So whats the solution? How am I suppose to handle the loans after graduating dental school?
If you're in school now, you should automatically be grandfathered into the repayment plans in your master promissory note. When you sign it, the repayment plans are binding. PSLF wasn't defined well for what qualified which is why there are so many issues currently. Find out what qualifies and pay attention in October when it hits for the first time. If you can get pslf in one of the qualifying settings and be grandfathered in, then do it.
If there is a military possibility, that's an option. A friend of mine had her dads school paid for by the military as a career change. Has his own practice now.
Everything else would be consulting the guy who made this thread since he's the expert.
If you can refinance to the private sector for a 2-3% interest rate, you can consider that and throw everything you can at the loans living cheap for a few years until it's manageable and you can be okay, then gradually go up and treat it like a second mortgage on autopay and forget about it.
If you have to be on an income driven, then you can do that and set aside a savings account and an investing account. Contact the poster here for what budget to utilize and the years necessary until the compounding interest is more manageable.
The big thing is mitigating the initial debt amount immediately so it can get paid off while your starting salary accrues. You should also negotiate as high as you possibly can with a senior dentist employer, even citing inflation, school cost projections, everything. If you can work more than 40 hrs per week, that will help. Enrolling in a plan and utilizing it as a safety guard for the min payment if life gets in the way is the best option.....just don't use that as a way to make the minimum payment and just coast when you should be aggressive. That's the problem I've seen....when people aren't even denting loans. It should be the backup safety net while you're chucking everything you can at the loans outside of your budget.
If you have to do a 25 year program, then do it and pay what you can and don't think about it other than autopay.
If tax codes ever change, take advantage, if a company will let you refi at 1-2% then consider it, if you can invest then consider it and let the balance accrue separate from a savings or 401k.
Pay attention to pslf, lending changes, what people who end up completing the 25 year plans way ahead of you do etc. If at the end of these plans you've aggressively paid off and there's literally nothing else to do, so many people ahead of you will have had problems that there will be forced changes most likely. What that is I'm not sure and can't predict that
If I were trying to fix this mess from up top,
-I'd plummet student interest rates to federal reserve levels so you'd essentially be paying as close to principle only
-I'd cap funding to universities to market fluctuation standard deviations of projected starting salary, which would plummet tuition and lead to administrative layoffs nationwide yet still fix the heart of the problem
- I would couple public service and rural jobs to underserved areas with tax deductions on all student loans with a refinance rate on your student loans of the lowest possible amount to incentivize professionals to go to underserved areas. The government would still make money from that while dropping your rate lower than mortgage rate levels.
Those might work. Nobody is currently doing that though, so you've got to go with what you've got.