U.S. President Joe Biden is joined by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona (L) as he announces new actions to protect borrowers after the Supreme Court struck down his student loan forgiveness plan in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on June 30, 2023 in Washington, DC.
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Jason Harmon, 54, has $47,000 in student debt he’s been paying off for nearly three decades.
He just got an email from the Education Department that his loans will soon be forgiven.
He’s one of the 800,000 borrowers impacted by the one-time account adjustment for income-driven repayment plans.
Jason Harmon, 54, has been paying off his federal student-loan balance for nearly three decades. That might soon end.
When Insider first spoke to Harmon in 2022, he had been paying off his $47,000 student-debt load for 27 years. After graduating from the University of Arkansas in 1995 with $26,000 in debt, he said he enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan that promised loan forgiveness after 25 years.
That seemed like the best option for him at the time because he said his income wasn’t that high as a journalist. Even when he lost his job during the 2008 recession and struggled to maintain employment since, he said he remained consistent on his student-loan payments. But issues arose when his loans were transferred to a new servicer in 2013 and his payment count was thrown off track.
Jason Harmon, 54, has $47,000 in student debt that could soon be forgiven through a one-time account adjustment.
Jason Harmon
“I was in this bureaucracy nightmare where any question I had didn’t go anywhere — any time I needed help it was a never-ending phone tree where I’m just being transferred from one person to another,” Harmon said last year.
But that nightmare might soon be over. On July 14, President Joe Biden’s Education Department sent an email to Harmon with the subject line: “You’re eligible to have your student loan(s) forgiven!”
“On April 19, 2022, the Biden-Harris Administration announced several changes that will help borrowers get closer to or achieve forgiveness under income-driven repayment (IDR) regardless of whether or not you have ever participated in an IDR plan,” the email said. “With these changes, you are now eligible to have some or all of your student loans forgiven because you have reached the necessary 240- or 300-months’ of payments under IDR.”
The department is referring to its one-time account adjustment for borrowers on income-driven repayment plans, in which the department determined whether borrowers have met payment counts to receive debt relief. But after being in repayment for years longer than he agreed to, Harmon said “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“It just means this great load from the last 30 years of my life is off my shoulders. And that’s really the most important feeling that I’m going to get out of this,” he said. “My wife and I are in a position where things are tight, and that forgiveness isn’t going to change our lives. It’s just going to take another number off the long list of numbers we’re paying on, and I don’t think that’s an unusual situation for Americans right now.”
Harmon’s wife also holds six figures in federal student loans, but she did not receive the same forgiveness email from the Education Department. While Harmon works as a fishing guide in Arkansas, he brings in minimal income — so the relief might not make a huge impact on his financial outlook. However, he said “it’s still long overdue.”
“That forgiveness isn’t unwelcome,” he said. “It’s what I was entitled to when I signed the loan paperwork in 1995. So it really has nothing to do with the current debate about forgiveness. This is something that was guaranteed to me before anyone today even knew what forgiveness was, or even discussed loan forgiveness. And I feel like it was something that should have happened in 2020.”
‘I’ve had nothing but anxiety and stress from this’
Harmon promised his wife that the day his loans are forgiven, he will “roll down our hill and do somersaults because this has been hanging over my head for so long.” After spending years attempting to get an updated payment count from MOHELA, the company that manages his debt, Harmon said he became discouraged when it seemed like he would be stuck in repayment even after reaching the qualifying threshold for relief.
“I’ve had nothing but anxiety and stress from this. I’m not going to believe the government’s letter, I’m going to believe the credit report,” Harmon said. “And when the credit report shows that loan is no longer on there, that’s when I know I’m debt-free on that loan.”
The department’s letter to Harmon said that it will work with his servicer to process his debt relief “over the next several months.” Harmon is part of the 800,000 student-loan borrowers who are set to get that relief — which the department announced earlier in July — and the department said that borrowers who reach the qualifying threshold for relief before August 1 should expect to have their loans discharged before student-loan payments are set to restart again in October.
If a borrower reaches the threshold on or after August 1, they will “likely have to start making payments after the payment pause ends.,” the department said. “But don’t worry—you’ll get a refund for any payments beyond the number you need for forgiveness.”
Harmon is now just waiting to see the loans cleared from his credit report – and finally put three decades of repayment behind him.
“It really affects every thing you try and do to move your life forward,” Harmon said. “You can’t use that money until you discharge that debt. It literally hang around your neck. I’m not discounting the importance of this debt other than psychological, you know, it’s really just going to be a happy moment of a burden lifted, and when I don’t have to deal with it anymore, that’s going to be a great day.”