Damn skullman that's some loan. I know PA's are paid peanuts compared to the work they do so I feel for you/your wife. My wife did 4 years undergrad, 2 years post and 1 year doctorate for PT at Chatham. That last year was $50k alone, but she was only about $150k in debt I believe by the time she graduated. That was in 2007.
We decided to put all our extra money into the loans when we got married in 2009 and had it paid off in 2015, except for a $16k interest-free loan her parents gave her which we paid off in 2019. It also helped we had no car loans and waited to buy a house until 2015, but it was no fun going through that period.
In retrospect I had $16k in loans for a 4 year degree when I graduated in 1999. Probably would be $100k if I graduated last year. Completely stupid the cost of a higher education.
We both make good money so it's not even a woe is us story, but it's still realllly annoying the amount of money she has paid already and she owes more than she did when she finished school. It just boggles my mind.
I know my wife did 4 years at Allegheny college, then went to some place in Marietta college for her PA studies. It's offset with how meager my loans were in general I guess, but I didn't do 6 or 7 years of college either.
I need to really sit down and look at her loans and see if I can even find a way to refinance some of them. I married into this, so I'm not sure of all the details with her interest rates, I just know that if we filed our taxes together with her income and my income her payment would double what it is right now for her IBR plan.
It's again what some people don't realize about how some people get behind even if you do the "right" thing by going to college. Neither my parents nor her parents could afford to give either one of us a single cent to go to college. We both grew up pretty poor. It just seems asinine to me that we basically have kids sign their lives over at 18 for 100's of thousands of dollars in loans that puts them behind the eight ball before they even finish college because that is what "you are supposed to do". That's not even factoring in the people who get degrees who pay peanuts once they graduate. My wife was lucky to make north of 80K right out of PA school.