For your student loans:
1) You should do the math on paying off vs getting forgiveness each person’s loans separately, since it might be beneficial to pay off one person’s loans early and do forgiveness for the other. I.e. it might make sense to do PSLF for your husband’s loans and throw all your extra money at paying yours off early.
2) When doing the math you need to use your normal income/ payment amount if you think you will be back to work full time after your disability is gone. Because your $80 a month payment sounds awfully low for your normal salary unless you don’t have many loans...
3) As others pointed out, your husband may qualify for PSLF which has a 10 year forgiveness, no taxes on what’s forgiven. This is one of the reasons you need to calculate separately, especially if he has been in the non-profit sector the last five years - only five years left to forgiveness! Note that “qualified payments” for PSLF is different than the 20-25 year forgiveness program. You have to be working full-time in a government or non-profit job while making payments to qualify under PSLF. (The 120 “qualified payments” don’t need to be consecutive.)
For teachers, payments during summers count if: “you have a contract for an employment period of at least eight months and you work an average of 30 hours per week during that period, and if your employer still considers you to be employed full-time during the summer break. . . . In this circumstance, your employer should include the dates of the summer break when reporting your dates of employment on the PSLF Employment Certification Form, even though you aren’t actually teaching during that period.” - studentloan.gov FAQ
Also, any payments made before a loan consolidation don’t count towards the 120 payments. Only those after consolidation.
3) If you don’t qualify for PLSF, are you sure your loans will be forgiven after 20 years of payment? If your loans are pre-2014 then it’s 25 years to forgiveness under IBR. PAYE is 20 years.
4) When doing the math, compare the total (estimated) amount you will pay after forgiveness + taxes to the total amount you will pay if you make early payments. Take the difference and decide if it’s worth being in debt 15+ years, and/or if it’s worth the risk and worry about the program changing without any grandfathering before you qualify for forgiveness.
- Use the repayment estimator to figure out what you’ll pay over the next x years under IBR and the balance left to forgive.
https://studentloans.gov/myDirectLoan/repaymentEstimator.action - Use the tax brackets for 2018 or a tax calculator to roughly estimate how much you’ll pay in taxes on the forgiven amount under the 20-25 year plan.
https://www.doughroller.net/taxes/federal-income-tax-brackets-deductions-and-exemption-limits/ - use the bankrate mortgage calculator to estimate what you would pay and how long it would take if you threw extra money at the loans. The “amortization / payment schedule” link/button lets you to add extra monthly payments to see what it does to your payoff date and interest paid. And “view summary” lets you see exactly how much you would be paying in interest. Add the interest to your current loan balance to calculate the total amount if you pay off your loans early.
https://www.bankrate.com/calculators/mortgages/mortgage-calculator.aspx 5) If you decide to do loan forgiveness, you should use the repayment estimator to see whether your minimum payments would be significantly lower if you file taxes separately (married filed separately vs married filed jointly). Under IBR and PAYE if you file separately, they do not count your spouses income when calculating the payment. Compare the amount saved in loans payments to the amount you would lose in tax deductions. Some tax deductions you lose are those for IRA accounts (but not for employer sponsored retirement vehicles) and student loan interest. I’m not sure about child tax credit or mortgage interest, which would probably be significant for you. Play around on TurboTax to see how filing separately vs jointly affects your taxes.