You find it odd I'm looking for a way to "cash out" on my over $300K in loans that I took on to help my patients? I plan to work in an area that serves an underserved population (most of ER of course does serve this population), which IS part of the intention of PSLF. There is nothing in the law that I've seen that will stop specialists from benefiting from PSLF if they work for a 501c3. How about you answer my question rather than making assumptions about my motivation for PSLF. People in academics aren't the only ones that deserve loan forgiveness, so get off your high horse.
You are correct: there is nothing in the law that prohibits anyone who works at a 501(c)(3) from qualifying, however, whether this will remain unchanged in the future is doubtful. Most groups do not incorporate as 501(c)(3)s because they are not non-profits.
If you are a social worker who makes 50k a year and has 50k in loans from your MSW, then it will be difficult to pay this off. Conversely, it will be easier for a physician who has 300k in loans to pay them off if they make 300k a year. You are not alone in the 300k club, and unfortunately, it is a problem many of us who are graduating/in medical school are facing: do we take out a crazy amount of debt so we can help people. No one would look at 300k in debt and say "pssh, this is easy." It is going to take sacrifice and planning, but it is totally doable (live like a resident for a few years, make sure your spouse works, do not/delay having kids, etc). Even if you do work for a group that is a non-profit, no one knows if physicians will be able to reap the full forgiveness of PSLF. Yes, EM physicians do provide a great service to society, but so do all physicians (including plastic surgeons who do breast augmentations). PSLF was meant to help people who take low paying jobs to provide vital services to the community, and while EM physicians do provide vital services, whether they are well compensated in PP seems debatable
Let's say you have 325k at 7%, let's assume you are in a 3 year program, and let's assume that income will grow at 2%, so using these numbers (
https://www.aamc.org/services/first/first_factsheets/399572/compensation.html), when you enter the work force in the summer of 2018, your starting salary will be $254,000.
Assuming you have no subsidized federal loans (and assuming your 325k is actually, say, 270 plus 55k in interest), so when you enter repayment, you'll be looking at an extra 9.5k in interest. So in 6-months from now, your balance will be 334.5k. Let's assume you will be doing PAYE, and that your salary will be 56k a year (I am rounding up to average the total for each of the three years). After you poverty level deduction and say, 10% of your income to a pre-tax retirement account, you monthly payment will be about $320 a month. Your monthly interest will be about $23,400, so you will have about $19,575 dollars in unpaid interest per year.
When you leave residency, you will have a principal of 334.k with $58,725 in unpaid interest. Now, let's assume you will work in a medium-tax state, say Virginia. Let's say you max out the 18k in your tax-deferred retirement plan, so your monthly take home pay will be 12k a month. If you pay 5k a month (living off 7k a month, or 84k a year post-tax), it will take you 8 years and 9 months ($525k paid, NPV is 445k). If the new REPAYE programs pans out, and interest is capped at no more than 50%, you would be looking at a repayment period of 7 years and 11 months ($475k paid, NPV of 407k). You can obviously pay more than 5k--particularly as your income rises--to pay off your loans faster.
Who knows what will happen to PSLF, especially for physicians, but the above numbers are meant to illustrate that you will not be paying your loans off forever. Yes the total amount paid will be a lot, but so is the amount you borrowed. While it would be great if we all qualified for PSLF, it is prudent to anticipate that the loop-hole will be closed, particularly for PP physicians.
