Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Student Loans – Update and a Plan

July 25, 2011 by Beth

As you may have seen my complain about from time to time here on NTBTWK, I wracked up a crazy amount of student debt while going through school. $71,504 to be exact. Now, when you consider that I was in post-secondary education for 11 years, it’s not actually that much – a mere $6,500 per year on average ((And that’s pretty much tuition fees and books most years. Jobs and scholarships were added into the mix so I could do things like eat food and not be homeless.)) or $5,500 per letter I get to put after my name. And, as you’ve also seen me talk about here from time to time, I’m paying off my student loans as aggressively as I can, while still trying to have some sort of balance in my life ((Some money to student loans, some money for laser eye surgery. Some money to student loans, some money for braces.)). I’m making sacrifices – not doing nearly as much travel as I would like, and renting a place in Surrey, where it’s much cheaper than Vancouver – as I’m putting the money I’m not spending on those things towards my student loans instead. The sooner I get them paid off, the sooner I don’t have to make giant student loan payments every month. Short-term pain for long-term gain, right?

Well, I did some number crunching on the weekend and I think I have a plan in place that means that I can have my student loans paid off by the end of next summer! When I first started paying off my loans, the loans were set up such that it would take me 9.5 years to pay off. That was April 2007, which means I was scheduled to have them paid off by October 2016! A combination of falling interest rates and me putting extra money that I have made towards the loans sure looks like it’s paying off!

At the moment, I have $24,000 left to pay. I currently pay $1,400 per month, meaning that I’ll pay $16,800 in a year. This, of course, leaves $7,200, plus all the interest on my balance ((Interest on my student loans is currently 5.5%, except for a small chunk that is 4.5%)), unaccounted for, if I wanted to have my student loans paid off in a year. Fortunately, I have a some contract work that I’m doing and I figure that I can put all of the after-tax amount I make onto my students loans. But even that isn’t quite enough, so I’ve decided to do something drastic.

Ages ago, I started saving for a trip for my 40th birthday. Every two weeks, ~$25 is automatically transferred into a separate account that I’ve been using to save up for this trip. The idea, of course, is that you don’t really even notice $25 missing and then all this money piles up. Well, I can verify that such a system works, as I really have mostly forgotten that that money was sitting there. Until, that is, I realized how close I was to being within a year of my student loan freedom date, and then, all of the sudden, I noticed this $2,700 sitting in my birthday trip account that looked like something that I could really put to better use. I mean, I’m still a good 5.5 years away from my 40th birthday – that’s plenty of time to save! So I made the executive decision that I will take that $2,700 and I will give it to the student loan peeps and I will be that much closer to having this student loan monkey off my back. And then we will party.

Image Credit: Posted by vipez on Flickr.

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