So I just wanted to share this breakdown of my student loan balance. I recently paid off the third of seven loans from my college degree. The first one I paid off was not included here, because it was private and not through Navient (Which is now “Aidvantage”). 1-03 was paid off sometime in 2019. I started making payments again when interest started accruing again in September of 2023. When making all payments, I made sure that I made the balance decrease a little bit. I also made sure that my entire payment went to loan 1-05, because it was the lowest balance.
Now that I’ve done this, the next loan to tackle is 1-06, because it has the next lowest balance. I’m not sure interest rates matter all that much, because I’m on an income based repayment plan (IBR). When you are on an IBR, your amortization reverses, and the loan balance goes up and up and up the more payments you make. This is why people really want to smack people when they say “Your education can’t be taken away from you.” You better believe I wish someone could take it away from me! This was the biggest mistake of my life, and if getting a college degree is something that you believe in or do not regret for yourself, then my opinion on mine has no bearing on you. Different paths are for different people, but 25-35 years ago, no one seemed to understand that. When my generation was growing up, we were taught that NOT going to college would cause poverty. Not the other way around. People with balances as much as ten times higher than mine have paid them off multiple times over but still owe more than what they took out. That’s why I’m adamant that it just decrease, even if it decreases by $10-$20. If your balance decreases by even very little, you are doing better than most people my age and younger. And my total balance of only $18K makes it possible for me to do that. Most people owe wayyyyy more than $18K. It’s also important to pay attention to one loan at a time. It surprises me that so many people don’t even know that it’s broken up into 5-10 different loans like this. That is because we were all just hurried into signing dotted lines and weren’t told what we were doing.
If you can manage to pay off the loans within the loans, then if a politician decides to take away IBR, your total monthly payments will be a lot lower than they were when you first graduated. And for people who think loans will be forgiven after “20 years” of IBR- yeah, right when it gets to that point, some politician is going to do away with that too. They lied about so much, how on earth are we supposed to believe that one too? Many people who have applied for the forgiveness that has something to do with being a public servant (forget what it’s called), I mean so many of them get denied for stupid loopholes. It’s never going to happen.
That’s why I’m not sure those “6.8 and 3.4” interest rates matter much. The interest just compounds and compounds and compounds anyway. Regardless, for now, the next one being focused on has a 6.8, so if it’s “the right thing to do” to pay off the higher interest ones first, then I’m still doing that.
These aren’t like regular car loans or mortgages with amortization schedules that have clear plans to pay off. YOU have to figure it out, and that needs to involve not taking advice from a generation that seems like they wanted to see a lot of us fail so they could get a good laugh. If a genie granted me a wish, I actually would wish for my college degree to get repossessed. That would be a dream come true! And it would cause my car (the actual necessity) to be paid off in no time, because the student loans also meant a much higher car payment (or at least it would have if I hadn’t had them when I bought the car).
It just wrecks your life in ways no one would have ever told you when you were young. Whenever people my age and younger talk about how we did what we were told and this is what happened to our lives, we’re laughed at by the same people that gave us the advice we took.
Sometimes it amazes me that I made this happen over the weekend- and I did it by returning to a job I had in my early 20’s that I was told to quit and go back to school. And to top off all of my badness, I ended up romantically involved with my supervisor. It worries me sometimes that someone might have a problem with my life now, but I decided if someone does, then I can put on an extremely straight face and say I charge $20K to take major life advice now. When I told my mom this, she actually said “But some people don’t have $20K.” I laughed. Did she hear what I said? I’m just proud of myself for making another one of these read $0.
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