New America Releases Income-Based Repayment Calculator For Forthcoming Report

Update: New America has released Saftey Net or Windfall? Examining Changes to Income-Based Repayment for Federal Student Loans. The paper can be accessed here.

Next week, the New America Foundation will release a paper examining pending changes to the Income-Based Repayment (IBR) program for federal student loans. Today, we are releasing the calculator we used to develop our findings.

The pending changes to IBR are the result of an Obama administration proposal to change the federal student loan program’s existing Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plan—which caps borrowers’ payments at 15 percent of their incomes and forgives any remaining debt after 25 years of payments—by reducing payments to 10 percent of a borrower’s income and providing loan forgiveness after 20 years of payments. Congress enacted this proposal two months after the President proposed it in his 2010 State of the Union address, but limited it to students who take out their first loans on July 1, 2014 or later. Anxious to deliver those benefits sooner, the Obama administration announced last year that it would instead make the plan available as early as this year—to borrowers who took out their first student loans in 2008 or later and borrowed at least one loan in 2012 or later. The final regulations are still pending.

To date, policymakers and advocates have provided little information about the benefits that the impending changes to IBR will provide to borrowers with different income and debt profiles over their entire repayment terms…

Read the full post on Ed Money Watch.