Don’t let yourself be fooled by phony student loan advice

Tomorrow is April Fools’ Day (How did we get quarter of the way through the year already?!), do you have any great pranks cooked up? It’s also my dad, Shel’s, birthday.

Dad was a great practical joker and loved to fool us on his birthday (“Look outside, is it SNOWING? April Fools!”). He’s also where I got my love of kite flying! Shel was instrumental in getting Navigate up and running, starting our database systems, and helping me talk through the logistics and goals of starting this business. I wanted to bring my passion for helping people to the confusing and daunting world of student loan debt, helping change an unjust system by advocating for the hard-working people of the health care community.

A big part of the work we do is help people not be “fooled” by the system or bad information. Even though the student loan industry has come a long way in a relatively short period of time (PSLF began in 2007, it’s still less than 20 years old!), it still has a poor track record due to the lack of information, arcane instructions, scant customer service advice. That’s probably why there are so many entities out there (good and bad) who are peddling student loan advice. I probably get a couple of robocalls a week offering “Obama-forgiveness” (not a thing, I assure you) .

So how do you sort out the good from the bad? A good place you can start is to follow the money:

who’s paying for this so-called “advice?” Remember the old wisdom: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.” A lot of free media make their money by publishing pay-to-play articles from outside sources, who usually want you to pay for their product. And if something sounds too good to be true (like “Obama-forgiveness”), it probably is.

Don’t get fooled into taking phony advice. The last thing we want is to see someone’s well-thought-out plan for the student debt go off-target because of bad, un-impartial advice. So we save the practical jokes for April Fools’ and stick to helping keep your student loans on target.