Important, this is a DRAFT version of a new calculator. It has not yet been tested for all circumstances. There may be errors. We would love your feedback or advice. If you understand excel and amortization schedules, we’d love to have you check our work.

Do you have a mix of loans for which you expect PSLF and loans for which you do not expect PSLF (e.g. non-eligible loans, filing jointly and spouse has loans and is not going for PSLF, etc). If so, you can use this calculator to figure out if you should refinance the non-eligible loans immediately to a lower rate, or alternately, to wait until you receive PSLF and THEN refinance the non-PSLF loans

The reason you may want to wait is that your total IDR payment is split between all Federal loans (PSLF-eligible or otherwise). If you refinance, you’ll increase the amount of your monthly payment which goes to a PSLF loan. If you get PSLF, this extra amount is wasted. Use this calculator to ensure the interest you save with a refinance is more than the amount you lose in forgiveness.

Important information is listed after the spreadsheet.

Explanations/Assumptions/Limitations

— For your loan balance, enter only your principal amount, and do not include any accumulated interest. If you happen to have any accumulated interest on your non-PSLF loans, you will need to enter the “effective interest rate” on the non-PSLF loans. That rate can be calculated using this tool (on that page, you only need to fill out the first 3 inputs, based on your non-PSLF loans, to calculate the effective interest rate as shown in the output section). Even so, if you do indeed have any accumulated interest your federal loans, this calculator does NOT take into account that your interest is capitalized after a refinance. This, this calculator will OVER estimate the benefits of a refinance in cases where there is accumulated or unpaid interest on the non-PSLF loans.

— Enter your current Federal loan payments, or your your expected future payments. Obviously, payments will change each year for most people. But remember that the higher your IDR payment, the less the advantage to a refinance.

— For any refinanced loan you are considering, the duration or payment term of that loan must be longer than your forgiveness. That is, the calculator will not work if your payoff date on the refinanced loan is prior to your expected forgiveness.

— This calculator assumes you are otherwise saving or investing any money that you could apply to a refinance. That is, if you are considering a refinance with monthly payments of $1000, it assumes you will save/invest that $1000 per month if you choose not to refinance. So in the “assumed return” field, enter the expected amount you might earn on this savings, depending on where you might invest it.

— The main output, the last number, is the total benefit to you if you refinance your non-PSLF loans now, as opposed to waiting to refinance after you receive forgiveness on the eligible loans.

— We assume you already maxing out all available retirement accounts. Otherwise, contributing to a pre-tax 401k/403b is almost certainly more beneficial than refinancing.