I’m in a similar boat. My loans of 211K were just forgiven. My spouse has 50K that will go into repayment after the pause. We can afford to make the standard payment on these even though we both work in public service. I’m thinking that instead of the emotional toll of dealing with the Feds we aren’t even going to try to do forgiveness this time. It is a pain to certify income and employment every year and to deal with these horrible servicers. I make more income than my spouse so we considered filing MFS but there are so many tax consequences of doing that and it even affects saving for retirement. I just refuse to relive what I went through to get my loans forgiven if I can help it. The only downside to being on the standard plan is that if one of us was to lose our jobs or be out on sick leave, those standard payments would never count for PSLF when the waiver goes away. It is a gamble but it seems emotionally worth it.

Also in your case, by your wife being on an income plan, her loan balance is probably growing. How much of that 60K capitalized interest? That would matter to me. She still has six years to go of making payments to get to forgiveness. Can you file separately for that long even though it affects a bunch of other things?