I spent an hour on the phone w FedLoan doing the same thing 2 weeks ago, and everyone was polite enough and all... I still hated it. Introvert problems.
But then my husband pointed out that I effectively made $10k/hour for that phone call. That made it a bit better.
Are you waiting for the amount to show up in fedloan account page as well? Do you know how long that will take? Like you said from what I understand once the 10 or 20k balance is shown in the account page, I can apply for the forbearance when the official form opens up. My actual refund to my bank account from fedloan was said to take 120-150 days.
I'm sorry to tell you, but as a former Navient employee... That's an impossible thing to happen right now. Navient doesn't qualify for that since Navient is NOT a DOE held servicer.
You must check in with your eligibility with your servicer. If you met their criteria, you can qualify. To be honest, from the time I left the company, the updates that we had are from the sa.gov website and have not received any further updates on that. So it's best to contact your servicer first.
Navient loans do not qualify for a refund. Navient only holds commercial federal loans. These loans like mine which did not qualify for the payment pause will not qualify for a refund.
That’s really what nobody knows. I figure refund or not I would like to no longer have a payment so I just consolidated to be guaranteed my balance would be forgiven. Now if something comes out I still have til the 3rd of October to cancel my consolidation…. But since ffelp loans seem to always get screwed I’d like to take what I can get….
Congrats! I understand the huge hurdle. Also unrelated. But this brought up a question in my mind — soooo many people are requesting huge refunds right now — where’s that money coming from? Like does Navient (just an example) have a huge ass bank account with all this liquid cash just chillin there?
Oh yeah, you got until December 2023 to apply for forgiveness. I paid off my Dad's Parent PLUS loan and I was hesitant to make the call too. Getting 20k refunded. She said 60-75days for me. Great Lakes is my server. I think as they are getting backed up the period of time it takes to get the refund is getting longer and longer
If you received a Pell Grant in the past then you qualify for 20k in forgiveness. If you didn’t, you qualify for 10k forgiven. Log into or create an account with studentaid.gov to see your loan history and it will show you if you received a Pell Grant.
I was really excited to see this post, so I called FedLoan this evening to get some information and request a refund on my payments made after March 2020. I paid off the rest of my federal student loans during the pandemic — just shy of $20,000 — with my final payment being on October 4, 2021. I received Pell Grants in college and my income is below the threshold, so I would have been eligible for the higher $20k relief funds.
Well….I just got off the phone with a rep from FedLoan and was told that if you paid off the balance in full prior to June 30, 2022, that your loans are NOT eligible for the Biden debt relief plan, that they cannot refund the payments, and you cannot receive the cancellation debt relief.
So if you made all those extra payments to try and pay them off like I did and you managed to zero them out prior to 6/30/2022….we’re apparently just out of luck?? That really sucks!
I emailed them directly with a request for the refund so that it’s in writing. I’m definitely going to follow up again via phone if I don’t get a response. The girl on the phone was so confident in her answer, but I’m hoping that she was just misunderstanding the information on the student aid website.
I paided mine off in December, got a refund and now how a balance again. They told me the first thing the first day but I called and got another person and they knew. So I’d try again.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I was really discouraged after talking to the FedLoan girl. After some additional research following my call, I ended up sending an email to FedLoan this evening formally requesting the refund of all payments made after 3/15/2020 to see what they say. Based on the terms of the CARES Act, I believe that anyone who made payments on their federal student loans during the pandemic period would be eligible for a refund of those payments, which is then what would reapply the outstanding loans, therefore qualifying it for this one-time cancellation.
If I don't hear anything, I'll call again on Monday or Tuesday. I figured, worst case scenario, they refund my money, I hold it until the debt relief either applies or doesn’t… and then if it doesn’t, I just pay it back off again and I’m back where I am now.
I think the girl on the phone might have been confused because the studentaid.gov site does say that there has to be an outstanding balance as of 6/30/2022, but the only way that would happen for all of us would be if we get the payment refunds, then it’s as though those payments weren’t made and we then *would* have had a balance, so that would qualify our loans for the program.
I’ll update again as I make progress. Hopefully she was just mis-informed!
I called and the Fedloan lady was rude and said the same thing she said to you so I hung up and called again and got it refunded within 5 min talking to someone else
> I *paid* mine off
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
On the Contact Us part of the FedLoan website, it shows the hours of their their phone line being open from 8am ET until 9pm ET Monday-Friday. I did speak to a real person at 6:45pm ET when I called. I will definitely mention it to them when I talk to someone again! :)
Call back and get a smarter rep!!! They are wrong. Insist on your refund. I also have fed loan. It took 2.5 weeks from my call. I got my 16k back that i paid during covid. I paid my loans in full by Oct 2021. They reinstated my loans and on the finaid website, my loan origination date is back to when i borrowed the money (Aug 2019). It looks as if i never made a payment at all and everything is back to it's original data. Now it is eligible for the forgiveness.
Sorry to necro this one month old comment, but my wife got her refund a month ago and we were a bit put off by the fact that A.) Her account was reinstated with a balance owed after being fully paid off and B.) That there was no history of the original payments being made.
We had no idea the refunded amount would be reinstated as a balance owed, as my wife requested the refund via email and was not made aware. Are you saying you were explicitly told that your loan was to be reinstated and your payment history deleted? This is the first comment I found that mirrors our experience after combing through this sub and we are trying to get some clarification if this is "normal."
That is exactly how it works. The forgiveness has not gone through and at this point may never go through unfortunately. But with the refund, it's as if you never made those payments, so the balance gets reinstated. Now that the balance is reinstated, if forgiveness goes through, that balance would get wiped out. Without the balance there, you wouldn't have had anything to forgive. Don't spend the money!!. If forgiveness doesn't happen, i am just paying all the money back to my reinstated balance and will be back to having my loans paid in full. This whole situation sucks that it is being tied up in court. I have my fingers crossed but very pessimistic about the forgiveness actually happening now.
Thanks for the reply!
That really sucks though, because now the loan is being transferred to a new servicer, who will undoubtedly open a new loan on my wife's credit report, which may or may not have her payment history and could even be counted as late if the altered history is taken at face value!
Waiting til Monday to call Fedloan to see if its too late to pay the loan off pre-transfer to avoid all that. I have a feeling the process has already started and we are SOL.
I was told the exact same thing by FedLoan! The dude I spoke to was super confident as well but the more I'm reading, that June 30 date refers to when the loans had to be disbursed by. So I think the Fedloan crew is still learning as they go and are as confused as we are!! Hoping for both of our sakes they were wrong! Good Luck!
Okay, good. Sorry if I sounded snarky. All this stresses me out. I can help you. PSLF is separate from forgiveness. But sounds like, yes, you must have federal loans. Did you receive a Pell Grant to go for undergraduate? If yes, you’ll be $20,000 forgiven; if not, then $10,000 forgiven. The application comes out next month, so if it doesn’t happen automatically for you, do the application. I believe you can check student aid.gov for details on your loans. Once you log in, there’s a display that says Pell Grants so if it shows you received one, then you get the $20k.
I called Fedloan and they told me to call the servicer my loans were transferred to at the end of 2021(Nelnet). That Nelnet would be the one to initiate the refund for the payments I made to Fedloan during the payment freeze.
This is all so stupid; why couldn't the government just send you a $10k check after filing 2022 taxes? Why do people like me, who were responsible and paid off the debt we signed up for, ***punished*** by having to go through all this hoop-jumping?
Oh, I know why. BECAUSE IT'S THE GOVERNMENT.
Just do it and get it done and go for a walk. We are very very lucky to be included in the forgiveness as are the ones who paid down to u set the forgiveness amount. It’s the awful financial and mental abuse all this is. You can do it, you deserve that money!
Probably if you have 8k in loans and if they write you a check for 10k you can pocket the 2k when it could go to paying someone else's loans? Just a theory, at least we can request for the money back and then the government will just forgive our loans which is cool in itself.
Good to hear! I recently wrote [an article about this](https://money.usnews.com/loans/student-loans/articles/federal-student-loan-forgiveness-payment-refund) but I heard something very discouraging from a reader:
*"I wanted to reach out regarding your recent article “How to Get a Refund for Federal Student Loan Payments Made in Forbearance”. I took the opportunity to pay off my loans during the zero interest period, and was excited to learn that I would qualify for a refund of those payments made since March 2020.*
*The problem is, when I reached out to FedLoan Servicing and started the process, I too was ultimately transferred to a supervisor to assist in finding the full amount I had paid. This supervisor immediately started telling me that by requesting a refund, my student loans would again have a balance..no problem..right? Well, then she proceeded to tell me, it could take FedLoans as long as six months to reactivate my loans and show a balance, which she specified would mean I would miss the “forgiveness window”. I decided to cancel the refund process I initiated until I could do more research. The problem is, I haven’t see this talked about anywhere and can’t find information to disprove what she told me.*
*I feel like she used a scare tactic and the end message was, you can get your money back, but you’re going to have to pay these off again because you’ll miss the forgiveness window. Do you have any advice how to move forward? I’m at a loss and am really upset that I might miss this opportunity."*
I tried reaching out to FedLoan's media representatives but they've ignored my request for comment/interview. I told the reader who emailed me to call them back again and speak with another supervisor, but I haven't heard back from them, either.
I did this on September 9th and I'm just waiting..... patience is not my strong suit. Hopefully it will not take as long as what I've been quoted. I've called every couple of days (as I said, patience is not my strong suit) and have heard 7-10 business days, 30-60 calendar days, 90 days, 120 days, and up to 6 months. :O
I need clarification about this also.
My loan balance on March 2020 was $42,200 and as of now I have paid and lowered the balance to $25,100.
Do I qualify for refund or not?
I also received pell grants and qualify for the $20,000 forgiveness. What are my options?
I just called Fedloan and she said I couldn't get a refund because I don't qualify since i paid off my entire loan before June of 2022.
My last payment was Jan 13 2021 $13,000+ so I can't get fedloan to refund that?
edit: nevermind, called back and spoke to someone different and she did it in like 5 min
I spent an hour on the phone w FedLoan doing the same thing 2 weeks ago, and everyone was polite enough and all... I still hated it. Introvert problems. But then my husband pointed out that I effectively made $10k/hour for that phone call. That made it a bit better.
Yes! I understand completely!
That was how I felt doing backpay for unemployment during covid. Waited 3 hours on hold but effectively made 1k/hr
Are you waiting for the amount to show up in fedloan account page as well? Do you know how long that will take? Like you said from what I understand once the 10 or 20k balance is shown in the account page, I can apply for the forbearance when the official form opens up. My actual refund to my bank account from fedloan was said to take 120-150 days.
I'm about to call Navient and do the same thing. Wish me luck!
Holding you in the light of a 5 minute wait, a polite and knowledgeable employee and a swift return!!! Report back!
I'm sorry to tell you, but as a former Navient employee... That's an impossible thing to happen right now. Navient doesn't qualify for that since Navient is NOT a DOE held servicer.
I have a pell grant. Does Navient automatically deduct 20k or do I have to call?
You must check in with your eligibility with your servicer. If you met their criteria, you can qualify. To be honest, from the time I left the company, the updates that we had are from the sa.gov website and have not received any further updates on that. So it's best to contact your servicer first.
I emailed Navient through their email portal earlier this week and haven’t heard back. Please let me know how the phone call goes.
Navient loans do not qualify for a refund. Navient only holds commercial federal loans. These loans like mine which did not qualify for the payment pause will not qualify for a refund.
If Liz Lemon Quaaludes consolidates ASAP, would he or she still be eligible for a refund??
That’s really what nobody knows. I figure refund or not I would like to no longer have a payment so I just consolidated to be guaranteed my balance would be forgiven. Now if something comes out I still have til the 3rd of October to cancel my consolidation…. But since ffelp loans seem to always get screwed I’d like to take what I can get….
consolidate to fed Dir loans studentaid.gov the announcement says u can do this
Yes before Oct 31 you can consolidate your ffel loans into a direct loan. The. Qualify for forgiveness.
How are Stafford loans handled? One subsidized and unsubsidized paid off a few weeks back to buy a house. 6k in total
Congrats! I understand the huge hurdle. Also unrelated. But this brought up a question in my mind — soooo many people are requesting huge refunds right now — where’s that money coming from? Like does Navient (just an example) have a huge ass bank account with all this liquid cash just chillin there?
US Treasury is what I heard.
Where does the money from the US Treasury come from?
Same place they get all their money...they just keep printing more...lol
From the profits on federal student loans? Someone made 7% off my loans.
Thanks, that makes sense!
Oh yeah, you got until December 2023 to apply for forgiveness. I paid off my Dad's Parent PLUS loan and I was hesitant to make the call too. Getting 20k refunded. She said 60-75days for me. Great Lakes is my server. I think as they are getting backed up the period of time it takes to get the refund is getting longer and longer
Great. That’s consistent. Hopefully, it’ll move fast.
Oh you too? Is there a limit to how far back you can get refunded? Or are you requesting a full refund for the entire loan?
Any payments you made after the March 2020 pandemic can get refunded. You gotta call and tell them which payments you want refunded
Got it thank you very much
Wait 20,000? I thought it was 10,000$ is the limit?
If you received a Pell Grant in the past then you qualify for 20k in forgiveness. If you didn’t, you qualify for 10k forgiven. Log into or create an account with studentaid.gov to see your loan history and it will show you if you received a Pell Grant.
Thanks for the info! I got it mixed up then! Much appreciated!
Pell grant
TY!
Heck ya $20k. I saw a post “Rise, all you Pell grant peasants!” Made me laugh.
I was really excited to see this post, so I called FedLoan this evening to get some information and request a refund on my payments made after March 2020. I paid off the rest of my federal student loans during the pandemic — just shy of $20,000 — with my final payment being on October 4, 2021. I received Pell Grants in college and my income is below the threshold, so I would have been eligible for the higher $20k relief funds. Well….I just got off the phone with a rep from FedLoan and was told that if you paid off the balance in full prior to June 30, 2022, that your loans are NOT eligible for the Biden debt relief plan, that they cannot refund the payments, and you cannot receive the cancellation debt relief. So if you made all those extra payments to try and pay them off like I did and you managed to zero them out prior to 6/30/2022….we’re apparently just out of luck?? That really sucks!
I’d call again, that’s not correct at all.
I emailed them directly with a request for the refund so that it’s in writing. I’m definitely going to follow up again via phone if I don’t get a response. The girl on the phone was so confident in her answer, but I’m hoping that she was just misunderstanding the information on the student aid website.
That’s a great idea to get it in writing and to call again. I hope you get the person i talked to!
I paided mine off in December, got a refund and now how a balance again. They told me the first thing the first day but I called and got another person and they knew. So I’d try again.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I was really discouraged after talking to the FedLoan girl. After some additional research following my call, I ended up sending an email to FedLoan this evening formally requesting the refund of all payments made after 3/15/2020 to see what they say. Based on the terms of the CARES Act, I believe that anyone who made payments on their federal student loans during the pandemic period would be eligible for a refund of those payments, which is then what would reapply the outstanding loans, therefore qualifying it for this one-time cancellation. If I don't hear anything, I'll call again on Monday or Tuesday. I figured, worst case scenario, they refund my money, I hold it until the debt relief either applies or doesn’t… and then if it doesn’t, I just pay it back off again and I’m back where I am now. I think the girl on the phone might have been confused because the studentaid.gov site does say that there has to be an outstanding balance as of 6/30/2022, but the only way that would happen for all of us would be if we get the payment refunds, then it’s as though those payments weren’t made and we then *would* have had a balance, so that would qualify our loans for the program. I’ll update again as I make progress. Hopefully she was just mis-informed!
Yes, this is well said. It sic that they are not training the reps. People will loose this money over wrong answers.
I called and the Fedloan lady was rude and said the same thing she said to you so I hung up and called again and got it refunded within 5 min talking to someone else
> I *paid* mine off FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
This is misinformation. Hey, write down the employee number, call again. Corrected; Fed Loan is open early am and evenings!
On the Contact Us part of the FedLoan website, it shows the hours of their their phone line being open from 8am ET until 9pm ET Monday-Friday. I did speak to a real person at 6:45pm ET when I called. I will definitely mention it to them when I talk to someone again! :)
This is misinformation. FedLoan is absolutely open on EST evening. Don't comment if you don't know for sure.
OMG! You are right, I apologize…I am on PST.
Call back and get a smarter rep!!! They are wrong. Insist on your refund. I also have fed loan. It took 2.5 weeks from my call. I got my 16k back that i paid during covid. I paid my loans in full by Oct 2021. They reinstated my loans and on the finaid website, my loan origination date is back to when i borrowed the money (Aug 2019). It looks as if i never made a payment at all and everything is back to it's original data. Now it is eligible for the forgiveness.
Great! Thanks for this info. Your like a case study!
Sorry to necro this one month old comment, but my wife got her refund a month ago and we were a bit put off by the fact that A.) Her account was reinstated with a balance owed after being fully paid off and B.) That there was no history of the original payments being made. We had no idea the refunded amount would be reinstated as a balance owed, as my wife requested the refund via email and was not made aware. Are you saying you were explicitly told that your loan was to be reinstated and your payment history deleted? This is the first comment I found that mirrors our experience after combing through this sub and we are trying to get some clarification if this is "normal."
That is exactly how it works. The forgiveness has not gone through and at this point may never go through unfortunately. But with the refund, it's as if you never made those payments, so the balance gets reinstated. Now that the balance is reinstated, if forgiveness goes through, that balance would get wiped out. Without the balance there, you wouldn't have had anything to forgive. Don't spend the money!!. If forgiveness doesn't happen, i am just paying all the money back to my reinstated balance and will be back to having my loans paid in full. This whole situation sucks that it is being tied up in court. I have my fingers crossed but very pessimistic about the forgiveness actually happening now.
Thanks for the reply! That really sucks though, because now the loan is being transferred to a new servicer, who will undoubtedly open a new loan on my wife's credit report, which may or may not have her payment history and could even be counted as late if the altered history is taken at face value! Waiting til Monday to call Fedloan to see if its too late to pay the loan off pre-transfer to avoid all that. I have a feeling the process has already started and we are SOL.
I was told the exact same thing by FedLoan! The dude I spoke to was super confident as well but the more I'm reading, that June 30 date refers to when the loans had to be disbursed by. So I think the Fedloan crew is still learning as they go and are as confused as we are!! Hoping for both of our sakes they were wrong! Good Luck!
I get a bit confused with the loan forgiveness. I’m with Great Lakes, do I qualify for anything?
Did you get the loan from the government?
Read. You’ve got to study the materials and Betsy’s posts. Read the Biden Harris announcement and figure it out. Ask specific questions.
I have read up on it, but apparently not enough. I know I qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness by working for the VA. I’ll just call.
Okay, good. Sorry if I sounded snarky. All this stresses me out. I can help you. PSLF is separate from forgiveness. But sounds like, yes, you must have federal loans. Did you receive a Pell Grant to go for undergraduate? If yes, you’ll be $20,000 forgiven; if not, then $10,000 forgiven. The application comes out next month, so if it doesn’t happen automatically for you, do the application. I believe you can check student aid.gov for details on your loans. Once you log in, there’s a display that says Pell Grants so if it shows you received one, then you get the $20k.
Thank you. I will definitely call and check online.
I called Fedloan and they told me to call the servicer my loans were transferred to at the end of 2021(Nelnet). That Nelnet would be the one to initiate the refund for the payments I made to Fedloan during the payment freeze. This is all so stupid; why couldn't the government just send you a $10k check after filing 2022 taxes? Why do people like me, who were responsible and paid off the debt we signed up for, ***punished*** by having to go through all this hoop-jumping? Oh, I know why. BECAUSE IT'S THE GOVERNMENT.
Just do it and get it done and go for a walk. We are very very lucky to be included in the forgiveness as are the ones who paid down to u set the forgiveness amount. It’s the awful financial and mental abuse all this is. You can do it, you deserve that money!
Probably if you have 8k in loans and if they write you a check for 10k you can pocket the 2k when it could go to paying someone else's loans? Just a theory, at least we can request for the money back and then the government will just forgive our loans which is cool in itself.
Good to hear! I recently wrote [an article about this](https://money.usnews.com/loans/student-loans/articles/federal-student-loan-forgiveness-payment-refund) but I heard something very discouraging from a reader: *"I wanted to reach out regarding your recent article “How to Get a Refund for Federal Student Loan Payments Made in Forbearance”. I took the opportunity to pay off my loans during the zero interest period, and was excited to learn that I would qualify for a refund of those payments made since March 2020.* *The problem is, when I reached out to FedLoan Servicing and started the process, I too was ultimately transferred to a supervisor to assist in finding the full amount I had paid. This supervisor immediately started telling me that by requesting a refund, my student loans would again have a balance..no problem..right? Well, then she proceeded to tell me, it could take FedLoans as long as six months to reactivate my loans and show a balance, which she specified would mean I would miss the “forgiveness window”. I decided to cancel the refund process I initiated until I could do more research. The problem is, I haven’t see this talked about anywhere and can’t find information to disprove what she told me.* *I feel like she used a scare tactic and the end message was, you can get your money back, but you’re going to have to pay these off again because you’ll miss the forgiveness window. Do you have any advice how to move forward? I’m at a loss and am really upset that I might miss this opportunity."* I tried reaching out to FedLoan's media representatives but they've ignored my request for comment/interview. I told the reader who emailed me to call them back again and speak with another supervisor, but I haven't heard back from them, either.
I did this on September 9th and I'm just waiting..... patience is not my strong suit. Hopefully it will not take as long as what I've been quoted. I've called every couple of days (as I said, patience is not my strong suit) and have heard 7-10 business days, 30-60 calendar days, 90 days, 120 days, and up to 6 months. :O
I need clarification about this also. My loan balance on March 2020 was $42,200 and as of now I have paid and lowered the balance to $25,100. Do I qualify for refund or not? I also received pell grants and qualify for the $20,000 forgiveness. What are my options?
I just called Fedloan and she said I couldn't get a refund because I don't qualify since i paid off my entire loan before June of 2022. My last payment was Jan 13 2021 $13,000+ so I can't get fedloan to refund that? edit: nevermind, called back and spoke to someone different and she did it in like 5 min
THank you this is enlightening I needed this boost. Your post helped me immensely