Please welcome Marina Modlin, wills and trusts attorney and author of The Independence Track — a resource for freelance attorneys. Today, Marina is sharing her student loan story and what she’s learned about Income Based Repayment (IBR). 

Welcome, Marina!

So, the other day I called the people who are servicing my consolidated federal law school loans, with a vague hope of finding out the terms of IBR, or Income Based Repayment, in which I am enrolled.

Now, I’m not usually the kind of person to be enrolled in something that I don’t understand — but with these loans, I felt like I had no choice: I couldn’t afford a regular payment, yet I couldn’t find any coherent documentation online, and the servicing company back at the time when I first enrolled was not able to explain it to me (they have since gone out of business. Can you even imagine what it’d take to go out of business in this industry?!) [Read more…]