NEW
OBBB-compliant, Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) is live in the simulator
Your best clients have student debt.
They have not brought it to you.
It is often the largest liability on the household balance sheet, and the decision attached to it is being made without you.
Why it stays invisible
Ask a room of advisors how many clients carry student loans and you get a low number. Ask the same advisors how many clients have a child who went to college in the last fifteen years, a spouse who went back for a graduate degree, or a Parent PLUS balance they took on themselves, and the number is not low at all.
Clients sort their own finances into buckets. Investments go to the advisor. Taxes go to the CPA. Student loans go to a servicer website they log into once a year and dread. There is no natural moment in a review meeting where a borrower volunteers a loan balance, and the intake form rarely asks.
So the balance sits outside the plan, and the one decision attached to it, which repayment plan to be on, can move six figures over the life of the loan.
Student-loan planning is where intergenerational planning starts
Each of these is a conversation with two generations in it. Firms that handle the loan question well are in that conversation before anyone else.
Carrying Parent PLUS for a child who has now graduated, on a separate track from every other federal borrower, with its own deadline.
About to inherit the decision, years before they have assets to manage, and already looking for someone to ask.
Filing jointly for the first time and discovering that the filing choice itself changes the monthly payment.
Why now and not five years ago
The rules changed underneath everyone. Every borrower whose plan changed has a decision to make and no obvious person to make it with. Servicers do not advise. Federal exit counseling checks a box.
The client is looking for someone. Most advisors are not raising their hand.
What adding it actually involves
Less than most advisors assume. The work is not memorizing federal regulation. It is having a defensible number in front of the client and a plan attached to it: pull the loan record, model the plans the borrower is actually eligible for, produce something the client can hold.
The judgment stays yours. The arithmetic, the eligibility rules, and the regulatory churn are the part that can be handled for you, and that is what makes this a service line rather than a research project.
Start with one client you already know has student debt
Pull their federal loan record and model it properly, start to finish. See what the conversation feels like when you bring them a number instead of a referral.