payments are due again for roughly 28 million federal student loan borrowers.

The COVID pandemic pause that lasted years has

ended. Jake Hasmar of Reading, Pennsylvania is one of those borrowers. They signed

up for the newest income-based repayment plan called Save. The less you make, the less you pay each month.

Just as we kind of predicted, it ended up being about 5866 a month.

Before the pandemic, Jay was paying 300 a month.

No surprise, they prefer this new much lower payment.

Which is like a phone bill.

300 a month is like three times my utilities.

Sophie Hernandez Simianitis, a freelance journalist in New York City,

also signed up for this new save plan.

She says she got a scare at first

when the system based her monthly payment

on her salary at an old job.

And I uploaded basically my pay stubs from my freelance and they were like, okay, just kidding,

you pay zero dollars.

That's good, but she also got an email saying her loans accrued more than a thousand dollars in interest.

And I was like, I don't know where that came from, but that seems extreme.

There are lots of borrowers right now who are feeling confused and call centers are being flooded with questions with whole times often an hour or longer.

Some 7 million borrowers are already in default on their federal loans like

Juan Carlos Moreno. That's not millions of people who are deadbeats. I think

most of them are just like me, hard-working people who had no other choice. The problem is default comes with

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