Quote:
Originally Posted by champstark
A bit late on this, but totally get it then. I had to refinance my loans before we got married because I knew I'd get ****ed on REPAYE/PAYE too.
Considering going into some sort of public service law at this point but probably can't because my $1500 a month payment will eat us alive. Oh well.
Have you used the calculators to price out the payments with each of you trying different plans and filing statuses? There's a trick to it if you and your wife have disparities in either income level or student loan debt.
Repaye takes into account both you and your wife's income and student loan debt even if you are married filing separately. IBR does not take into account your spouse's numbers at all if you are married filing separately but does take into account if you have kids.
Because of the way that Repaye calculates your payments (there is a formula where it apportions payments based upon a theoretical share where you and your spouse pay an equivalent chunk of money proportioned out to the size of your loan), if you have a big disparity in income, and/or if you have a big disparity in student loan debt size, it can actually make sense for the one of you that has smaller loans to be on Repaye while the other one is IBR, because Repaye will calculate a smaller payment for the smaller loan spouse because it assumes the bulk of the payment should be made to the other spouse's loan while the other spouse is in fact on IBR which is just a flat rate payment of 15 percent of disposable income (income that is above i think 400 percent of poverty level) if you are married filing separately. It is very complicated but you should use the online calculator from the student loan .gov website to try out every permutation, it makes a HUGE difference, and if you're in public service like my wife and I are it makes sense to try to get the loan payments as low as possible since whatever isn't paid after 10 years gets forgiven anyway.