So tonight, we're gonna spend, about an hour talking about a decision tree through paying for college.

If you joined the previous webinar, this is quite similar to that one. We'll soon do a few slightly different ones on topics that I'll touch on in just a few minutes. A few housekeeping notes before we really dive in. I'm recording the webinar. Tomorrow, you'll get both a copy of the video itself as well as the slides that I'm going to walk through. If you have any question as we go through these slides, please do feel free to use either that chat box or the q and a box to ask those questions.

And if there are questions that you perhaps still feel comfortable asking in public, you can reply to the message that we'll send tomorrow, and either myself or somebody on my team will get back to you on those as soon as we can.

With that, let's get started.

So a little bit of about me. For those who may not know, my name is Chris, and I'm one of the founders of Juno.

I started this seven years ago to help reduce the cost of the student loans that I had to take out for Harvard Business School. And I'll give you the quick story, and I'll tell you more about it at the end.

Seven years ago, I I got my tuition bill, and I didn't know what to do about it. I started researching federal student loan options and private alternatives, and I tried an experiment with a few of my classmates to see, could we bundle together a few hundred people who needed to get loans at the same time and ask different banks and credit unions if they'd be willing to offer a discount to our group, something better than if each one of us went to those lenders directly by ourselves.

A couple of them said yes, and the product at that time, which was just an experiment, worked. For the last seven years, we've formalized that and turned it into Juno. And so we do the same thing now, but for all graduate and undergraduate students in the US as well as Canada and Western Europe.

And to date, have about two hundred thousand plus people who are signed up to use this. So I have become a reluctant expert on almost all topics related to FAFSA, student aid index, federal grants, federal loans, and private student loans. But if there's any questions that you have whatsoever, please do feel free to reach out. We are here all year round to help.

For tonight, I'm gonna give you a quick overview of the agenda, and then we'll jump right into it. So after this slide, I'm gonna walk you through a brief look at the general timeline for financial aid.

Aid. And then I wanna help you build up to what the actual cost of college is gonna be for the upcoming academic year. There are some concepts and terms that'll be helpful to understand as you read them in your student bills and your financial aid award course.

And then we're gonna spend the bulk of the conversation breaking down that full cost, answering the question of what are the different ways to pay for it in one order.

We're gonna spend a lot of that time talking about the three different types of student loans that you could have access to over the summer, and I'll go into that in a lot of detail. And then we'll cover my strategy around how to get the lowest rates and where Juno fits into that.

Finally, I'm also going to cover just for a few minutes some potential changes that may be coming to the federal student loan market due to legislation that's currently being discussed in congress.

I'll go into it in as much detail as I can and save as much time at the end as possible for q and a. Again, if you for those of you who joined since I last mentioned this, I'm recording the webinar. You'll get a copy of the slides and the recording to your inbox tomorrow. And if you have any questions as we go through, please do ask them in the chat box or the q and a box.

So start off with a general timeline for financial aid.

The way I'd like to think about it is last month by last month, most people would have decided where they or their children are going to college.

You may have already been required to put down a deposit for the upcoming academic term.

And really starting this month and next month is when you're gonna start getting tuition bills or student bills that are sent to you or your students.

Those bills are typically due at some point in August or September. This varies. There are some schools that are later, some schools that are slightly earlier.

But because those are typically due in August or September, now is the time at which you want to make your decisions about the different buckets of money that you may use towards paying for school so that you are well prepared ahead of any potential deadlines that you need to meet. And that's really what we're gonna talk about tonight. We're gonna talk about a decision tree on deciding how to pay for the.

If you have any questions about earlier parts of the timeline for financial aid, I have other webinars that we've done many times throughout the year that I'm more than happy to send you copies of. I will include links to recordings of those in the email that I send tomorrow in case those are helpful for you. And if you have follow-up questions based on those, again, please feel free to reply to that email, and I'll make sure that we get you an answer.

So let's start off with some basics.

Yeah. If we do our job right tonight, then hopefully, you'll walk away understanding what the full cost of college actually is.

You'll understand how to maximize the free money to help reduce the amount that you actually have to pay out of pocket towards school, And we'll understand the different strategies about which loans to use if you need any in what order so that you can avoid borrowing at higher rates if you need to. I see a really good question here in the chat box about, what it might what are your options if you're going for a graduate degree, like a master's?

And we're not going to cover that tonight, but, unfortunately but there is another webinar that someone on my team is hosting, I believe, this coming Tuesday.

In the meantime, please, the person who asked that question, send me a direct email. You're putting my email in the chat box.

And if you can't make the time that we have scheduled for next week, it might actually just be easier to have you speak one on one with one of the experts on our team who can help you walk through what this looks like for a master's degree.

Our conversation tonight is strictly focused on undergrad.

This slide, though, applies for both masters and undergrad.

You're gonna hear this term and probably see it or have already seen it called cost of attendance.

And all that really means is the sticker price of going to school for one year at a time.

This is something you might see published on your school's financial aid website.

It would likely be on your financial aid award letter, and you may see it again on your student bill when that comes.

And it's meant to represent the fully loaded cost of going to that school for a year.

I'm gonna use an example throughout the next hour to try to put some real numbers to what we're gonna walk through. It's just for simplicity, the example cost of attendance for a UCLA student for the upcoming year who is receiving in state tuition.

I know this is not gonna apply for most people, but, hopefully, this is easy, gonna make it easier to follow.

So cost of attendance is made up of not just the tuition fees that you have to pay for the upcoming year, but also includes an estimate for how much it costs to live in food and housing, health insurance, some budget for personal expenses and transportation, and the cost of books and supplies.

Each school has a different one. Each school publishes it on their financial aid website, and this often does change each year. On average, over the last ten years, across most schools, these numbers have gone up about two to five percent each year.

Important things to understand about this. One, this does only represent one year's worth of expenses.

And two, you may have already seen or received an email about health insurance waivers.

So if you or your child are already covered under health insurance, then you can remove that cost from this cost of attendance.

Meaning, you typically have to fill out a waiver that makes you include some information about the health health insurance coverage that you already have.

And in this example, that would mean reducing the cost of attendance for the upcoming year by three thousand six hundred and sixty dollars. So it can be quite meaningful.

So if you do think that this applies to you, make sure that you are waiving health insurance through the school so that you're not paying for something that you already have.

Now that we understand cost of attendance, let's use this example. This forty three thousand two hundred dollar number is the fully loaded cost of going to UCLA as an in school student for the upcoming year.

You might end up spending a little bit more money on housing or more money on personal expenses than what this budget assumes.

But this is the number that UCLA's financial aid office is gonna work off of, when determining some of the other things that will allow you to help pay for some. So just keep this forty three thousand dollar number in mind. What we're gonna do now is try to break that down into the steps through which you'd go to pay for it. The first step is what we're gonna call free money. And I'm not gonna go into this in a great amount of detail, but there is at a very high level, you fill out FAFSA each year.

And every year you fill out FAFSA, there's a set of calculations that happen on the back end. Those calculation results in something called student aid index. You don't have to remember what I'm saying right now, because there's another presentation I'll direct you towards if this is of interest to you.

What the financial aid office does is they get the results through FAFSA, and they effectively use that to determine how much they can allocate to you. And the options of what they can allocate to you in free money are largely what you see on this slide. So from the federal government, they there's a few different buckets of funding that you can get. Some states also have state aid that, you could be eligible for. And some schools, not all schools, have what's called their own institutional need based aid bucket, which is effectively money that they plan on giving to students to help reduce the cost of going to school for the upcoming year.

A lot of this is driven off of the results of your FAFSA.

And depending on the school you're going to, a similar form to FAFSA called a CSS profile.

Yeah. In this example, for this family whose student is going to UCLA, let's just assume that they got roughly five thousand dollars worth of scholarships and grants for the upcoming year.

I'm not gonna go into all of the details of the different types of data that are available. I'm happy to talk about these one on one or answer questions about them. But the important thing to understand about this first bucket of free money is that it's something that you could, in theory, increase in future years or even this year. The reason I say that is the results of your FAFSA can be imperfect.

When you are getting all those buckets of aid that I spoke on last slide, You're getting something called need based financial aid. It's exactly what it sounds like. Based on the results of the financial information that you gave to FAFSA, that the financial aid department then looked at, They determined that you had a certain amount of financial need, and then there is a set of rules they have to follow that allows them to allocate certain buckets of money to you, ideally, money that does not have to be paid back.

The reason why, I say it's imperfect is that FAFSA form itself, it doesn't have the ability for you to explain certain things about your finances or put another way. It does not capture a full view of your family's finances.

So you actually do have the ability to provide more context and more information to the financial aid office, and they have the ability to consider that information and potentially adjust the amount of need based aid that you could be eligible for. There is a link on this slide, which, again, you'll get tomorrow, that goes to the presentation that walks through this in detail. It's a roughly hour and a half presentation that I've done a few times this year to help people understand the various types of reasons why they may be eligible to ask for more financial aid.

And I go through in detail the ones that are more likely to be accepted by the financial aid office.

Whether you think it's too late to do this or not this year, the important thing to understand is you fill out FAFSA every single year that you or your student is at school. And because you fill out FAFSA every single year, the financial aid office is gonna calculate the new need based award every year.

If there is something that you see in that presentation when you click on it that you think, well, that doesn't apply this year, but it might actually apply for me next year, then I'd like you to just think about that and remember that you have the opportunity to appeal the amount of financial aid that you get from the school every single year. And even if you tried and were unsuccessful this year, there could still be very valid reasons why you could be successful next year or the third year or the fourth year.

I see a request here already for the URL for negotiating financial aid.

So how about this? Tomorrow, when I send you the email that summarizes everything we're gonna talk about tonight, I will also include the links to the presentations and the most recent webinar recordings, for three other presentations that we've done that kind of effectively pulled together an education series around financially.

The first one is gonna cover filling out FAFSA and some tips and tricks around what to watch out for when you do that. The second one, you don't have to go through it, but it covers student aid index, which is basically walking through all of the math that gets done after you submit FAFSA to create that student aid index number that you might see in your financial aid award letter.

And the third presentation, which might be the most relevant, is exactly this. It is all the tips and tricks and strategies for how to go about negotiating your financial aid award. So I'll send you both the presentation as well as the reporting of the most recent webinars for those. And if you have any questions after looking through those, again, please reply to that email, and I'll make sure you get the answers.

For the sake of tonight, let's move on beyond those topics and assume that this example family got five thousand dollars worth of scholarships and grants, and that's what they maxed out at and of what they were eligible for. That leaves them with we started with forty three thousand dollars as cost of attendance. We subtract that five thousand dollars of scholarships and grants, and we get to this thirty eight thousand two hundred nineteen dollar number that still needs to get paid somehow.

And this is where I wanna introduce you to a concept that you may end up hearing from the financial aid office.

This thirty eight thousand dollar number is your borrowing limit. The amount that you're allowed to borrow from any source for college, whether it's the federal government or a private source, is equal to that cost of attendance number we started with minus whatever scholarships and grants the student receives for the upcoming academic year.

And there's an interesting implication and wrinkle to this. If you end up receiving some external scholarships and those external scholarships are reported to the school, then the school is required to reduce your borrowing limit dollar for dollar by the amount of that scholarship.

And the reason I mentioned this is so that you can proactively budget and plan and not accidentally overspend.

There are some cases where people might assume that an external scholarship, is not reported to a school, and let's say spend that and then take out a load up to what they thought was their borrowing limit and then spend all of that and then be stuck in a situation, Just be aware and and plan around and assume that if you get an external scholarship, it's likely to be reported to the school and would impact the borrowing limit.

So the next step in in this process is fundamentally deciding how much you can contribute towards paying for school this year through savings, income that you save monthly, or five twenty nine plans, which is another form of savings. And in this example, let's assume that the family was able to contribute ten thousand dollars this year towards the remaining cost of attendance.

One just really quick personal preference is and this is gonna be different from person to person. But let's say you have a five point nine plan or you have savings you plan to put towards college. A very common question I'll get is, should I spread that out over time, or should I use it all up front?

There's not a perfect answer here, but I tend to prefer to reduce the amount that I need to borrow in earlier years of school. Meaning, if I have a five twenty nine plan that can help me pay for a significant share of the upcoming year, I would personally likely use it so that I can delay taking out money for as long as I possibly can.

There is one little wrinkle on this that I'll, mention in about half an hour, but it's also we'll walk through it. But if you have any questions around, the strategies for using five twenty nine plans or savings, please write them down. I'll I'll come back to them in an extra two.

So that for this example family, we started with a forty three thousand dollar cost of attendance. We got five thousand dollars of scholarships and grants. We used ten thousand dollars of savings, and that leaves us with a twenty eight thousand dollar goal to fill. And this is, in theory, the amount that we're going to need to borrow for the other end of the year.

There's three ways that we can go about doing that. That's what the bulk of tonight's presentation will go through. So the first option is federal loans that are borrowed by the student.

The second option is federal loans that are borrowed by the parents, and the third option is private student loans that are typically cosigned by both the student and parent.

And what that's what we're gonna go through in a lot more detail. So for the next twenty to twenty five minutes, what I'm gonna walk you through is a lot of detail for each one of those three loan programs. Some of the key things that I think you should know. I'll give you two slides on each of these loan programs with the most up to date relevant information that I can find.

And I'll pause after each two slides set to basically answer any questions you might have about that type of loan program.

In this, we'll think about it as a decision tree. So let's go through the super high level overview so you have a contextual understanding for where these loan programs sit in your decision tree, and then we'll go through all the details you need to know about it.

So first, if you do need money to pay for college, if you need to borrow any money, you really wanna use direct loans first. It's the left hand side of the slide. Direct loans are money that is borrowed by the student from the government.

They have lower rates than the other federal loan programs, and they have a lot of protections built in. They're in the name of the student, but you can only borrow a relatively small amount through them each year.

If you need more money than what's available to you through a direct loan, and I promise we'll go through the loan limits for that program and, a lot more detail in five minutes, then you have two choices.

Either the parent is allowed to borrow up to that full cost of attendance or whatever amount is needed, again, through the federal government. And they can do that through what you see in the middle of the slide, something called the parent plus loan, which allows the parent to borrow a larger amount, but it's also more expensive than the direct loan.

Or you would look at using a private loan, which depending on your credit, could end up being cheaper than that parent plus loan and would also allow you to borrow the same amount that the parent plus loan would. And so for the next couple of slides, I'd I'd like to provide you with more details on eight key things to understand about each loan program, as well as some additional common questions that I get about them.

So the first four things we're gonna walk through are whether there's an origination fee on these loans, what the interest rate is, whether it's a fixed rate or a variable rate, and how much you're allowed to borrow through it for each year of school.

We'll also talk about how you qualify, whose name the loan is legally in, when you're supposed to start making payments, and whether or not there are any sorts of hardship protections built into these loan programs.

After I go through these, I'll give you, a quick summary of some potential changes that might be coming to these loan programs starting next year.

But I'll caveat all of this with for those of you who have students who are entering college or will already be in college, this fall, you, in most cases, are grandfathered into the versions of the programs that I'm going to walk you through now.

And I'll I'll go through that in more detail in about fifteen minutes.

I'm gonna pause just for a moment to catch my breath and drink some water, but please, if you have any questions, do let me.

Alright. So let's start off with the federal direct ones. So, structurally, you're gonna see a slide like this for each of the three loan programs that I mentioned.

The federal direct one, as I would say, is really where you want to start if you you need any money at the home pay for school that's coming here. I would expect that every financial aid office would tell you the same thing. Some of the key things to know about it are that it's available to the student directly. If the student filled out FAFSA, but there's a complete FAFSA on file, and the, student is, still has remaining financial need after the grants and scholarships that they've received, then they can get access to this federal direct loan. There's no cosigner that's needed. The parent isn't associated legally with this loan.

The reason why it gets advocated for as the place to start if you need to get money is, one, the rates are much lower than a parent plus loan. Two, there are a lot of protections that are built in in terms of the ability to tie the monthly payment after graduation to a percentage of income, and access to public service loan forgiveness, in case, let's say, the student becomes a doctor or a teacher or a firefighter or a policeman or something else.

So let's go through what the key things are.

First, there is an origination fee on both the direct mode and the parent plus loan. And the way that origination fee works is is kind of interesting. It's not a fee that you pay out of pocket. But to use the same example as we used before, let's say UCLA, In order for UCLA to receive a hundred dollars from you through a direct loan, you actually have to borrow a little bit over one hundred and one dollars.

And so this origination fee just effectively increases the principal amount that you have to start off with on the loan. For the direct loan, it's a small fee. It's a little bit over one percent. For the parent plus loan, it's a much larger fee at a little bit over four percent.

And so direct loans, they have an origination fee. It's about one percent.

The interest rate on direct loans is set up by a formula that congress created over ten years ago. For all new direct loans that students take out from July first and on, the rate is gonna be six point three nine percent, and that's fixed for the life of the loan. The six point three nine percent number, it you might see some places that say, a slightly higher number above a little bit over six point five. That's the old number for all loans that were originated, for the twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five academic year.

We already know what the new rate is for all loans that are created after July first. So if you you find other articles or sources that say a different number than this, don't be confused. The the correct number is six point three nine.

There's no credit check that's actually required to get this. Whether the student has amazing credit or no credit, they're gonna get the same six point three nine percent fixed rate.

And they typically have the ability to delay making any payments until six months after graduation, unless they drop below halftime enrollments, at which point they also have to start making payments.

And as as I was mentioning, there are a lot of hardship protections that are built into this loan program. And so if any money is needed, this is where to start.

You may see on your financial aid award letter that you've been offered something called subsidized direct loans. And I'll just touch on that for a quick second.

If you based on the results of your FAFSA and the amount of financial need you have, it's possible that for the first year of school and any year of school for undergrad only, a portion of this loan may be offered to you as subsidized, which means that that portion does not accrue any interest until after the student graduates.

All other loans you would see on your financial aid award letters would typically say unsubsidized direct or unsubsidized Stafford loan, which just means that the interest starts accruing the moment that the money is sent to the school.

That principle is important to understand. For all student loan products, whether it is this federal direct loan, that parent plus loan product I'll talk to you about in two minutes, or private student loans, interest doesn't start accruing when you apply for a loan. It doesn't start accruing when you sign for a loan. It only starts accruing when the money is actually sent to the school. And the money is sent to the school on typically something called a tuition due date, which is typically around the time that the fall term is going to start. And so if you took out a five thousand dollar federal direct unsubsidized loan, and let's say you accepted it in your financial aid dashboard today, that money probably wouldn't get sent to the school until August or September, and you would start accruing interest on it at a six point three nine percent rate once that money is actually at the school.

I see a really good question here on, if you accept your loan today, is the interest rate better?

Two two ways to answer this.

First, the rate on the new loans that are originated after July first, is actually lower than the rate on the loans that the direct loans that people took out to pay for the twenty twenty four, twenty five academic year.

But second, you have a financial aid dashboard that your school has probably set up for you. And when you log in there, there's typically a button for the direct loans that, and you have to click accept. And then you if you accept that before July first or after July first, that in almost all circumstances doesn't change the rate that you're gonna get on those loans. What impact, whether or not you are getting a direct loan that's priced for this year or priced for last year, is the date that it's dispersed, which is the technical term for when the money is actually sent to the school. And so the school for the fall term is probably asking the government to send the money in August or September. And so, whether you accept it now or accept it a month from now, it's gonna end up being classified as a twenty twenty five, twenty twenty six academic loan who's gonna have that six point three nine percent rate.

I mentioned that because it's the same thing that's gonna apply for parent plus loans.

The only real downside of the credit is the amount that someone is allowed to monitor the credit.

And what you see on this slide is a chart that shows you how much someone is allowed to borrow based on two factors.

The first factor is what year they are in school. The second is whether they are classified as a dependent student or an independent student.

That classification has nothing to do with whether or not you claim someone on your taxes. It's a very specific definition that the Department of Education uses, And you can see most of that definition on the right hand side of this slide.

So if a student is at least twenty four, if they're married, if they're going to graduate school, if they're a veteran or a member of the armed forces, an emancipated minor, or a couple of other things, then the Department of Education says, okay. We consider you independent. Because we consider you independent, your parents don't have access to a parent plus loan. They can't. And, you are able to borrow this higher amount that you'd see on the right hand side of this line.

If a student is dependent, then which is most other scenarios, then they can borrow what you see on the left hand column of this chart.

To put numbers to it, for the first year of school as a dependent student, you can borrow up to five thousand five hundred dollars for that year.

As an independent student, you could borrow up to nine thousand five hundred dollars for that year.

The amount that you can borrow goes up a little bit in your second year and your third year, and it's important to understand that this is a use it or lose it program.

If you decided not to use direct loan this year, but you wanted to use one next year, and let's say next year is your sophomore year, you are still limited as a dependent student to borrow six thousand five hundred dollars through the program.

You didn't use the five thousand five hundred that was available to you for freshman year, but you can't go back and get access to that next year. You either use it or you lose it. The last quick tip I'll leave you with on direct loans before we move on is in the next couple of slides, I'm gonna talk to you about parent plus loans. And parent plus loans were created in large part to help fill the gap between whatever amount you need to pay towards school for the upcoming year and what you're able to borrow through direct loan. For a lot of families, there's still a a large amount remaining financial need. Parent Plus was created to help fill that need.

And some people do get denied access to Parent Plus.

If a parent is denied access to Parent Plus, there is a mechanism, and you need to contact your financial aid office, whereby the student can then be allowed to borrow the higher amounts that you see on the right hand side of the chart. So to bring it home, let's say the dependent freshman is normally allowed to borrow five thousand five hundred dollars. They still need money after that five thousand five hundred. Their parent applies for a parent plus loan through the government and, for whatever reason is denied. We'll go through the denial reasons in a minute.

Then the student and their parent can ask the financial aid office to reclassify the student to make them eligible to borrow up to nine thousand five hundred dollars for freshman year. Hopefully, that fills the gap of what is needed.

It may not, but that is the one mechanism that you have in case the parent plus denial does happen.

I'll pause just for a moment to see if we have questions on direct loans, before we move on to understanding parent plus.

Okay.

And, again, if you ask questions later as you think of them, I'll I'll come back and answer them during q and a.

This brings us to the first part of our decision tree, which is to say that if the amount of money that you need for the upcoming academic term after scholarships and grants and saving people put towards school is less than what's available to you through direct loan program, just use that direct loan program and and don't worry about the other programs yet.

If the amount that you need is greater than that, a lot of people fall into that bucket as well. And that's what it makes sense to compare and understand, parent plus loans versus private student loans. And that's what we're gonna help you understand.

Alright. I see a great question here to start off with, which, I'll just start off with this before we go through the overall understanding what parent plus is.

The question is, let's say you have great credit, but you're self employed.

Would a parent plus loan be hard to get being self employed?

And, generally speaking, it should not be hard to get if you're self employed. The reason I'd say that is, some of the important things to understand about Parent PLUS are that as long as you meet the basic qualification criteria, everyone is gonna get the same rate, same terms.

And there's not a credit score cutoff or an income cutoff for qualifying for a parent plus loan.

There's a different set of rules the department of education uses, and it's just called do you have something called adverse credit history?

In the next slide, we'll talk about what that means. An adverse credit history doesn't mean that you have a very low credit score. It could, but it doesn't mean that, and it has nothing to do with your income. It actually just means, do you have certain lines on your credit report that would disqualify you from being able to access the parent plus loan? And those tend to be things like wage garnishments or tax liens, having defaulted on other student loans or or things like that. And so other than that, if you don't have those marks, then you typically would qualify. And if you do qualify, everybody gets the same exact terms.

That's a stark contrast to private student loans where the qualification criteria can be very different from one lender to another, and both your credit and your income can impact your eligibility for the programs.

But as a result, each person who does qualify could get a different rate. And the stronger your financial profile, the likelier it would generally be that you would get loan rates. And so let's talk a little bit more about parent plus, which for many people ends up being the best option that's available to them.

The key thing to understand about it is that the origination fee and the rate are a lot higher than what's available to the student through the federal government.

Whereas I showed you on the direct loan, the student, the student's direct loan has a one percent origination fee. Parent plus has a slightly more than a four point two percent fee. To use the same example as before, in order for UCLA to receive a hundred dollars, to credit towards my student bill, I actually need to borrow a little bit over a hundred and four dollars. And so it increases my principal by a significant amount on day one.

Whereas the interest rate on the direct loan for the student is six point three nine percent, on parent plus, all new loans that are originated after July first have an eight point nine four percent fixed rate.

The big difference between this and the direct loan, on besides that is the amount that you're allowed to borrow through it. So a few slides ago, I introduced you to the concept of a borrowing limit, and that borrowing limit is your cost of attendance minus the scholarships and grants received.

That's the active and borrowing from parent plus.

Other just key things to understand, this is something that's only available in the name of the parent. The student isn't legally tied to a parent plus loan. They can't legally be added to it while it remains settled, and I'll go through that in a little bit more detail on the next slide.

Payments typically begin sixty days after the loan is dispersed, but there is a mechanism that is typically within your, parent plus application on student aid dot gov where you can opt to not make payments until after the student graduates.

So it would don't actually have to make payments while a student is in school, but you have to opt in to that. At the same time, you are allowed to make always on all three loan products I'm talking to you about tonight. You're always allowed to make payments early, with no prepayment penalty. So if you wanna pay these off faster, you're able to do so, and there's no ramifications for doing so.

So a good question here on that it ties into who's eligible for a parent plus loan. So the question is, if you're divorced, can each parent apply for a parent plus loan?

And so either parent is allowed to apply for a parent plus loan.

The limiting factor is the amount that you're allowed to borrow through it. So, really, if if one parent the way I've seen this done more frequently would be you have two parents who both, are helping pay for school.

They're using a parent plus loan for one year. One parent might be the one who applies for and uses the parent plus loan. The next year, the the other parent might be the one who does it. They might switch off from year to year or even from semester to semester.

I've seen that done in in some cases.

As long as the amount that you're requesting to borrow is not higher than the borrowing limit, then it can't be done.

Who's eligible for a parent plus loan is also a very specific definition here. It really is just parents of undergraduate students who are enrolled at least half time.

Aunts and uncles, grandparents, and other people in the family are not able to borrow a parent plus loan. It's just the rules of the way that the system is set up.

And the children can't have this loan in their own name. They they can't be added as a co borrower. It doesn't show up on their credit report. They're not immediately required to help pay it back.

But if you want to have a discussion with your children about some shared responsibility, you can absolutely do so. Just recognize that there's not a legal responsibility that they have because of the way the program is set up.

If you want to access a parent plus loan, your school would likely already have sent you a link to the student aid dot gov website where you'd fill out the application.

If they haven't, I'm also including the link to that on this slide.

And so it's, roughly ten to fifteen minute application.

You submit it.

If you are approved, then there's one more step after that where you have to do some sign something called a master of the promissory note, which is just a legal document that says that you intend to take this loan out. The information you provided is accurate and that you will pay it back in effect. It's more complicated than that, but that's effectively what you're doing.

And then the money gets sent to the school when the school requests the money.

There are some reasons why you could be denied access to a parent plus one, and some of them are listed on this slide. Tomorrow, in the email that I'll send you, I'll include the link to the Department of Education's website where it shows the longer list of potential denial reasons.

As I was mentioning before, they're really looking for things like recent bankruptcies or large debts that are more than ninety days delinquent, wage garnishments, tax liens, defaulted student loans.

As long as those, let's say, reasons are not on your financial aid or are not on your credit report. As long as you don't get classified as having adverse credit history, then you can still get approved for a parent plus one.

I see a question here on, that I'm not sure I totally follow. Question is, is there no cosigner forgiveness with, Parent PLUS loan?

Brian, if you wouldn't mind just clarifying what you mean by cosigner forgiveness for a parent plus loan, that would be very helpful.

Another great question on for both parent plus and a valuable direct loan, what are the lengths of loan?

The term over which you're supposed to repay them. It's a great question with a slightly complicated answer. So there's multiple repayment plans that are available for these, federal student loan products.

And this there's something called a standard repayment plan, which is a ten year repayment window for most loans with most balances.

Meaning, you borrow a thirty thousand dollar parent plus loan, and you choose to defer payments until after graduation, then ten years after graduation is when you would you should be done paying it off under a standard repayment plan.

Same thing is true for the direct loan that the student borrows. However, there are many different types of repayment options that are available to the student and several others that are available to the parents.

There are scenarios in which you can limit the amount that you pay to a percentage of income, and there are potential new changes that could be coming to the repayment plans that are available starting next year. We'll know some more about what those changes could look like over the next two to three weeks is my best guess based on the legislative calendar. And, I already if you're at this webinar, I have your email. I I fully intend to send you a quick update once I have a strong review on what potential legislative changes could be, coming or are likely to actually be enacted.

So now I just wanna compare that to private notes. And we can go through this a little bit more quickly. But the key thing to understand about private loans is the rate and the terms we're gonna get are gonna be different for each person. For some people, you could end up with, much better rates than what you could get through a parent plus loan, for example. And for some people, that won't be true. And it'll be really hard to actually know until you shop around and check.

And what I'll do over the next couple of minutes is just give you a better understanding for how private loans work in contrast to the federal loan products and some strategies for how to actually check what rates you may be eligible for without doing a hard check and impacting your credit.

And so our goal here is to just understand what these are and figure out how to check what you could be eligible for without a credit impact, so that if you find something that you decide might be right for you, once you do move further with a given bank or a product, and you eventually do get a hard credit check, it will theoretically have been worth it.

So some of the key things to understand.

As mentioned this before, but this is really meant to me as an alternative to parent plus.

The student should borrow that direct loan and and use that amount.

Even if you might get a lower rate through a private loan than the six point three nine percent that is available to the student for a direct loan, which would be rare. But even if you did, that student might end up having that loan forgiven depending on the career that they choose to go into. You never know.

Students should, in my opinion, still use the direct loan.

Some of the key things to understand about private loans, at the moment, none of the major private lending companies that I am aware of charge an origination fee.

None of the products or companies that Juno works with charge an origination fee. That I know for certain.

The interest rate is going to vary depending on the quality of the, let's say, based on your financial situation. And so for some people, they are able to get much lower rates.

The amount that you're allowed to borrow is the same as what we walked through on Parent Plus. It's the say it's that cost of attendance minus scholarships and grants.

And for most scenarios, in order to qualify for this, you do need to have, across a couple of different lenders, at least, credit score above six fifty and ongoing income.

The important thing is to understand about let's say you actually check your rates.

There's three things that can impact the rates that you would ultimately see.

The first is whether it's you're gonna see a series of options that will be put in front of you, and three axes that impact it. One is fixed rates versus variable rates. The second is the term length that you're choosing from. And the third thing is the repayment plan you select.

And here's how this actually impacts it.

First, personally, I'm ignoring variable rates for this conversation.

I I have a very strong preference for fixed rates, especially seeing the rates that are being offered in the market today.

So let's just zero in on the next two things.

Most private lenders will allow you to select between a five year term, seven year term, ten year term, fifteen year term, some a twenty year term. And so you have a range of terms that you can opt into when you get quoted your options.

That you're typically gonna see lower rates that are associated with a shorter duration. And so sometimes you might see, very low advertised rate. That's typically gonna be available to people who want a five year loan and who have excellent credit.

The final thing that impacts it, as I was mentioning, is when you choose to start making payments, you can, on one end, do something called full deferment, which means that you opt into not having to make any payments until either six or nine months after the student graduates.

On the other extreme, you can select something called immediate repayment, which means, effectively, thirty days after the money gets sent to the school, you're gonna start making full payments on it. So if you took a five year immediate repayment loan, that would effectively mean that about five years after that money is sent to the school, you should be done paying it off.

And in between, there are other repayment options. One is called interest only, which is what it sounds like. You only have to pay off the interest until the student graduates, and then you start making full payments.

And the final option is something called a a fixed payment or a minimum payment where you're obligated to make a twenty five dollar monthly payment while the student is in school, and you start making full make full payments after they graduate.

But the reason why a lot of people will select that minimum payment or fixed payment option is that they can then connect that loan to their bank account for automatic payments.

And once they do, then they get a zero point two five percent rate reduction that's automatically applied. And so the outstanding balance would grow a little bit more slowly.

The biggest downside of private loan is even if you end up getting a lower rate than what's available to you from the federal government, you don't have the kinds of hardship protections that exist on federal student loans.

And sometimes the hardship protections that exist on federal loans can change from time to time.

Over the last four years, they got more generous than they had been previously.

Now things seem to be going a bit in the other direction.

But that's something you give up. If you choose a private loan, you give up on both the existing protections built in federal loans and future protections that could theoretically exist.

So I'll just go through some of the key questions. And if you have other things you'd like to talk about, I'm happy to go through them too.

I would consider a private loan only after a student has used a federal direct loan.

Same strategy as parent plus.

And I would these are the two reasons I commonly hear why people choose to use private loans instead of parent plus. The first is if you really want to have a loan that is both the name of the student and the parent where both people are cosigning on the loan together. There is no option to do that for a parent plus.

And the second reason is if you have good enough credit, or income to qualify for better private rates than what is available to you through plus. And as I was mentioning on the last slide, there are a lot of ways that you can compare the rates that you'd get from one place to another without doing a hard check on your credit.

And so most lenders at this point have an eligibility check tool, and many of those tools will allow you to input information in about three minutes or less, not do a hard check on your credit, and see roughly the rates that you may get.

And so I would recommend doing that.

Good question here on, are there private loans available without the student cosigning?

Yes. There are. They're called private parent loans.

There you can also access those through Juno.

They're effectively a replica of the parent plus concept that's available to the federal government, but now only available that it's only the parent that's actually tied to it. One of the key thing to understand, whether the loan is cosigned or not, if it's only the parent on a private loan or the parent and the student, it is almost always the parent's credit history and income that is driving the rate that is being offered to whoever the borrower is. But there are certainly reasons why some people prefer to use a private parallel loan and not have the stew tied to this.

I've said a lot, and now the important thing is to understand a little bit of what might change.

Yeah. Let me give you a quick the ten thousand foot view here is there's a budget bill that's going through congress. You may have heard of that.

That budget bill includes some provisions that would impact the way that federal student loans and grants work.

There's a version of this bill that was already passed by the House of Representatives.

There's another version that the US Senate is supposed to release over the next few days.

And there's a final version that will get settled on over the next few weeks, that may pass. We don't know for sure.

What I'm showing you on this slide is what we know so far the house has passed. It doesn't mean that this will actually happen, but this is the best starting point we have for what may or is likely to happen.

What is likely to happen is some things that impact both how much the student can borrow and how much the parent can borrow, and it only impacts students who are entering college next year and beyond.

Slightly more complicated answers to that. If your student is entering college this year, then you can be grandfathered into all of the rules and programs that I walked through for the last half an hour As long as under the way the bill is currently written, you borrow some minimal amount from those federal programs this year.

So if you borrowed a hundred dollars from here and plus this year, then the way the bill is written, you should be able to continue borrowing Parent Plus under the same setup for the next three years after this year.

Otherwise, these are the changes that would happen.

And I'm I'm trying to summarize a few dozen pages into one slide here, but I promise I'll send a more thorough write up after I read the version and send it releases so that nothing is confusing.

The amount of money that a student let's talk about the first bucket, which was the direct loans. It's what the student is allowed to take out.

The way things are currently written, that amount might go up a little bit.

So right now, the amount that a student is allowed to borrow is limited both by the year they are in school and the total amount that they can take out over all of the years that they're in undergrad.

That would change so that the amount that a student is allowed to borrow each year, that might go up a little bit, and it might be set to somewhat complicated formula that's called the median cost of attendance of the program type.

Meaning, to use the example from before, if our student was going to UCLA to study journalism, the Department of Education would calculate what was the median cost of attendance for all journalism programs in the US last year. And if it was twelve thousand dollars, then our student can borrow twelve thousand dollars to this program this year, through the direct loan program this year to help pay for school. That would be higher than what the current looks like.

And the amount they could borrow throughout all of their undergraduate career would be capped at fifty thousand dollars, which is higher than what it looks like today.

The flip side of that is that the parent plus loan program would be significantly impacted.

For all let's say your student is going to college next year and or this year and you're not grandfathered in, then each parent would be capped at borrowing fifty thousand dollars per lifetime through the parent plus program, regardless of how many children you have.

Today, you're allowed to borrow up to the full cost of attendance. It's meant to help you bridge whatever gap exists between the cost of attendance and and what the student borrows and what's left. That would change so that if you ended up using all fifty thousand dollars of your borrowing capacity in year one for one child, that's all you're left with.

The other parent, if there is one, would also be allowed to borrow up to fifty thousand dollars lifetime.

But if you have other children after that, then you would be unable to use parent plus loans in order to help them pay for school.

It's something to be aware of.

We might see changes to how all of this is set up over the next couple of weeks, and I promise I'll let you know what those changes are.

I'll pause if there is any questions on this, and then we have maybe seven or eight minutes left total to wrap up.

Let me just bring everything together for a minute to help you understand a little bit more about the this decision tree and concept of shopping.

So and I'll come back to these questions in just about two minutes. So this is the example that we've been walking through for the last hour. We started with somebody who had to pay forty three thousand dollars or had a cost of the headquarters of forty three k.

After scholarships and grants, they did thirty eight k.

After they used some savings, let's say it still needed twenty eight thousand. Let's assume it's a first year student, and they maxed out the amount of direct loans that the student is allowed to borrow. That would leave a little bit over twenty two thousand dollars left where the this family had to decide, are they gonna fill that gap with parent plus loans or private loans?

And all I wanna communicate here on this slide is that, what would seem like a small difference in the rate that you might get charged could amount to a sizable difference in the total cost of the loan over the time that you'd pay it off. And so shopping around can be very meaningful. In this in this example, we're comparing the parent plus loans that someone would use for the upcoming term with, let's say, a theoretical example private loan for a ten year term, where the rate ended up being eight percent.

In this example, right, the total cost of interest over the life of this loan is five thousand dollars more for the parent plus product than for the private product.

Your actual results could be completely different than this, but a small change in the annual interest rate can lead to a very large change in the total cost of the loan over time. And that's why I'm just strongly advocating shopping around, especially in places where you don't have to do a hard check on your credit.

And I'm just about to wrap up.

We started, you know, to help solve this problem. It's I don't want you to trust us when I tell you that we're gonna help find you a good product if you are interested in or might benefit from a private.

I wanna ask you to shop around. And if you do find something better than what we're able to offer you, they go give us a chance to beat it. The way that we set things up this year is, similar to what we were able to do last year, which is you can check your rates relatively quickly on the Juno platform.

And you can do it with the link that you see attached here.

If you like any of the products that you see and you sign one of those, rates, then we process two percent cashback for you, which would be five hundred dollars and a twenty five thousand dollar loan. That that gets sent from Juno to you. If you find a better rate, amazing.

I want you to.

We have a process that is really simple where as long as it's from a quite long list of eligible competitors, we're able to work with our partners to match that lower rate and increase your cash back at three percent of the loan amount. This is set up this way on purpose to reward you for shopping around and to make it so that you don't have to trust me that we're trying to do what we can to help you find and get the lowest cost private loan that's out there if that is something that is right for you after everything that you've heard.

Two more slides, and then we'll be done. And I'll go back to this q and a.

Again, very common questions about how the rate match process works, and it's pretty simple.

You ultimately shop around, find rates from different places.

Check your rates, through one of our partners on our site. If you find something better, then all you gotta do is email us at hello at trilin juneau dot com, and someone on our team walks you through this in in detail. It's pretty simple. We make sure that you are, comparing a real offer from the middle lender to an offer from our lending partner. We make sure that you're comparing similar loan terms, so a five year loan to a five year loan as an example.

And and then we do the work on the back end to make sure that we can keep those promises that I just made to you to get that lower rate and to get you your cash back process.

Last slide. Just the four most common questions that I I get about any private loans.

So the first is, do I borrow for one year?

And the answer is yes. You're not supposed to, and you actually can't borrow for all four years upfront in part because your borrowing limit is set to the cost of attendance for one year of school and time and also because you don't want to over borrow early if you don't actually need that money until later.

Second is, I told you that there's different repayment plans that you can choose from. Can you change that repayment plan selection after you log in alone?

Generally speaking, the answer is no. In most cases, you're not able to pay a lower amount than what you committed to when you signed the loan each month.

Meaning, if you decided to select an immediate repayment loan, because it had a really attractive interest rate, and two years later, you decide, actually, I prefer if I could have had this loan payments deferred until after my student graduates.

That's not something that you are likely to be able to do. But the flip side of it, you can. I was mentioning that there's no prepayment penalties. So if you wanted to pay off a loan faster at any point during the term, you are absolutely able and welcome to do that.

And finally, you are able to borrow from a different lender each year. So don't assume that wherever you found a good deal from for one year is gonna be the best option available to you every single year.

I encourage you to shop around whatever. And if you do find something that's better than what we're able to offer you, please let me know so that I can find a way to work with them as well.

Alright. I'm gonna flip over to some questions right now. Give me a minute to read a few of these.

Okay.

Let's go back to this slide. Let's see a few questions related to the changes that may occur in the federal government. So, the question here is if this passes or something substantially similar to this, could you do a bridge between the two? And I I I think the idea here might be, could you do a bridge between the existing version of the, parent plus program and the new version parent plus program, if I'm not mistaken?

Say, short answer is we don't really know.

The way that it's currently written is that the rules that a student would be, each student is basically what the rules would follow. And so a parent might have, let's say, two children. Child one is going to school this semester. The parent borrows a minimum. Let's just say they borrow a hundred dollars through the parent plus program for that student this year.

For that student, the parent plus limits are gonna be the same as what I walked you through before, for both this year and the three years after that.

But but that parent's second child that would go to school in the fall of twenty twenty six, they would have these lower limits of fifty thousand dollar lifetime. And so it's the way it's currently written, it would apply to each child differently even for the same parents.

I see this question quite frequently. It's a really good question. So you haven't gotten your student bill yet.

A lot of people have not received those student bill yet.

How do you know what amount to apply for or to borrow?

Two ways to answer this question. One is if you looked at this slide, you may be able to back into something quite close to the amount that you would need to borrow, by yourself anyway.

And so the school has a cost of attendance that should be accessible or shown to you for each term.

Your financial aid award letter would have the amount of scholarships and grants that are offered to you for the upcoming term.

And you should be able to use those two to kind of estimate what is the amount that you may need to borrow after using whatever savings you would plan to use.

And so if you wanted to get relatively precise, you you probably could get relatively precise without having yet received the student bill. I'm not saying that you need to do that, but just that you could.

The second is if you, let's say, tried something rough and you said, okay. I might need that my math says I need twenty two thousand seven hundred, but I actually applied for twenty eight thousand dollars, so higher than that amount, then there's that's actually relatively safe for you to do because if the amount that you applied for, is greater than your borrowing limit in this case, that gets automatically reduced to your borrowing limit by the school.

And if you wanted to reduce that loan amount later, you could also just pay back the incremental amount that you borrowed that you don't need, without a penalty for doing so, as long as you're doing it quickly enough. And so, just in in general, it is possible to apply for loans early on.

The cases in which I see people who really want to do that is they'll do a soft check on their credit somewhere to see what's available to them. They might find something that, is a low rate that they want to lock in, and they will want to apply for and get approved for that loan so that they can lock those low rates in case rates change over the next month or two months, before they need to take action more quickly.

And so it's an option that you have available to them. I'm not saying that you need to do that. You can absolutely wait for your student bill.

But if you do try to lock something in early, the way to do that is simply by just slightly overestimating the amount that you might need and then reducing it afterwards.

You can borrow one semester at a time if you choose to.

When you apply for a loan, you typically have an option to select, which term you want the money sent to the school or if you wanna cover the full academic year.

And, generally speaking, I see most people apply for a full academic year, and I actually think that can be a good idea for a couple of reasons. First, I'm gonna just use some made up numbers here. Let's say you applied for a twenty thousand dollar loan for the full academic year at a school that had a semester system.

Half of that money would then get sent in the fall, and half of that would get sent in the spring. And you would only accrue interest on the portion of the money that has already been received by the school.

So you're not actually overpaying or, let's say, accruing excess interest on a a larger loan balance than you need because that second half has not yet been sent.

And there's an interesting implication to this, which is if you wanted to lock something in that looked like a good rate now for the full year, and it you have the second disbursement that's scheduled for the spring semester.

If for whatever reason, rates go down dramatically between now and January, when that money would probably be sent to the school, you can actually cancel or and replace that second bucket of money that you have locked in right now.

And, ideally, you'd be able to do that with something that potentially has a lower rate than what you've already secured.

In some ways, you can kinda think of it as you apply for the full year. You're not accruing any extra interest on it. It gives you the optionality of replacing that second pot of money over the next couple of months if the interest rate environment moves in your favor. But you won't be any worse off, if interest rates move up because now you've already locked something at that current pricing.

I know that can get a little bit complicated, but it generally, it can work in your favor.

Very good question. How does Juno make money? Full transparency.

Our incentive is to be completely aligned with you. We make money off of the total amount of loan volume that our partners, the the banks and credit unions and fintechs, are able to close and generate from what Juno does.

We don't want anybody as a customer to use Juno or to use any other products that we put in front of you unless, first, a private product is right for you after listening to these reasons, and, two, unless it actually is the lowest cost version of it for you. And so, yes, we do make money off of this, but we do not want to unless we actually are presenting you with the best version of what's available to you.

And, very honestly, if you need anything related to FAFSA, so you need index, understanding federal grants, understanding federal loans, or understanding the private loan products that you network with, our team is available year round almost every day for free. We're not charging for any of the services that we would provide. My hope would be that we're able to provide you a great product. We will give you unbiased advice.

If a federal product is better for you, we will tell you And if there is a chance that that four years from now after you or your student graduate, you may want to refinance those loans, then, hopefully, you would trust us by coming back to us and giving us a chance to see if we can find you a great option to refinance those other loans. Or if they end up going to graduate school, having the opportunity to try to win your business at that point, if we can find you the best product.

So I got a question here about somebody who is living off campus. How do you borrow for that since it won't have to go on the student bill?

Great, great, great question. So the amount that you're allowed to borrow, again, it's I'm gonna flip to this slide.

It's going to be set as the cost of attendance minus the scholarships and grants that I mentioned.

When you borrow money and it goes to the school, what they subtract out is the tuition and mandatory fees for the academic term. Any amount that is left over, after the school subtracts out the tuition mandatory fees is, effectively yours to use as you see fit towards these qualified academic expenses, and housing is one of them. And so the school will put an estimate in this example of roughly nineteen thousand dollars of food and housing. Your actual food and housing bill for living off campus could be wildly different from this.

But whatever you do, the amount that you'd want to borrow would be capped at the cost of attendance.

The process works like this. If you wherever you're borrowing from, federal government or private, the money gets sent to the school on that tuition due date.

The school would subtract out the tuition and fees.

The amount that's left over would sit in an account that the school has for you, and they would tell you to log in to your dashboard and to transfer that money to a personal account to use towards all of the other buckets of expenses as needed.

Because I see this question again, maybe I'll kinda answer it in a slightly different way, would be, should you apply for the loan before receiving the first bill from the school?

That it can be helpful to do so if but it's unknown. And the reason I say that is, let's say you slightly overestimate the amount that you need to borrow.

A way is to reduce that cost later without a penalty.

But the benefit would be once you apply for and are approved for a loan, then those rates, once you are approved, are locked in for thirty days.

And so during those thirty days, if something happens to the economy and rates go way up, you're still approved for and have the option to sign and use those rates that you walked in now.

That's the the main benefit that exists here. And it is kind of person dependent. And, well, some people will really value having that optionality.

For many people, that's not terribly important.

But that's the well, I wanna be careful about how I'm describing this.

It the earlier you shop around, and see why that might be available to you, the likelier it is that you might see something that, is good rates wise whether through GSM or somewhere else and then have the chance to lock that in. And so at the very least, I would recommend doing those rate checks where you don't have to get a hard check on your credit to see what's the ranges of the numbers that might be available to you. And depending on what those look like, then decide, is it worth it for you to submit a full application?

Because you have to submit that full application in order to get an approval and lock those rates.

And that's it.

Good question here. Are there any advantages to accepting the direct pay now, or should you waste?

There's no advantage or disadvantage to accepting that direct aid now. So, again, the direct loan is what the student is able to borrow directly themselves.

No advantage or disadvantage to just click the accept button now.

Where do I recommend shopping around for a private one?

So you can check your rates from, depending on your state of residence, a few places on Juneau.

And so you can use the link that I'll send you in the email tomorrow and should take you less than three minutes to just be able to check rates without impacting credit.

And then besides that, there is a platform I like to call Credible. I'm gonna send you a link to that as well.

We, we'll just make it a little bit easier tomorrow. That would let you see rates from a couple of more places as well.

Really good question here on hard credit checks. So, the question is if you applied for loans at multiple companies, how does that impact your credit score? And so Experian says so first, you don't need to actually submit a when you submit a full application for a loan, that's a step that comes after doing this rate check. So I'm telling you, maybe we we start with a rate check that doesn't impact our credit.

We like something. We decide to do a full application. That's gonna take roughly fifteen minutes.

And once I do a full application, then I'm consenting to have a hard credit check run that does have a somewhat small impact on my credit, that will eventually go away.

Experian and Equifax say that as long as you are doing multiple hard credit checks in, within a roughly thirty day window for the same loan product, then your credit won't get dinged any more than doing one hard credit check for that product. Put another way, they say that their formula does not impact you negatively for shopping around.

So and from what I've seen and what they publish on their sites, that should be true.

That being said, you probably don't even need to submit that full application given a lot of the, lenders now would be you could see the rates that you'd like to be eligible for just off of that soft credit check.

Steve, a question here on, so another student aid company has advertised an increase in the autopay discount from a quarter percent to a half a percent.

Is that something that you know is offering also?

It it's not explicitly, but the way that I would, really view this is, what's most important in comparing a private loan option on price is what is the debt rate that you're gonna be charged over the same duration. So over, let's say, for example, ten years and for the same repayment type. And so what I would really just encourage you to do is that check for that other lender, what is that net, rate that you're gonna get charged? So whatever that rate is minus that half a percent to whatever you would get charged on Juno as well or through our partners, and see what that difference actually is. But tomorrow, I'll also send you a a quite robust calculator that a lot of people use every year to help compare the cost of any private loan option to the federal parent plus option.

So you can put your assumptions and inputs there about any loan that you're being quoted anywhere and see with the various assumptions that go into it, what is the total cost of each loan over the time during which you're supposed to pay it off, and what is the true APR on each of those loans. There's a couple of different views that we'll give you to help compare the the actual cost of the options in front of you.

Here's a question. Okay? So, Clayton, I think that the question, would accepting a direct loan potentially hurt your grounds appeal?

It shouldn't, but there is no, benefit accepting it now also doesn't give you a benefit. And so, I can't speak too definitively on that because appeals are really viewed on somewhat of a case by case basis by financially administrators.

And if there's any hesitation in your mind, I would just recommend not yet accepting that direct loan since you're in no rush to do so anyway.

But that's a great point, a great question. And so, the annual scenario would just be don't even let it be a doubt in your mind and don't accept it yet.

Okay.

I am gonna wrap up now, but, just as a quick reminder, I'll send you a recording of this webinar of the three others that I mentioned at the top of the webinar and some of the other links that we discussed tonight to your inboxes tomorrow. If you have any questions based on any of that, please feel free to reply to that email directly.

And, I hope you have a great rest of your evening.

Thank you.