For many students, going to college for a higher education also means racking up debt. There's a new program to help borrowers.
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00:00 $1.7 trillion. That's how much Americans owe collectively when it comes to student loan debt.
00:06 There is new help out there though for millions of borrowers. I graduated from law school in 1999
00:12 and I've been paying those loans back since then. Angelica Colwell tells me her law school loans
00:18 were originally around $70,000. She's already paid about $60,000 but still owes just as much.
00:25 Because of the way the interest goes, I haven't gotten anywhere. It's the one debt that I could
00:30 never, I've never been able to catch up on. But that could soon change for Colwell. She's
00:35 one of the millions of student loan borrowers that could benefit from the Biden administration's new
00:40 program called SAVE or Saving on a Valuable Education. Someone going on SAVE will never
00:46 have an increasing interest balance due to having a low payment and that's critical because we've
00:52 had folks that have had enormous increases in their balances to where they might have started
00:57 with $30,000. They're easily a hundred or higher now. I wanted to learn more about how the loan
01:02 payback program works so I spoke with Chrissy Arkovich who specializes in student loan work.
01:07 She says the SAVE program is not forgiving debt completely but it's income based and it will keep
01:12 interest from accumulating. Anyone who's making $30,000 and single under SAVE would arguably have
01:18 a zero payment and so there'll be a lot of folks with a zero to maybe a hundred dollar payment. The
01:23 vast majority of people that used to be on repay before COVID hit, basically they're going to
01:28 automatically transfer to SAVE and SAVE will probably be about a third of what their former
01:34 payment used to be and that's significant right now. Because of this, Colwell says she'll finally
01:39 be able to put a dent into her student loans. I think my savings are going to be around $61,000.
01:45 Meanwhile, Arkovich says the SAVE program's qualifications are unlike anything we've had
01:50 previously. You are married and you file a joint tax return, you can file a separate return come
01:55 January and have your payment based solely on your income and that's significant. People with
02:01 direct subsidized, unsubsidized and consolidated loans could qualify for SAVE. As for Colwell,
02:07 she says she's waited more than 20 years for something like this. At the end of the day,
02:12 I feel like I'm getting out of it what I was hoping to get, which is just
02:16 fair repayment of money that I borrowed. Reporting in Tampa, I'm Lydia Vasquez.