Hire a Student Loan Planner and Get Your Custom Plan
If you owe $20,000 to $1 million in student loans, keep reading.
Paying back student loans is more complex than ever before, especially with the new SAVE plan and the 427 pages of regulations that accompany it.
Should you pursue forgiveness or pay everything off quickly? Do you need to file taxes separately? How do you maximize your interest subsidies? Should you get your payment capped or is that unnecessary? Should you pay slightly more per month for 20 years or slightly less but extend your term to 25 years?
We're experts in helping you navigate these and other complex questions to maximize your savings and minimize your stress and debt anxiety.
Our CFP®, CFA and CSLP® student loan consultants have helped 11,500+ clients take on over $2.6 billion of student debt. Read our 2,200+ reviews and see why our clients rate us the best provider of student loan help in the country. Then, if you like what you see, we hope you schedule your own custom plan with the button below.
Your Student Loan Planner® Consultants
Rob Bertman
Molly Laughter
James Mwombela
Sim Terwilliger
Derenda King
Jake Courtney
Rebecca Baldauf
Meredith Jones
Book a consult
For New Clients
Book a consult
For Existing Clients
Rather than entrusting your financial future to someone who offers financial services but only dabbles in student loan counseling, work with us. We live and breathe student loans.
Why should you believe we can help you?
We’ve consulted on hundreds of millions in student debt, and we’ve found millions in forecasted student loan savings for the professionals we’ve worked with.
We charge a one-time fee for our thorough review, but we’ve found that 90% of our clients save an average of over $53,000 projected over the life of the loan repayment period.
We’re not a document preparation company.
We won’t fill out your student loan paperwork for you. We want you to take ownership of every last dollar of your student loans. Our job is to arm you with the information you need to make an informed decision
The value to working with one of our student loan planners is strategy.
You’re going to get a roadmap. You’re going to get a way to pay back your loans. You’re going to get all of your questions answered. You’re going to find out what everyone else is doing. We’ve worked with more than 8,588 borrowers like you. We’ll also share tips that your peers are using to pay back their student loans.
There’s a real difference between having student loan debt and thriving financially while having student loans.
The financial aid office helped you sign up for debt, but now you’re on your own.
Soon after graduation, you get passed off to a loan servicer that has no idea what they’re doing.
You call them, and the person gives you an answer. Then you call back, and another person gives you an entirely different answer.
Your time is too valuable to be wasting like this.
Maybe you’re single and just starting out, or maybe you’re married (or soon will be) and kids are in the picture. You have the same bills as everyone else, but there are two problems:
- Not only are you starting later in life because of your education, but
- There’s massive amounts of debt getting in your way.
So what do you do?
Do you throw everything you have at your debt and
- Push off buying a house for 10 years
- Convince your spouse to move to a studio apartment in a sketchy part of town
- Decide not to even talk about having kids until you’re well into your 40s...
— just so you can put all your money toward your student loan debt?
Or hire Student Loan Planner® to figure it out for you!
Watch the video below to see why I got into student loan consulting, and how our team might be able to help you eliminate your student loan anxiety with a custom plan made specifically for you.
Take the strategic approach!
Do you maximize all the loopholes and savings that exist with government programs?
If you take the first approach, you better make darn sure it’s worth it (and get the best refinancing deal, so you sacrifice as little time as possible paying everything back)!
There are two ways to pay student loans:
1.Pay them off as fast as possible like your hair's on fire OR
2. Pay as little as possible and use every trick in the book to maximize the amount of forgiveness you can receive.
Choosing the wrong approach could cost you tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That’s where we come in.
People come to you because you're an expert at what you do.
Your profession requires a lot of schooling so you could be the expert people turn to when they need the most help.
So, who do you turn to when you have questions about your student loans? Do you turn to a financial planner who doesn’t understand the ever-changing student loan marketplace, or do you turn to the experts?
We are the student loan experts if you owe $20,000 to $1 million.
Travis took into account my wife's finances and student loans and pointed us towards SERIOUSLY AMAZING savings. Travis was honest, nice, and easy to follow as we went through everything. He made sure to point out where we would save the most money in the long run and explain how each payment plan works. I am very happy with the service Travis provided and recommend him to anyone who needs help with big student loans.
Evan Rochlis
Physician
I feel fortunate to have pursued a consultation with Travis. He helped me understand that I was overpaying for life insurance, in addition to how most efficiently pay back my dental school loans. I thought I was doing okay, and I was, but I can guarantee that I will save even more now after talking to Travis. He is very capable of answering any questions you may have regarding loans, saving, investing, etc! Worth it.
Erin Marie Spencer
Dentist
Here’s the thing: That five- or six-figure debt? It’s not your fault!
The government passed legislation that said that graduate schools are allowed to charge as much as they want for their programs. Naturally, deans were happy to raise tuition accordingly.
What are we supposed to do, live in a world without dentists, physicians, veterinarians, lawyers, pharmacists, chiropractors, psychologists or other highly trained professionals one day?
Should you save for retirement or pay down that loan?
You weren’t saving for retirement while you were in school, so it seems like you should start saving ASAP, right? But it’s really hard to know what to do with the money you’re making in your financial situation. How much are you supposed to put toward long-term savings? How much should you be throwing at your loans?
Nobody in the financial services world knows the answer to that unless they know how to handle the elephant in the room: the student loan debt.
Our job is to finally explain all of your repayment options.
If you’re struggling with five or six figures of student loans, we want to hear from you.
Don’t keep your head in the sand and avoid looking at your loan statements. Feel confident in the approach you’re taking instead.
Compare student loans to something else that’s complicated: taxes.
If your taxes are complex, you hire a CPA.
If you owe five or six figures in student loans, book a consultation with one of our Student Loan consultants.
All of us hold either the CFP, CFA or CSLP designation.
We'll look at your federal loans as well as your private student loans (if you have both).
We’ll show you how to maximize the right federal student loan forgiveness programs, like Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), if you're eligible.
We’ll show you how to minimize your Adjusted Gross Income, in order to help you when you file your taxes!
We’ll look at your debt-to-income ratio along with your interest rate and see if consolidation and refinancing make sense for you (or rule it out).
Additionally, we’ll make sure you’re saving for the tax penalty under the most advantageous income-driven repayment plan, if that’s the right path.
I consulted with Travis in the hope of finding a financial plan that would guide me through the coming years of loan repayment. I now have a financial plan that specifically suits my personal situation to pay off the debts with much less uncertainty and unknowns. If you are in the same situation as I was, don’t hesitate to reach out to him and you won’t regret it.
James Sang Lee
Dentist
Before talking to Travis, I was feeling really stressed and not sure how I was going to manage. I appreciate that he was very patient in helping me understand the repayment options. He took the time to learn about my financial situation and helped create a clear plan that best benefited me. He is very resourceful, and I would recommend his services.
Ana Nevarez
Pharmacist
We offer customized student loan help for your situation.
Every analysis done by Student Loan Planner® is highly customized for you.
Here are a few examples of challenges brought to us by student loan borrowers that you wouldn’t find answers to anywhere else:
Veterinarian with $300,000 in debt just married to high-income business owner without loans.
She found out her income-based repayment would be tripling and had no idea whether she should file taxes separately or jointly with her spouse.
Physician with $500,000 in med school debt was weighing two competing job offers at an academic hospital and a private practice.
He needed to know the tradeoffs between earning a lower salary with loan forgiveness compared to a higher income and refinancing with a private lender. We armed him with information that led to a $10,000 salary increase AND over $10,000 in Year 1 interest savings.
Pediatric dentist with $650,000 in dental school debt needed to know how to deal with his mountain of debt without hurting his goals of practice ownership.
We showed him how to maximize his cash flow and receive tens of thousands in interest subsidies.
Dual lawyer household, one Big Law and the other, public interest law, was going to abandon loan forgiveness due to their $500,000 combined income.
We showed them key points that they had omitted in their analysis that led to a projected $75,000 in savings.
Second career chiropractor planned on working forever, due to her $250,000 loan balance and $60,000 income.
We got her a student loan repayment plan that dealt with her loans intelligently, while also showing her how retiring in her 50s was a realistic possibility.
Pharmacist was making a $2,000 monthly payment on his loans while working at a community hospital.
We showed him how to cut his monthly student loan payment to $600 instead and maximize the projected $200,000 in loan forgiveness he was eligible for under current rules. His response? “I guess I need to buy you a beer.”
We’re willing to wager that you’re leaving money on the table.
Why?
Because the vast majority of student loan borrowers we’ve worked with have a lot of opportunity to adjust what they’re doing (to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars saved).
Watch out for salespeople masquerading as financial advisors or offering student loan counseling.
We’ve had a lot of clients who’ve been sold products that they really don’t need, and they come to us in worse shape financially than they were before they talked to someone else! We’re able to reverse some of those mistakes, which allows them to have more breathing room in their monthly cash flow (not to mention the long-term savings they’ll see!).
Imagine being misled to buy a $500 a month life insurance policy when you have 8% student loan debt.
Think about how you’d feel if you discovered that your financial advisor told you to invest with them, so they could get a $10,000+ commission, when you could’ve been debt-free instead.
We’ve seen this and much worse.
While we’re not financial advisors (we’re student loan consultants), we have sometimes saved our clients additional thousands of dollars by suggesting they fire their “financial professional.”
We’ve found clients an average $49,000 in projected student loan savings!
The higher your student loan balance, the more help we can provide. The average client that works with us owes over $250,000 on their student loans.
Do you owe that much, or more?
We can guarantee that we’ve seen worse, no matter how much it is. We’re here to help reduce your burden — not to pass judgement or give you unhelpful “pay back your debt” cliches.
Who is the Student Loan Planner®?
I’m Travis Hornsby, and I’m the chief student loan consultant around here. Before I became Student Loan Planner®, I was a bond trader for one of the world’s largest investment companies.
I had to compete with the sharpest minds on Wall Street, and I traded over $10 billion during my time there. That kind of work requires rigor — the same rigor I use when analyzing student loan options for our clients.
I hold the Chartered Financial Analyst designation, and I care deeply about student loans. The student loan ecosystem is intentionally complicated to keep people like you paying way more than he/she needs to be paying. That complexity works in favor of our clients though, because with every wrinkle comes another opportunity to save money.
Why do I care so much about student debt?
I fell in love — hard — with a woman I met in Philadelphia while she was a physician in training. When we had the money talk, she revealed a shocking amount of debt from medical school.
I started doing my research, then built a calculator to see what our options were, and then it got downloaded thousands of times online when I shared it.
The calculator was just the beginning. Soon, her friends were coming to me asking for help. People who downloaded the calculator started sending frantic emails begging for assistance.
That’s how Student Loan Planner® was born.
We’ve consulted on hundreds of millions since that day, more than any other group in the country.
Frequently Asked Questions
“He put our minds at ease”
“Loans are a big deal and there is a potential to save THOUSANDS of dollars with the right pay off plan. Talking to Travis helped us immediately find the best way to pay off our loans in a way that was tailored to us. He factors in a lot of different things to give you balance and put your mind at ease. Now it's time for the real work! Thanks, Travis!”
JM Barnes
“I wish I’d consulted him years ago”
“I cannot say enough good things about Travis's expertise, service, and knowledge of the tricky student loan landscape. His skill as a financial analyst sets him head and shoulders above the rest. If you want student loan advice based on sophisticated number crunching and encyclopedic knowledge of loan and forgiveness programs, refinancing options, and even tax implications, Student Loan Planner is the consultant to choose. Travis's expertise and compassion are a rare combination. He clarified my situation and helped me find clear direction and a strategy that will save me tens of thousands of dollars. I wish I had consulted him years ago.”
Anne Delaney Pushkal
Museum Curator
“One of the best decisions I could have made”
“After 8 years of school I was overwhelmed by the amount of money I was going to have to pay back on my loans but Travis explained my options in depth and in a language I could follow and understand. I had so much anxiety over my loans because I did not know that much about them, but Travis shed light on my situation and it provided instant relief just to know I had a plan and there are options out there. After the 1 hour phone call I felt like a weight had been lifted off me and I can now just focus on my career as a school psychologist and remember why I decided to pursue a Psy.D!! You will not regret scheduling this consult. It was definitely worth the money and I will absolutely be recommending Travis to my fellow Psy.D friends!”
Jaimie Leigh
Psychologist
“His phone consult is literally the most valuable one hour conversation you will ever have”
“Travis acts as your ally and your friend throughout the entire process.”
