u/buybackregretmaybe

In a bit of a spiral.

I am about a year max from PSLF forgiveness, potentially much less. Spiraling because I’m considering walking away from PSLF and what that might look like financially.

I work a mix of W2/1099 jobs, but I unexpectedly lost my PSLF W2 job this summer when my hospital abruptly closed my department.

It is appearing unlikely I will find another PSLF eligible job without moving out-of-state. The options are not palatable. I am single and cannot fathom moving somewhere undesirable for a job I’m not excited about, even if I can switch jobs & move again after achieving PSLF forgiveness. I don’t want to waste the next couple of years trying to find a partner & build a family by moving around.

I make about 300k and have 392k in federal loans at a ~5.2% interest rate, with what feels like a minimal amount in retirement and no real estate. I feel like a horse that’s finally been broken tbh, I completely regret my fellowship choice and financial compromises I’ve made in my career path. If I sellout and successfully generalize, my income could potentially increase substantially. I’m okay with selling out to build a better life outside of medicine.

I find contemplating giving up on PSLF completely overwhelming emotionally since that has been my plan for so long. Where do I start? Is there a calculator to roughly estimate what I need to earn & payoff without destroying my financial future? Am I being dumb and instead should stick with PSLF despite the personal cost? I have a lot to learn & read to properly make this decision.

I’m reading that months prior to a consolidation are not eligible for buyback.  Is that true across the board?

Tl;dr I am on the cusp of hitting 120 months of qualifying employment.  Before coming across that exclusion criteria, I was hoping to buyback the 7 months of forbearance I was left with after consolidating under the 2022 COVID waiver.  Am I really not eligible?  If that’s the case, I’m honestly shocked by the lack of overlap in the Venn diagram of borrowers getting buybacks and the borrowers who consolidated under COVID guidance.

I only took out loans for my graduate degree, which went into repayment pre-covid.  I consolidated in good faith in 2022, like many others.  My loans had obvious manual typos within them, with loan statuses being off by a month or by a day or even clearly by the year, when they should’ve otherwise all been synchronized.  Consolidation seemed like a good way to smooth these discrepancies over and get my loans on track for PSLF with my history & future of eligible employment.  

I did not seem to ever get the “one-time payment count adjustment”.  I was left with 7 months of pre-consolidation forbearance history from periods of forbearance lasting 59 (thanks February), 60, 90, & 124 days.  I recall being placed in forbearances when re-certifying my payment plan/income.  Some of these periods feel excessively long, and some of them I feel like I was inappropriately steered into.

In addition, I have 3 randomly missing months (6/2024, 9/2024, 10/2024).  Though this is around the time of the Mohela platform switch, these months are listed as in repayment status in my text file and are represented on approved ECFs.  I plan to ask my servicer to re-report this payment data from the NSLDS database to try to get these months to register as qualifying.

I’m slightly crashing out about not being able to buy these months back.  My PSLF employment is unexpectedly ending right when I‘ll be hitting 120 with buybacks.  If not eligible, these extra months dramatically change how my future looks.  (Without exaggeration, I will have to move out of state for another PSLF-eligible job in my field, return to a work environment I‘m not exactly enthusiastic about, and professionally need to stay in my next job for an extended period of time to keep my CV respectable.)  I was incredibly reluctant to consolidate, and now I’m filled with regret about missing this unforeseeable opportunity. Would welcome any points of reason.