A Flood of Forgiveness?

Big news this week. Based on the Department of Education’s latest court filing, a large wave of loan forgiveness is expected to be processed by the end of March.

This is for borrowers who became eligible under ICR, IBR, and PAYE — many of whom have been stuck waiting due to the SAVE plan injunction and processing delays. Now that those roadblocks have cleared, the Department can finally push these discharges through with the systems they already had in place.

Here’s the key thing to know: if you became eligible for forgiveness in 2025 but your discharge was delayed into 2026, you won’t owe taxes on it. Under the AFT settlement, the Department agreed to use your eligibility date — not your processing date — as your discharge date. So you’re still covered under the tax-free window.

If you’re on the SAVE plan, this doesn’t apply to you — SAVE was permanently struck down on March 11, and I’ll have more on that soon.

Your action item for the day: whitelist emails from studentaid.gov and ed.gov. That’s how they’ll notify you when your forgiveness goes through. If those emails land in your spam folder, you might not know it happened. You can also set a priority filter so they hit the top of your inbox.

A few other things on my radar this week:

1/ Parent PLUS borrowers— your consolidation deadline is approaching. If you haven’t already consolidated your Parent PLUS Loans into a Direct Consolidation Loan, April 1st is effectively the last day to get your application in and have it processed by the June 30th deadline. After that, you lose access to income-driven repayment going forward.

Without IDR, your only repayment option is the standard 10-year plan — which for most Parent PLUS borrowers means significantly higher monthly payments and no path to forgiveness.

And we’re already seeing processing delays — Aidvantage is the only servicer handling consolidations for all 40+ million borrowers.

Before you consolidate, make sure you understand what your new monthly payment will be, and be careful about consolidating other loans in with your Parent PLUS Loan. You could lose progress toward forgiveness under both PSLF and IDR. We just posted the first video in a new YouTube series walking through all of this:

2/ The GAOreleased a report** showing that the Education Department stopped reviewing servicers for accuracy back in February 2025**— right around the time they cut nearly half their staff. Before those reviews stopped, four out of five servicers were failing the Department’s own accuracy standards. That means right now, there’s no one checking whether the information your servicer gives you is correct. You’re dealing with the most complex consumer loan product in the world. You don’t necessarily need to hire me, but please — make sure you’re getting your information from reliable sources, not just your servicer. Your situation may sound like your neighbor’s, but I promise you it’s not always the case.

3/ Free webinar today at 3 PM Eastern. Multiple state student loan ombudsmen are hosting it. Shout out to Betsy Mayotte from the Institute of Student Loan Advisors — she posted it on Reddit, and it wasn’t even on my radar until today. I’ll be on consults, so I can’t join myself, but I wanted to make sure you had access to it. The more places you’re hearing this information, the better. Sign up here:

https://dfpi-ca.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ButfhRfsQeqVZOu7gDBFaQ#/registration

And as always, if you want to walk through your file and determine whether the issue is eligibility or a record error, you can schedule a consultation here:

https://www.tateesq.com/book-a-call

One of my clients, Greg, sent me a variety pack of Ashton Cigars. I made my way through those over the past week. Not a bad smoke at all — there were definitely some keepers in the collection.

After closing out that pack, I picked up a few Olmécs and some Andalusian Bulls from La Flor Dominicana. The Olmécs are a wonderful Padrón-type smoke. The Andalusian Bulls are absolutely delightful, but you’re definitely committing to a two-hour session.

The latter paired perfectly with watching YT videos on how to install adjustable pavers with ceramic tiles on my patio. I’m adding them to my upstairs patio because the current base is sloped pretty aggressively — I’d like to be able to sit down without needing to stack composite shims underneath everything.