven.

So you have to first apply to have it rejected, then make the 12 payments, and then reapply to get it approved.

Nikki Nolan: Oh, my, what? Yeah, that’s wild. And you also have to have a Direct federal student loan for it to be as well. Which a lot of people miss that it needs to be a Direct federal loan. Some of the other ones like the Perkin or the FFEL loans or any of aParent Plus loan, any of those loans don’t qualify. It has to be a Direct loan.

Hil Kaman: And that’s what I had. I had about, had two fed loans from law school left. They were like $40- together it was around $40,000. And so I’d done my 10 years. I applied for the public interest loan forgiveness. It was rejected because I wasn’t in a qualified payment plan. I switched to a qualified plan. That was March, 2019. I made my first payment in March, 2019 under an income-based repayment plan. My income had grown over the 10 years that I had been employed there. And now my student loan payment tripled, because I went from a, just a standard repayment plan to an income-based repayment plan.

And I thought, okay, well, I only have to do this for 12 months. And so I just put it on my calendar March one, 2020, I’m going to have made my 12 payments and I’m going to apply for the temporary program.
And I thought, like, that was going to be it. So I just, I, you know, every month I’m just like counting it down. I, I, you know, I see that money go out. I’m like, yes, I’m getting closer. Getting closer. People are telling me there’s no way to give up hope. Like, know that people still do not believe that this is actually gonna work.

I go through like, I make the last payment, February 28th, 2020. And this is right as like COVID is happening. I make that payment and then I give FedLoan Servicing, like a week before I call them. Okay. So I figure-

Nikki Nolan: Cause you’re being nice.

Hil Kaman: I’m being nice. Like, they have to do the paperwork, like, they have, they have to see what they have to do.

I got really lucky here because if there hadn’t been that temporary pause in payments, I would have had to keep paying, during that time. And if your loans are forgiven under the public loan program, you eventually get that money back. If, you know, from the date that you’re eligible. So…

Nikki Nolan: Oh, I didn’t know that because I did know you had to keep paying cause I’ve been on a lot of the Reddit forums, so there’s, like, tons and tons of Reddit forums on this with people who have amazing advice and people who have terrible advice. So you have to, like, really pick through it. But I saw, like, people were saying that it takes, like, months and months for it to go through it and you still have to be making payments.

Hil Kaman: That’s correct. And then eventually they’ll back to you and send you a check for the overpayment from the day you were eligible for forgiveness. but I got lucky because they put the pause on payments. So I didn’t have to pay for that period of time while I was waiting to get it forgiven.

So about middle of March, I call FedLoan Servicing. I say, you know, I am Hill Kaman, I have made 125 qualifying payments. I’ve made 12 payments on the right payment plan and I’m eligible for forgiveness. What do I need to do? And, you know, they say, well, you have to fill out this form and you have to copy and paste this text into an email and send it to this email address. And, we’ll let you know. So I thought, great. So I go, I take this, like, I copy and paste the text that they told me to put into an email and I send it to, I don’t know what the email is and I send it off. And, I get something back that says, your application has been denied.

And so it’s been a month. So it’s, like, April. So I call him back. I say, I’m just curious. I, you know, I’m pretty sure I’m eligible. And so I get a very nice person at FedLoan Servicing and they look through all my payments and they say, well, you only have, you know, 103 qualifying payments. And I was like, I’m sure that’s not true.

And to take it well, give me a minute. And so actually they’re on the phone with me for like 15 minutes and they go through and they looked through all of my payments and they, they find that there’s been a data entry error, and that I actually do have all the qualifying payments. I should qualify. They’re going to push this.

They said, send that email again, put it there. So this is April says sure. Send it in. It goes through in may, comes around again, email. You’re not eligible for forgiveness. So I get back on the phone, I call, I get a different agent, same thing. You didn’t have enough qualifying payments.

So I said, well, can you please look through it again? They looked through it like, Oh, I see there’s been an error here. Well, I’ll put a note in there. We’ll get that corrected. You should hear from us within a couple months. So I just decide.

Nikki Nolan: -a couple of months.

Hil Kaman: I just decide that I’m going to put a reminder on my calendar. I’m going to call FedLoan Servicing once a month until this is forgiven. So I call in June. It’s like deja vu. You don’t have enough qualifying payments. And said, well, no. I’ve been through this. Can you please look through it again. And they look through, they tell me I’m eligible, everything looks good and they’ll send it through. It’s great, I trust them. I call back in July.

Nikki Nolan: Whoa, wait. You what? You trust- if it was me, I would just be on the phone, calling them every fricking day. Annoying them so badly being like, no, you are so kind. You, every month. No, no, no. I would be like every day annoying them.

Hil Kaman: Well, they told me- they kept telling me like we have a lot of these. Like, it’s going to take a couple of months. Like, give us time to do this. So I start calling back every month and it’s like, every month I’m getting the same thing. Like, I have to walk through with the person that I’m actually eligible. They said we got to send it.
They tell me this process has got to, like, go through their review and then they have to send it to department of education for a review. And then it comes back. So they’re, like, give they’re, like, telling me each time that it’s in the process and that I look eligible. So finally this goes on, starting in March, it goes to November.

Wait, can I curse on this podcast?

Nikki Nolan: Oh, you can curse all you want- yeah!

Hil Kaman: So, into November. I lose my shit because as I call to find out my- I do my monthly status call and person says you don’t have enough qualifying payments. And I said, that is not right. I know I do. I’ve had many people look at this. He says, well, you need, can you just go ahead and resend the application again for me?

And I said, no, I’m not doing that. He goes, well, I need you to resend it. I’m not doing it. I just told him, I will, I will not do that. I will stay on the phone until we get this sorted out. And he goes, well, I have to talk to somebody. I was like, you know, like, I’m starting to use all my lawyerly skills. I’m like, give me your employee number, give me your name. Who’s your boss. Call me back. I’m like, do you need to call me back in three days. And he doesn’t call me back. So I call them back. And this process starts where I start calling them and asking to speak to a supervisor, starting to be, and I get to their customer service representative and they start feeding me this whole line of crap. We have to be really diligent because there are a lot of people critical of this program. And if we just start forgiving people’s loans, then people are going to criticize us for giving away free money and not being diligent with how we review these things. I-

Nikki Nolan: No! No! Don’t. No- I’m sorry. No.

Hil Kaman: I would, I would get so worked up, like, adrenaline would be pumping through my body and get so mad. I was spending so much time on this as well. And what was so frustrating is people, the, the, the people who I would get in the call center were so nice. And they would, like, multiple times, five or six times take 10, 15 minutes and go through my entire file.

And every single person who did that said, you look good. You, you’ve done everything right. You have all the qualifications to qualify in this program. So after my, losing my shit and getting finally to a supervisor in, sometime in November, I was like, you’re going to call me back in two days. And they were like, no, we don’t do that. I was like, no, you’re going to call me back in two days. So I, they didn’t call back.

Then a week later I got this call and they’re like, we have good news for you. And he goes, the supervisor. She’s like, you’re eligible. You should be seeing something in the next couple of weeks.

And sure enough, three weeks later I logged on and it says zero in my account. I just couldn’t believe it. It was such a good, it was such a good feeling. And I still can’t believe it that it, that it actually happened. But it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t keep calling them. I, they’re not looking for people who are eligible and then helping them out to do it. You have to,, if you’re eligible or you think you’re eligible, you have to do the work and you can’t give up because they, if you have one little error, there was a, what had happened was I had had to ask for a, deferment at one point. I needed to take a pause for three months on my payments.

And when I restarted, I restarted making payments after the three months, but they never went back in and turned it back on in their system to count those as eligible payments. So there was a glitch in their record-keeping because of that. And. It just lasted for, it was in 2013, it lasted for seven years and they had to, like, manually go back in and verify those payments later on, but it really was their, I don’t know if it’s incompetence or unwillingness, you know, that should, that should have been fixed on my first or second phone call. Not, you know, six months, six months later, but all it’s forgiven. I forgive them.

The system is so frustrating because it’s not set up for borrowers. They don’t really do a lot of good informing you in the beginning. When you get, when you take out the loans. There- it’s not set up to help you understand the consequences of the payment plans. And luckily there’s this temporary program where Congress tried to help people in my situation, which I’m really grateful that it exists. But if you don’t take proactive steps, you will not get your loans forgiven.

Nikki Nolan: Whoa, what a ride. And the thing is, you’re a lawyer. You have lawyerly skills, but a lot of people probably don’t even have access to this. They don’t have the time to call in. And, and that’s probably what they’re hedging their bets on, is that that people will give up.
It just makes the whole thing frustrating. What they need to do is just cancel all the loans and let’s just start all over. Let’s rebuild the system.

Hil Kaman: it felt like they had received direction at FedLoan Servicing to not make it easy for people to move their application through. they had these programs. The money was allocated for it. But if it felt they weren’t taking the steps to actually do it. And what, that was a supervisor who told me that, they have to be super diligent to make sure that the, you know, the wrong people don’t have their loans forgiven.

And I was like, well, you’re the people who have all the records, you know? Like, I’m not asking you to do that. I’m just asking you to, like, once you said you’ve done a review and you’re eligible to actually do what you said you were going to do. And it felt like they were trying to make it hard so that people couldn’t get forgiven.

Nikki Nolan: Wow , well, we’re getting close to the end. Is there anything that you would, like, to talk about that I haven’t asked you about?

Hil Kaman: I’m very privileged, not only in having had the opportunity to go to school and be in a position where, I could pay off a lot of my loans. So I had, I had about $75,000 in fed loans and about $50,000 in private loans. And it’s been 13 years since I graduated law school and I feel like it now gives me a chance to save for my kids’ college.
I had this dream of being totally debt-free, but I ended up buying another house, like, months before I had my loans forgiven. It was kind of risky. Like, I felt like I knew it was going to happen and I was kind of counting on not having those extra funds, but I guess, like, I feel like it worked out for me because I ended up doing work that I enjoyed.

So I think there’s a little bit of a, that can make it feel worth it. But if you end up feeling trapped by the work that you’re doing, that debt is so wearing on you, just emotionally. It adds this extra layer of dissatisfaction with a job that you don’t- and so at the times, when I felt really down about my job, I know that debt made that sense of dissatisfaction worse. And just being in debt really is not a good place emotionally, and keeps you trapped.
I think that when I think about my parents and their ability to go to college for free, and then what that allowed them to do, it does convince me that we need to reform the education system in a way that allows people to go to school and not have that extra layer of stress on top of them while they’re going to school and starting their careers.

And I got to also go to study abroad for two years in Germany and go to the university there both as an undergrad and while I was in grad school. And they have free college there and they also have healthcare for college students. I remember when I matriculated when I was in grad school in Germany and I took my student ID and I went down to the healthcare registration thing and they were like, okay, well, it’s time to pay your health insurance for this semester.

We need $40 from you or something like that. I was like, what? Are you serious? It was like $40 for this semester for your health insurance. And I just remember how it took the stress away from the situation where you could actually focus on being a student. You could actually focus on learning and not being afraid of the costs of this going on.

‘Cause that was all through law school. That was a filter over the top of going to school. you were worried about money. I was like, you got those student loan checks and you’re worried about the cost of that, but you’ve just sort of put your head down and you did that.

And I think, what could we give ourselves as an economic and an education system if we made it so that there wasn’t this extra layer of anxiety over people all the time about the cost of that schooling? I think we would, we really do ourselves a lot to provide a system that didn’t have that. I think other countries have an education system where college is either free or very affordable. Remove that stress and it allows people to learn when you don’t have that added stress.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, I feel like there’s a lot of different societies that when you prioritize education and you prioritize like people’s well-being over profit, it just benefits the entire system. It seems like, this only benefits people at the top and really is, a previous guest said, is really an upward mobility tax.
If you are a person whose family cannot afford to send you to school, basically you set yourself up for 20 to 30 years of being taxed for trying to get ahead. It takes you so much longer. And that way you really can’t compete with the wealthy.

And I have no evidence, but it seems like that by design.

Hil Kaman: Yeah. And you’ve had some great guests on your show that had been able to articulate this, really well and talk about the various consequences of it and some of the other ideas out there for reform. And it really does damage people who have less opportunity. So that’s where we’re harming ourselves by the, I like this idea of an upward mobility tax. And if you know, the less resources you have going in, the more debt you’re going to have going out, and you’re not able to access the same value of that education.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, it’s ridiculous. So you actually already said the advice you would give to your younger self, but is there any other advice you would give to your younger self?

Hil Kaman: I would say to those younger or attorneys who are in that window of staying in their public interest, non-profit, government jobs to hang in there because there is this opportunity to get it forgiven. If you’re in the window right now, where you’re in that kind of nine, 10 year timeframe, and you’ve been in the wrong payment plan, go check out the temporary expanded loan forgiveness program. Try and take advantage of that.

But we need really good nonprofit and government attorneys. There’s not a time where going into government is really seen as admirable. Maybe it has never been, or maybe at different times it’s fluctuated, but I do think we need to have strong institutions of government with smart people, caring people, you know, people who want to give their career to that. And that’s what these programs were designed to do, knowing that you’re going to get paid less. And prosecutors, the workload is sort of unrelenting. And we have fewer people in our office now than when I started in 2008, and more workload.

Some of this is unique to the state of Washington because of some initiatives that have limited the ability of local governments to raise taxes. It caps their, the amount that they can raise taxes at 1% and then yet the cost of operating government goes up 2% or 3% per year. So then that squeezes the ability of the government to provide services.

And it means they can’t pay people as much. It means they can’t hire as many people or as many people as they need. And good people don’t want to go into a job where you are paid less than the public sector. And you’re asked to do the job that was done 10 years ago by two people, by one person.

And one of the rewards for that, that the federal government has put out there as an incentive is you’re getting your loans forgiven. And I, you know, I think there should be forgiveness for everybody so that we can get out of this crisis universally, but just to give people hope who are in those jobs, in government jobs and feeling like, man, maybe this isn’t worth it. Maybe I’m not going to get my loans forgiven. Like, I hope that you know, that they hang in there and that good people don’t leave the government cause we really need good caring people in the government as well.

Nikki Nolan: Is there anything you want to pitch before we wrap up?

Hil Kaman: Well, I do have a blog that I, at one time, was really good about publishing every week, but that has kind of fallen off, in the last six months, but it’s just my name.blog. So Hill Kaman, H-I-L-K-A-M-A-N.blog. And I write about some legal stuff, and I write some poetry, and share some thoughts. And I really hope to publish more frequently in the near future, but if you want to check that out, there’s some stuff up there.

Nikki Nolan: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I’m so glad we connected.

Hil Kaman: Yeah, I’m so glad you’re doing this and that this is out there for people. More people should listen and address the student loan crisis.

Nikki Nolan: Matter of Life and Debt is produced by me Nikki Nolan.

Special thanks to Efe Akmen for creating the music and mastering the audio.

Additional support and thanks to Sarah Thibault  who writes the information and transcripts about each episode.

This podcast would not have been possible without them.

Visit our website for more information matteroflifeanddebt.com, where you can listen, read transcripts, get additional context of the subjects you just heard about, and subscribe- absolutely for free. That website again, matteroflifeanddebt.com. Thanks again for listening.

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