Arriving in BRU Zaventem from the U.S. at 8:00 pm and have to travel to Ghent hotel. Will have large suitcase. Torn between booking a private transfer car that costs $150+ OR hopping on a train & taking a cab to hotel. Two cents are welcome! (Also welcoming your suggestions on private transfer car companies)
I applied for IBR in July 2025, but didn’t receive the approval until January 2026. That’s about 7 months of waiting.
I’ve been on the SAVE forbearance since August 2024, so you can imagine I’ve been itching for my payment counts to move again.
My auto payments started in March 2026, which is great, so I’m now at 102 qualifying payments.
I hit 120 months of public service employment this month, so I just submitted my buyback request, too. (Good luck to me on that.)
I called MOHELA today to request for processing forbearance for the period when they were reviewing my IBR application in the second half of 2025. My goal was to add a couple of months to my qualifying payment months.
The MOHELA rep basically told me:
I should call the DoEd to ask for processing forbearance, to which I said, that’s incorrect because the DoEd sent me to my servicer. Then he said, well, you cannot retroactively request for processing forbearance. 😑 And finally, he tells me that my IBR application was processed pretty quickly so I don’t even qualify for a processing forbearance. Then I said, you consider 7 months pretty quickly? He places me on hold to look up my IBR application timeline. Then he says, my application was reviewed on Dec. 25, 2025 and was approved on Jan. 6, 2026. So I said, okay, what the hell was my application doing chillin from July 2025 to December 2025? He said it was considered “pending” because of the backlog. That’s the point when I was like, so now MOHELA is playing with words and differentiating between pending and processing? What kind of ludicrous reasoning is that? A borrower submits an app in July 2025 and hears back in January 2026 and is supposed to just say, oh my application was not processing, it was pending, so it’s cool that I don’t qualify for processing forbearance?! Absolute and complete hogwash.