Hello!
I discovered this site a few months ago and have been lurking ever since. I enjoy learning about new ways to be frugal and have admired the diversity of the community and its financial know-how. So I thought this might be a good place to discuss a dilemma I've been thinking about for some time.
I am fortunate to have no student loans or any debt of any kind. But my fiancee, who completed a law degree several years ago from a good university, has six figures worth of Student Loan debt (with 3.5% interest). She is on a 30-year income based repayment plan which, over the past couple of years, has resulted in her paying $0 towards that debt per month. She has her own law practice, and although she is very smart and hard-working, her practice has not been profitable to this point due to her area of law and the type of cases she has been taking on.
Apparently, if the two of us are married, the student loans will include my income as part of the plan, meaning we will have to start paying towards it each month. Since she is insistent on the two of us contributing equally to monthly bills, and she worries that she doesn't have enough to cover her half in the event that the IBR goes up post-marriage, she is suggesting we possibly avoid being officially, legally married so I don't end up saddled with that student loan debt as well.
I know the attitude about debt on MMM: treat it like a raging dumpster fire and eliminate the problem as fast as possible. I've assured her that I'd like to help her pay off that debt, but she's still uncertain about it.
Part of her reasoning is that her understanding of IBR is that in thirty years, the entire student loan debt will be forgiven, providing she sticks to that plan and makes little enough to qualify for IBR over the course of that period. We'll have to discuss whether or not this is actually how such a plan works with the loan officer, but the idea of gambling on thirty years worth of poor salary to someday be rid of the rapidly piling debt is a scary notion to me.
I acknowledge that she doesn't sound like the most mustachian of people, but she is actually pretty frugal and fiscally conservative in many respects. She has agreed to start working long-term with another lawyer in the building on some other sort of legal work that she hopes will provide a more consistent paycheck, but it remains to be seen when this will materialize and how much of a financial boost it will be.
I'm open to any advice (other than "ditch her," of course, which I'm not doing since she is my companion and best friend), as I don't have much experience with Student Loan financing or debt in general. I'm looking to put together a long-term plan for how we're going to deal with this; I don't want to have any regrets years from now.