KAITLIN HENNESSY: Hello, everyone,
and welcome to "Student Loan Repayment and SALT."
My name is Kaitlin Hennessy.
I'm the Program Coordinator at WSU Global Connections.
Presenting tonight is Michell Jaworski.
She is from the Office of the Dean of Students.
Throughout the evening, please use the chat box
to ask questions and comment on the presentation.
All questions will be addressed at the end of the presentation
during the Q and A, however you can put them in there
at any point.
Also, please use a chat box to let us
know if you have any technical difficulties.
Myself or Olivia-- she's another event moderator in the chat
box--
will do our best to help you.
All right everybody, thank you so much for coming,
and I'm going to turn it over to Michell.
MICHELL JAWORSKI: Good evening everyone
are my name is Michell Jaworski, as Kaitlin said.
And I work in the Office of the Dean of Students
here at Washington State University.
And we service all students on the Pullman campus,
as well as students in global campus.
So if you every have any questions
or need help with anything, that's
what we're here for, to help students out.
One of the things that we offer as part of that help
is providing access to the SALT website,
which is what we're going to talk
a little bit about tonight.
I'll walk you through the SALT website and the information
that SALT provides through their website.
I will preface this all by saying that I am absolutely not
a financial expert, by any means.
I am here to talk about the SALT website and the things
that you can learn from the SALT website.
And the information that's provided through the SALT
website, including help with student loan repayment
and understanding the repayment process, and other things that
can be helpful to students who are in that process--
while you're in school, and when you finish school and you
begin the repayment.
But I am not a specific expert on any topic
within the arena of SALT.
So just to get started, here's a brief introduction
about SALT. It is a free educational program that
helps students while you're in school, as you're planning
for school, and also once you leave school to help provide
some financial literacy education,
which is very useful throughout your entire lifetime.
This program was created by the American Student Assistance
Association.
And they used to be a lender of student loans.
And now that they're no longer in that business,
they've looked at ways to help students be better financially
able to support themselves through school,
and to then pay back their loans when that time comes.
They are a nonprofit organization.
They have over 50 years of experience
helping students with financial decisions,
and paying back for their education.
So they are a great organization,
and their goal is to help students
to be able to pay for school.
So we're just going to jump in and talk
a little bit about the SALT website and the experience.
We as a university, at Washington State University,
pay for our students to be able to have access
to SALT. So as a WSU student, you can sign up for an account
through the Saltmoney.org website.
So just a quick show of hands for our few folks
that are here-- how many of you know about SALT
or have heard of SALT before?
And I believe you can use the hand-raising function
to indicate, or you're welcome to just type it
in the chat box.
So it looks like, Olivia.
Anyone else heard of SALT, or are aware of SALT
and what it is?
OK.
So that gives me an idea of what we can cover here
during our time today.
So we're going to look very exclusively at the website.
We'll walk through the different pieces of it.
And if there's any specific section
you'd like to come back to or want
to focus on a little bit more, just let
us know, so we can go back to that.
We'll actually go into the website itself at one point.
And Kaitlin has been kind enough to let us use her login,
so we'll walk through some of the elements of the website
more specifically.
So if there's anything you see and you want to see more of,
let us know and we'll be able to come back
to that at some point.
So the thing you see in front of you right now
is the initial page where you go to log in.
Saltmoney.org/wsu is the login for Washington State
University.
You can use your WSU email address,
or any other email address you want,
but you do want to make sure that you associate yourself
with Washington State University--
that allows you to then have access to the website.
This website is free for you to access for your time
here as a student, and after you graduate.
This is something you're going to have access to
for the rest of your life, if you would like to.
And there are resources on there that are available for students
even after they've completed school.
So the first thing you're going to see
is the login page, or the signup page.
So you want to go in and click the "signup" link.
And then create your account, if you've never done it before.
You're going to enter a little bit of information
about yourself--
you can see here in front of you,
they're going to ask you to select and sign up.
Fill in your information, graduation year,
all of those things, and then they're
going to bring you to this next part, which
is where they're going to look at setting up your goals.
So they recently updated their website,
and they've created what they call their dashboard now
for helping you reach your goals.
So first, we need to know what those are.
So they're going to ask you to rank these four main topics--
Manage Money, Find A Job, Repay Student Debt,
Plan For School Cost.
So wherever you are in your life,
you can adjust these goals to meet
where you are in your life.
So if you're in school and want to start
thinking about how to pay for school,
maybe planning cost is your highest.
Or, I know Olivia is graduating soon, so maybe for her finding
a job might be number one.
Repaying student debt might be number two,
or maybe the other way around-- repaying debt
is more important.
So you rank those goals, and then they
use that to help design the website
and to focus the information on the website toward what
your goals are.
And they'll give you information about those goals,
and they'll create a to-do list of things that might
fit within what that goal is.
So as you're thinking about where you are,
the SALT website can help you focus on what
those goals are going to be.
So if you say manage money is your most important,
they're going to ask you some additional questions
about your financial situation so that they can know again
how to target some of that information towards what's
going to be most helpful to you.
They're going to ask about finding a job.
What about finding a job is important?
What are the things that you want help with?
What kind of job are you looking for?
And you can see they offer a number of different options.
Are you looking for part-time, full-time, seasonal employment?
So it covers an array of different topics
within the Find A Job.
Then there's Repay Student Debt.
So, what is it that you're looking
for within repaying that debt?
And how can you get more information on that?
And then information about planning your school costs.
So, how can you be prepared for paying
for school in the future?
This is also a great tool when and if you maybe have children,
or family members in your life who
are looking for some additional money for school.
You could use some of the information
under this one to see how you can help them pay for school.
Because there is a really great scholarship search
engine in SALT, which hopefully we'll hit on at some point
through here in a few minutes.
So once you've set your goals, and you've
answered those questions to give them some more information,
then they're going to create that dashboard for you.
And that's going to go through and give the information
about what your goals are your things you want to do.
And so it creates a to-do list based on your goals.
So in this case, this person's top goal
had to do with their debt management
and being able to pay back their debt.
So managing their money was their top goal
and that was the thing they're trying to help with.
And so the first to-do list is to kind of organize your debt.
Know what you owe, so that you can then figure out
how to pay down that debt.
And underneath that, you can see here some other articles
and tools and things like that that they recommend
to add to that to-do list to help you with debt management,
if that's what you're trying to do.
You can also see on the side, they have the list--
there's profile information on the right-hand side.
There's also some information about--
if you wanted to change your goals at any time,
you can do that.
You can complete more information on your profile.
There's also information about the SALT courses.
And the courses are really helpful for--
so the "My Salt," if you ever wanted to change your goals,
it shows you there how you can do that.
Then, like I said, you can add additional content
to your to-do lists when you find some other tools
or information that you think could be helpful to you
as you're trying to get through that particular goal.
And once you've hit that goal, then you
might want to change to something else
and readjust your list, so you can
go back and change those goals and focus on a different topic.
If you really wanted to dig deep on some specific topics
about money management, about learning
about financial literacy, the "Salt Courses"
are where you can go to do that.
And you can see there on the right-hand side are
the list of the SALT courses.
And those are really--
they're all online, they're self-directed.
You can get a certificate of completion
for them, just to show to someone
or to hang on your wall.
And those courses are going to dig down deeper
into specific topics.
As you can see, some of the list of topics that they are--
Employment, Internships and Careers,
Money Management-- all of those different things
that you can dig a little deeper into
and take those online courses.
They're interactive.
They're going to get into, like I said,
a number of different topics.
There are some organizations on our campus
that actually have our students complete this
as part of their process.
They are offered in English and in Spanish,
so you could do the courses in either language that's
most useful for you.
And there is an online live chat.
And member support, just specifically for the courses.
And so if you ran into any issues or problems
with utilizing the SALT courses, you
could certainly reach out to the folks at SALT for help
with that.
The next one is, looking at the debt organizer.
And this one's going to be important for when you're
thinking about managing your money,
repaying your student loans, or even if you're
looking at planning for paying for additional time in school.
If you're going back for another degree--
or, say, you're graduating and planning
to go to graduate school--
there's information here about paying for graduate school,
as well as for your undergraduate degree.
And the difference is that you need
to know the other things you need to think about when you're
planning for graduate school.
So the debt organizer is going to be a really great place
to kind of start and get in there
and really go through that.
So they have this--
it's called "Know What You Owe."
And so you can go in and add information.
You can upload information from the National Direct Loan
Servicing Center.
The NLDS will upload your information
about any federal loans that you have.
So you can put that information in here.
You can also add your other personal debt.
So if you have a car payment, if you're paying on a mortgage.
You have credit card debt--
you're paying off-- any other items that you want.
You can use this to put all of that information in there
to see what you owe, and it'll help you
with a plan to be able to pay that debt off in a way that's
going to work for you.
It'll also help you when you're looking at your student loans,
when you're thinking about which repayment plan
option to choose.
And there are a number to choose from.
So really, using this "Know What You Owe" and the repayment
navigator will really help you as you're
trying to figure out how to do that.
So the "Loan Repayment Navigator"
is the next one that you can see here.
And like I said, this is a really helpful tool
for students when you have student loans.
And I know that was one of the main topics
for this particular conversation today-- was
to really get into the "Load Repayment Navigator."
And student loan debt is a very common debt for people to have.
And there are a number of ways to be able to pay that back.
And so the repayment navigator is there
to help you figure out how to make sure
that you're making the best choice for yourself.
When you finish school-- whenever
you separate from a university, you
have a six-month grace period before you
have to start paying your loans back.
During that time frame, it's probably a good idea for you
to start thinking about, how am I going to pay those back?
And, what repayment plan am I going to be on in order
to be able to do that?
And the repayment navigator is a place
where you can go and learn about what
those different plans are--
the costs, what the different payments might be,
and how those are going to fit into your budget.
So you would go to the repayment navigator.
They're going to ask you some questions to gather information
about your loans.
And you can see what some of those questions are.
It's going to help you.
If you wanted to get your federal student loan
data downloaded directly from the federal database,
they can do that.
Or if you have any private loans,
or you just don't want to connect with the database.
You can just input the loan information yourself,
if you have that information available to you,
which you should.
It's going to tell you, here's how much you owe.
Here's how much payment you may have to pay.
Is that something you could do, or do you
want to look at some of these other options for loan
repayment?
And it gives you links for, what are those different options
that you can explore, as you're thinking
about what type of loan repayment plan you want to do?
It's going to give you more information
about the different types of payments,
because there are several different types of payments.
Some are based on your income.
Some are based on just sort of a standard amount,
based on time frame.
They all have different time frames.
They have different basics about what
are the requirements for that particular loan.
And, how are you eligible for it?
How does the grace period work?
If you chose this option, how much
would you pay over the lifetime of that loan?
Because all the loans are going to gather interest.
Some other gather while you're in school.
Some start once you're done with school.
And so this helps you look at over the lifetime of that loan,
how much are you really paying?
So if you have a $25,000 loan and you
do the standard repayment plan over the life of the loan,
you're going to pay $35,000.
But if you do the extended repayment plan,
you end up paying $40,000 for a loan.
So this kind of helps give you an idea
of which repayment plan is going to work for you,
and also how much you're going to be paying back.
And you can change your payment plan
as you go through paying back your loans.
So you may start out on one and then switch to another one
as you're going through your lifetime.
Say you win the lottery and you just
want to pay the whole thing off.
Or if you get a really good job that
pays more than you expected you would ever be making in a job.
So you're like, oh, I can make $400, or $500, or $600 a month
payments versus the $200 payments
that I'm making right now.
And so you can go in and make changes to that.
And this navigator can help you make those decisions,
before you go onto the website for your loan servicer,
to help you know which one might be
the best choice for you based on the situation that you're in.
They also have information about ways
that you can postpone payments.
They have information about getting forgiveness
or discharge of your payments.
They have information about what to do
if you find yourself in default, or if you're
delinquent on a payment.
And so those are all parts that are built into the website that
are things that you can get to and navigate to when you have
an account set up with SALT.
The other thing that SALT does is, they help answer questions
about the loan process.
If you're graduating soon, and I saw a couple people are--
Kelly and Olivia congratulations.
For those you that are going to be graduating
soon, when you get into that prior
to the start of your repayment period,
you may get a phone call, or an email,
or some other kind of outreach from SALT.
Even if you haven't signed-up for an account with them,
they have access to the students.
We send them information on all of our students.
And they reach out to all students.
And they say, hey, we know you may have some student
loans coming due soon, have you started making your plans
for repayment?
Are you thinking about that?
What are you doing?
Have you made plans for that?
They may reach out to you with that.
Please respond to them if you want help with that.
They can help you talk through that.
If you miss a payment once or twice,
before you become what's known as "in default," SALT
may reach out to you then, too, and say, hey,
we noticed you've missed some payments.
Can we help?
How can we help you?
Some of the websites for other loan organizations
can be a little cumbersome and hard to navigate through.
And their job is to collect the money.
And SALT, they're not collecting money from you.
They're just there to help.
So they can answer questions.
They can help guide you through the processes and procedures
for handling delinquent payments or default payments.
They are there to help answer questions.
If you are going to graduate school,
and you want to know what you need
to do in order to continue keeping
from having to pay the loans-- so
having them deferred while you're in graduate school.
Or you're going back for a second degree.
So they are really--
that's what they're there for.
You can see the times that they're available.
It's all Eastern Time or Pacific.
So you get a decent calculation there.
But they are there to help.
They're there to answer questions.
I've actually met some of the people that
work in these offices.
And they are genuinely there to just help students,
to answer questions, and to be there
to support you and help you navigate through this stuff.
These are all people that understand the loan process,
and how those things work, and how to navigate
through those things.
Because it can be very nerve racking and very confusing,
and can be very frustrating as you're navigating
through some of this stuff.
And especially with everything else you've got going on.
You're trying to find a job.
You may be trying to find a new place to live.
You may be trying to find a school,
or dealing with other things in your life.
And so your student loans shouldn't
be something that's overwhelming and making it harder for you
to get through.
So that's why we do this.
We provide this service for you as a student,
so that you can take that off your plate.
SALT has a lot of additional places
where you can get in touch with them.
They are online.
They do you have a presence on Facebook and on Twitter,
where they share a lot of great tools
and information about stuff.
They also do have their own SALT community--
community.saltmoney.org, where you can go and connect
with other students.
And they do a lot of contests, and give away free money,
in addition to the other ways you can get free money.
But they do some contests through there sometimes.
Students share their stories about how they've
paid off their student debt--
different tips and tricks on that-- ask questions.
It's a good place to just interact with your peers
about financial literacy, and about SALT, and about student
loans.
And other things that are troubling you
as you're thinking about your financial situation
and how to navigate through that, which can be
pretty stressful, for anybody.
So again, registration process is super simple.
Just click that "sign up" link up at the top,
fill in your information, and get your account set up.
And then that account is yours for the rest of your life.
We make it available to you.
We pay-- the university.
Washington State University pays a fee to SALT
in order to make this available for our students.
And so we're the reason that this is available to you
as a free service, because we are the ones who are
paying them for this service.
It's also subsidized by--
as I said, they used to be a loan provider.
And so, some of it is the money that they're
making off of those loans also helps subsidize some of this.
And they decided that, because they couldn't be a loan
servicer anymore, they've decided
to move into helping people.
And so they partner now with schools.
There are over 300 schools in the US who partner with SALT
to provide this service to their students.
And so we at WSU thought this was important.
And wanted to make sure that we're providing this service
to our students to help you be able to pay for school,
pay back your loans, and all of the other things
that students want and need to be able to do you
as they're managing their money and getting through school.
And to make financial issues less of a burden on you
as the student.
So that's kind of the major part of the presentation.
We can also jump into the SALT website
and look around, and play with some stuff.
So you can see, I do have an account.
And I'm going to log into that now, so we can look around.
And if there is anything you would like to see,
please let us know.
And we'll hop over to that and take a look at it.
As soon as it logs us in-- here we go.
All right, so you can see this is
my database, or my dashboard, as they call it.
And I have "manage money" as my number one goal right now.
And so it has given me information specific to that.
Olivia, it looks like you're asking
about options for repayment and the different ones on the page.
So, yeah, we can look into that.
Let me just get to that.
So I've just pulled up the Loan Repayment Navigator.
We talked about this earlier, and this
is what it looks like when you first get to it.
So you click on "Get Started."
It's going to ask information about your specific situation.
And you input the information that's
about you and what you've done.
So you can add loans that you've borrowed.
So I'm just going to make up some numbers here.
And we'll say I borrowed $10,000.
That's barely a year, right?
But we'll put them in there just as a pretend for right now.
With $10,000 of student loan debt,
every month I would be paying $104 on the standard repayment
plan--
I think it's the sort of default one.
If you don't choose a repayment plan,
I believe most of the plants default
to the standard repayment plan.
So it's giving you the information
for the standard repayment plan.
And it says, do you want to learn more about that?
Or do I want to go to the income-driven option?
Or the extended repayment?
Or the graduated repayment?
Holly asks, "If when you use the loan calculator, does
this stay on your account?
Or do you have to do it each time?
I believe it stays on your account.
When they did the updates to the new dashboard--
if you look over on the right-hand side of the screen
here, you can see it's got the repayment navigator.
So I've entered some information in there.
And so I think that stays there, because it also shows--
you can see the scholarship search
that I started playing around with on February 2, 2016.
So now I could go back and go back into that scholarship
search engine, and the information
that I entered previously would still be available there.
And I believe the repayment navigator does the same thing.
And so if each year you can look at how much
you're going to owe, and then as you add new student loans,
you could add in the new information.
Any information on refinancing private student loans?
That is a great question, Tony.
And I'm not sure I have the answer to that,
but you could certainly looking in here about--
there's information about consolidation of federal loans.
While we're here, we will do a search-- "private loans."
So I just typed "private loans" in the search box at the top.
And these are the information that I
got about using private loans.
And so I don't see one that specifically
answers your question yet.
But there is certainly a plethora of information--
oh, there's one about refinancing federal loans.
Paying off loans-- here we go--
"Repaying and Consolidating Private Student Loans."
So there's an article right there
that talks about private student loans and refinancing,
or repaying or consolidating those.
So there's some information there,
Tony, that might answer your question about refinancing
private loans, in addition to maybe doing
some consolidation of those loans,
or other ways to pay off those loans.
Any other questions, or anything else
you'd like to see on the SALT website?
While we wait, I'm actually going
to pull up that scholarship search engine,
because I know Olivia's planning to go to grad school.
And so this might be useful, if anyone else is planning
to go to grad school or just have some more semesters left
here at WSU, and want some ways to find some free money.
I'm going to tell you a little about this scholarship search
engine, because I've heard a lot of really great things
about it, and think it's a fabulous, wonderful tool.
So you know there's a scholarship
program through WSU.
You fill out the scholarship form
on the financial aid website.
And the SALT scholarship database
is different from the WSU database.
So WSU offers scholarships that are specific to WSU.
You do those through the WSU financial-aid website.
On the financial-aid website, I think they also now
have a link to a database there that does some
searching for scholarships.
This is a different one that's outside of-- it's certainly
outside of WSU scholarships.
It may have some similar information
to the financial-aid website's database
that they just recently added to their website.
I don't know if you've been on the financial-aid website
recently, but they've made some changes.
And one of the things is that they've also
added a scholarship search tool on their website.
I am all about free money, too.
I'm all about helping people find free money for school.
Because you're right, school can be really expensive, Holly.
So I definitely want to help people
find ways to help pay for it.
And this is one way to do it.
Just as an example, I'll tell you,
I've had students come up to me who've used this before.
And they've told me-- one student said
he applied for a scholarship for,
I think it was $250 or $500 or something like that,
and all he had to do was write a short essay on how
to survive a zombie apocalypse.
And that was a scholarship that someone out there was offering
to give money for that.
Another student told me she was able to get
$1,000 from L'Oreal--
the hair and makeup people-- by just telling them
that she [? used their ?] hair care products, or that
used their hair dye.
Another student told me about a scholarship
that they saw where all you had to do
was post a picture on Instagram with a specific hashtag.
And then they did a drawing for money for school.
So they are a lot of people out there
who are trying to give people money to get an education--
not a lot of people our there taking advantage of that.
And so this is a really great place
to come and get some of that information.
You can see there's a nice little pop-up on my screen.
SALT does occasionally ask for people to give them information
that they use to help make the site better, to gather
some data and some analytics.
And so, I've now just answered that survey.
And you all know that I like Facebook.
So the scholarship search engine--
what I like about the scholarship search engine
is, how many of you have gone onto Google
and done a search for scholarships?
Raise your hands, or throw a quick smiley face or something
up there.
Kelly, yeah.
Two more-- yeah.
Same here.
If you ever go on Google and just type "scholarships,"
you're going to get a bajillion hits,
if that's even a real number.
There are a lot of people out there.
There are a lot of scholarships out there.
And then what do you have to do?
You have to click on each one, and look through everything
and say, am I even eligible for this one?
Is this one I'm interested in?
What's this one about?
The beauty of this database is, they're
going to help do that searching for you.
They're going to help you narrow that bajillion number down
to a number that's more manageable and reasonable,
based on the information that you give them.
So if you just answer some questions--
when you click this "Get Started" button,
you answer some questions about yourself,
fill in the information, and then they can help you.
They're going to then filter that list down to scholarships
that you might be eligible for.
So I filled in some information previously,
so I'll just keep what's in here and walk through here.
I did it sort of just as a generic kind of thing.
But you can see, it asks a lot of information.
And the more you provide, obviously the more scholarships
it's going to be able to-- the more
it's going to be able to narrow that list down and provide
some information.
Because there are scholarships out there
for a lot of different things.
It asks about your background.
And again, there's a lot of information
that relates to you personally.
But there are scholarships that exist that meet
some of these different things.
So if you're left handed, there are
scholarships out there for left-handed people.
If you do you have a specific disability,
there may be some scholarships for that.
Are you a first generation student?
There's a list of different options
that you can choose, up to 10 here.
And there are different things.
Are you a dependent of, or spouse of someone
who was in United Airlines Flight 175 on 9/11?
So people that were dependents or spouses
of people who died in 9/11--
the Oklahoma City bombing.
Are you or a family member a refugee?
Student attends a high school in the delivery
area for Papa John's Pizza.
There's just this wide range of things
where there are scholarships that exist for people.
And you can choose these different options
that fit you, up to 10, under this personal information.
Some other information you can add about yourself here--
what kind of work experience do you have?
What's your intended career?
And you can choose up to 20.
So if you don't really know what you want to do,
or maybe there's a couple of different things
you're thinking about, you add in some stuff here.
I'm going to work with fish.
No military experience, but my father
was in the military-- he was a Marine.
I don't really remember what he did,
but I'll just pick something here.
He was a Vietnam vet.
What family, work experience do you have?
All of these questions.
So this is time consuming, too.
But it's helping to narrow down those choices.
So the more information you can provide through this form,
the better they're going to be able to find scholarships
that might work for you.
So you want to fill out as much of this information as you can,
and provide as much information here as you can,
because this is going to help them.
There's also things for hobbies, sports, clubs,
and organizations.
If your family's involved in any Greek organization
or associations--
all of these different things help
them find scholarships that are going
to be the right fit for you.
And then once you do that, then here's a whole list--
just based on the information that I provided previously--
of scholarships and awards that the person who I filled out
for or asked could apply for.
And you can see the amounts range from--
I think the first one here was $20,000--
$1,500, $600.
So there's a wide variety.
There's a long list.
And I would say, don't scoff at the small numbers.
Those are the ones that people are least likely to apply for.
And so your chances of getting it are a lot higher.
There, you can see they list deadline dates.
And the deadline dates run through all year long.
So you can see deadline--
here's June deadlines.
Then you run into some July's.
Here are some August deadlines.
So even after school starts--
here's September deadlines.
There are deadlines that run throughout the year.
Some of these scholarships are on continuously rotating basis.
So there's a lot of great tools and information and resources
here to help you as you're planning how to pay for school.
And you know, $500 is not a ton of money.
That's like, what, one book these days?
Half an hour of class?
But it's still $500 that wasn't in your pocket to begin with.
So it's a really great tool, a great resource.
I've heard a lot of really great things
and a lot of great feedback from students.
It's the number one visited portion of the SALT website
across the country.
So it is a very popular piece of the SALT website, I think,
because it's helpful, and a lot of students
find it very useful.
There's an amazing new opportunity that is now available online.
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