Please see below for important information on helping Dreamers lower their student loan payments:
As of October 2015, a new repayment plan called REPAYE has been added to the Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plan options, and it's the best of all of the options offered under IDR.
Dreamers will need to fill out this form: https://www.navient.com/assets/loan-customers/documents-and-forms/Income-Driven-Repayment-Plan-Request.pdf, and under Section 2, Question 2, check off the box that says REPAYE.
Section 2, Question 1 recommends that the student loan holder calculate and choose the lowest plan, but Dreamers should request estimates under each plan by calling their loan holder to figure out which works best for them. This may make a difference for Dreamers with children.
Dreamers can fill out the form online. To do so, they can link to their tax information seamlessly by allowing the portal to access their tax statements from the IRS, and then submitting the form. This is a 2 minute process!
By the next day, your student loan holder will confirm that this request was being processed. A couple of days later you'll received my newer, lower repayment amount, that which is locked in for the year and must be recertified annually.
If Dreamers are eligible for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (PSLF), they will need to submit a separate form to make sure their lowered payments count towards forgiveness in a total of 120 payments that do not need to be consecutive.
So, one form recalculates the amount you will pay, while the other form makes sure your recalculated (and hopefully, lower) payments count towards loan forgiveness after 120 payments.
The PSLF has to be filled out by the Dreamer and their employer. You can find out more about PSLF here: https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/sites/default/files/public-service-loan-forgiveness.pdf
This is the actual PSLF form: https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/sites/default/files/public-service-employment-certification-form.pdf
Once both forms are submitted, you're locked in for the year and need to recertify annually.
Please also refer to this article about loan forgiveness available to counseling and admission professionals: http://www.nacacnet.org/learning/communities/Admitted/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=847
Lastly, there is a PSLF payment tracker, that no matter your student loan holder (which changes quite often), qualifying PSLF payments are tracked. This is super useful and can be requested from your loan holder, even if your current loan holder is different from your loan holder, like five years ago, for example.