00:00Hello everyone, I'm Sally Krawcheck and welcome to Up Close in Financial with
00:04Refinery29. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Ellevest, which is a digital investment
00:09platform for women. I built a career on Wall Street and I'm so happy to be here
00:14with you today. Tell me a little bit about you. Hi my name is Ash and my wife
00:23is in $120,000 of student loan debt. The interest rate is about 6%. Our
00:28monthly payments are just about paying off the interest. We make a combined
00:33income of $75,000 a year. So look, I think the the rate on this debt I don't love.
00:40I always say that if you can get a rate below 4% that's good debt. I don't love
00:45this this debt for a bunch of reasons. I don't love it because it's a lot and it's
00:50a lot and you know versus your income but I don't love the interest rate. It can't
00:55hurt to call and talk about reducing it. I would guess your chances of doing that
01:00are pretty low. One thing that is almost never comes up and is everything's worth
01:08thinking about so thinking about is bankruptcy. I think less than 1% of
01:13individuals who declare bankruptcy even try to get the student loan discharged and
01:19of those that do ask, 40% get some portion of it reduced. We hate bankruptcy
01:24because we we just we're women and we do what we say we're gonna do right and we
01:31repay our debts and we keep our promises. But if you're telling me that this is
01:35crushing and we can't take it and it has implications for your credit later, there
01:40are points at life in which it's okay to say look I'm in a position you know maybe
01:45have to look at some other options. For those of you who have student loan debt
01:50out there, the name of the game always is to try to reduce that interest rate on
01:54the debt. So there are three ways that you can do that. Number one, look into
01:58auto pay. With auto pay, because the provider knows that you'll be paying them
02:02on time every month, they can reduce the rate that you pay and on average they can
02:06reduce it by about a quarter of a percentage point which doesn't sound like a
02:10lot but can add up. The second thing I want you to do is call your loan
02:14provider and just ask if they'll reduce the rate. Sometimes if you've been
02:18making payments on time and have a good track record, they will reduce the rate
02:24for you. And third, there are any number of startups out there right now that will
02:29refinance those loans. Again, you have to have good credit, you have to be making
02:32your payments on time, but if you've been doing that there is the potential and
02:37opportunity that you can have your rate substantially reduced through some of
02:40those startups.
