Student Loan Payments--Share your progress and accomplishments!

bmo88 · June 2015

I was excited to check my balance today and realize I am down to $933.87 (originally $11,600). It feels so real that my student loans will be paid off within 2 months and they will be gone forever. I have been hurling extra money at them for a while and it's finally feeling like it was worth it.

Now, we will be focusing on DH's remaining $20,000 (originally $28,000). But by snowballing my original payment into his will allow us to pay $1,000 a month on his loans and expedite it's repayment

I am really glad we are taking this approach, though it can definitely feel like debt fatigue at times. We have been paying on our student loans for 3 1/2 years and hoping to eliminate them within the next two years. We still have other debt (car loan and mortgage), but getting student loans out of the way will be a huge relief and one step closer toward starting a family for us.

Share your progress and accomplishments!

als1982 · June 2015

Woohoo!! Congratulations! We are taking a similar approach. I paid my loans off last month, which started at about $21,000. Now we're working on H's $58,000 and have a stretch goal of getting it paid off in 16-18 months. It felt great to get rid of mine, but it's going to be life changing to be rid of his.

Mustard76 · June 2015

Congratulations! AW: as of yesterday, I am PAID IN FULL!! It is such a relief! I started at close to $20k, and only started making a "livable" wage 5-ish years ago. I graduated 9 years ago, so I am just relieved to have them paid off before the standard 10 year target. I'm so happy to be consumer debt free, at least until we buy our next house.

LibbyL123 · June 2015

I started at 54k
Just recently got serious once balance was down to 25k. In the last 6 months focused hard and balance or down to $10500
Should be paid off by January 2016. Then snowballing that money to pay off our van. Then debt free but the house!!! Overall 6 year plan to be completely debt free !!!

hoffse · June 2015

Since it's now June, we're 6.5-7.5 years away from having our student loan debt paid off.

Then again, we started with about $210K of combined law school debt. So even without interest we're averaging about $30K/year. Paying it off that quickly is plenty fast for me, given the balance we were starting with.

bmo88 · June 2015

hoffse said:

Since it's now June, we're 6.5-7.5 years away from having our student loan debt paid off.

Then again, we started with about $210K of combined law school debt. So even without interest we're averaging about $30K/year. Paying it off that quickly is plenty fast for me, given the balance we were starting with.

@hoffse: Nice job on getting your loans paid off so quickly considering the amount you are paying back. I know quite a few people with $100-$200k in student debt, but got a degree that wouldn't lead to a high paying job and therefore aren't able to pay it back quickly. But I also know people who make very high salaries with similar debt but only pay the minimum because they want to "live their life." While I can understand it to some point, it's insane how much interest they are going to pay back!

simplyelise · June 2015

I'm not sure what DH's loans were when he graduated in 2012, but when we got married last October, the balance was 54k. We are at 34k as of today. We're doing about 2500 a month, just under 50% of our takehome, so we should be done July 2016.

I'm so so glad we'll have these over and done with in the next year. DH regrets his graduate degree so much, so it will be great to have payments over and done with. And we don't have any other debt, so I'm excited to move on to our other priorities next year, putting money towards retirement, saving for a downpayment, etc.

als1982 · June 2015

Can we make this a weekly or monthly check in? The Mr. Money Mustache forum does that and it's super motivating, but I much prefer this board and tracking my progress here!

Xstatic3333 · June 2015

Good job everyone! Some impressive repayments here!

My SL progress is much less exciting. H just consolidated his loans with Great Lakes to get better customer service than he was from Navient. Since his loans are only 2.5%, however, we probably won't accelerate them until both my loans and our PMI are gone. He has just under $40,000.

My loans are at 6.9%. I'm currently paying the minimum but do plan to increase that once we are back at our e-fund target and/or if my raise goes through. I have around $31,000.

I did pay off my 9% PLUS loan right after graduation, but because I used windfall money it feels more like luck than an accomplishment.

I confess that a desire to "live our lives" definitely comes into play with our SL approach, but we did also kick up our retirement quite a bit this year so it's not all bad. You all are inspring though, and I do sometimes toy with wanting the loans gone quicker.

bcarb · June 2015

Last year I was blessed to be accepted in my work's Student Loan repayment program. They pay up tp 10k of your balance and thankfully I had about 9200 remaining. Those will be paid off at the end of the year. Only part that stinks is I pay taxes on it, which brings my take home pay down 100 dollars a paycheck, but will be worth it to not have those loans anymore! H's loans are about 11 or 13k, we just pay the minimum on those & in no hurry to pay them off. I would rather pay my car off first(so close)! and I agree with PP, the desire to Live our lives comes into play with our SL approach as well.

cbee817 · June 2015

DH had $37,000 in SL from undergrad (BA in English) in 2006. We paid that off in January 2013 and during that time, we also paid for his grad school classes (MA in Education - mandatory to teach at a public school in our state) in cash. He usually took 2 classes at a time while working and also loaded up on summer sessions (which were cheaper).

I was fortunate enough to have a 50% scholarship and 50% from my mom for undergrad (BA in Mathematics) and my employer paid for all but $921 in admin fees for my master's degree (MA in Economics). All 4 degrees came from our state university- the largest and best school in our area.

We were very lucky with having such little SL debt for 4 degrees and have it paid off. We're now able to contribute to 529 plans for the girls so they can hopefully have minimal SL debt (at least for undergrad) as well.

simplyelise · June 2015

Question on "live our lives"... For you, what is an acceptable sacrifice for what payoff?

For us, we could have paid about $620 a month (12% of takehome) for 10 years to pay off the student loans. Instead, we are paying $2500 (49% of takehome) and anything extra for 18 months to have them done. That's 8.5 years of debt freedom that we get for our sacrifice.

In terms of what we're sacrificing, I suppose we are delaying vacations for 18 months, delaying buying a house or new cars, missing one year of retirement investments, living with our hodge podge of used and hand-me-down furniture, and sometimes saying "no" to invitations out.

But I certainly don't feel like we are waiting to live our lives. We get to go on a date every month, we make good food, as long as we know about it more than a couple weeks in advance, DH can golf with friends (on groupon), we can visit any of our parent groups (2-4 hours away) for a weekend trip, and we can still give to church and give gifts to friends for events.

Obviously everyone's situations are different, not the least of differences is debt to income ratio, which would obviously affect the length of your sacrifices. For us, our starting debt amount last October was 85% of our yearly takehome.

So what level of sacrifice are you satisfied with leveraging for your payoff?

Xstatic3333 · June 2015

simplyelise said:

Question on "live our lives"... For you, what is an acceptable sacrifice for what payoff?

For us, we could have paid about $620 a month (12% of takehome) for 10 years to pay off the student loans. Instead, we are paying $2500 (49% of takehome) and anything extra for 18 months to have them done. That's 8.5 years of debt freedom that we get for our sacrifice.

In terms of what we're sacrificing, I suppose we are delaying vacations for 18 months, delaying buying a house or new cars, missing one year of retirement investments, living with our hodge podge of used and hand-me-down furniture, and sometimes saying "no" to invitations out.

But I certainly don't feel like we are waiting to live our lives. We get to go on a date every month, we make good food, as long as we know about it more than a couple weeks in advance, DH can golf with friends (on groupon), we can visit any of our parent groups (2-4 hours away) for a weekend trip, and we can still give to church and give gifts to friends for events.

Obviously everyone's situations are different, not the least of differences is debt to income ratio, which would obviously affect the length of your sacrifices. For us, our starting debt amount last October was 85% of our yearly takehome.

So what level of sacrifice are you satisfied with leveraging for your payoff?

Good question. For us, this is pretty circumstantial. We got married at ages 28 and 34, right after I finished grad school. Immediately after the wedding I got a job and H got his first "good paying" job, and that is the first time in our lives we starting giving MM stuff any thought whatsoever. We paid off our CC debt quickly at that point using some saved money and some wedding money.

With a total of $74,000 between us, and an income of around $85,000, it would take us a good few years to pay off the loans even at high intensity. Even if we just wanted to tear into mine ($31,000) it would probably take a couple of years. Now, I know I mention frequently that I have an expensive hobby (diving) that brings me great joy. This hobby is incompatible with pregnancy and very tough to do with young kids. Travel is also important to us, and since our area has a high cost of daycare will be very difficult once we have kids. I'm now 30 and we'll start TTC soon. For us, though I might make a big sacrifice for a given three years of my life to attack the loans, these particular three years (28-31) were not ones I was willing to give up travel and diving for given our overall finances and DTI. If I was 22 it might be a different scenario.

Needless to say, with TTC on the horizon cash savings is a big current priority.

We are also very behind on our retirement, which is pretty scary to me. We are behind on any measure of retirement saving targets, though we do have some (thanks for dragging me to Fidelity kicking and screaming when I was 20, Mom!) I think that there is no point to doing a TMM-type plan unless you fully commit, and we weren't willing to stop retirement. H is now giving 16% if you count his pension fund (6% is to a 457), and I am up to 10%. We can comfortably do this, travel some, and keep our hobbies, and so we don't feel a burning need to attack the SLs. Like you, we have occasional date nights and eat good food at home, but we don't spend much on shopping or non-essential home upgrades.

Every couple and their priorities are different, and it is interesting to see different thought processes. I think a lot is what you were raised with, too. My parents saved a ton for retirement and paid off their house early, but also had car loans and used credit cards. I just don't have the debt aversion that many, understandably, have.

brij2006 · June 2015

We started with $43,366.50 in February 2015, and are now down to 21,869. I'm so ready to kick Sallie Mae out of my house!!!!

To answer @simplyelise question, we're willing to sacrifice many many things to get this debt (and all of our debt) gone. I'm so over it! We live on a very strict budget, live with minimal items, and do less "entertainment" and traveling than we used to. The way I look at it, it's a small amount of time to sacrifice things and get this finished off. The more we sacrifice to put toward debt, the quicker we will be out of it and living the way we want to.

hoffse · June 2015

simplyelise said:

Question on "live our lives"... For you, what is an acceptable sacrifice for what payoff?

For us, we could have paid about $620 a month (12% of takehome) for 10 years to pay off the student loans. Instead, we are paying $2500 (49% of takehome) and anything extra for 18 months to have them done. That's 8.5 years of debt freedom that we get for our sacrifice.

In terms of what we're sacrificing, I suppose we are delaying vacations for 18 months, delaying buying a house or new cars, missing one year of retirement investments, living with our hodge podge of used and hand-me-down furniture, and sometimes saying "no" to invitations out.

But I certainly don't feel like we are waiting to live our lives. We get to go on a date every month, we make good food, as long as we know about it more than a couple weeks in advance, DH can golf with friends (on groupon), we can visit any of our parent groups (2-4 hours away) for a weekend trip, and we can still give to church and give gifts to friends for events.

Obviously everyone's situations are different, not the least of differences is debt to income ratio, which would obviously affect the length of your sacrifices. For us, our starting debt amount last October was 85% of our yearly takehome.

So what level of sacrifice are you satisfied with leveraging for your payoff?

For us, the extra debt payments come after completing virtually all of our other goals. Our retirement comes before anything else. Our house comes next - H and I are both very much affected by our living space, and our day-to-day happiness matters more to us than paying off student loans a few months earlier.

DR would have a fit, but even travel comes ahead of extra debt payments for us. That's because we are in a situation where we can afford to go to interesting places and see some of the world before we have kids or are old/tired. This part of our lives in unique and relatively time-limited, so we're taking advantage of it.

Finally, if/when we have kids, their college savings and activities will come before extra debt payments. We recognize that this is not the advice most financial planner give, but even with that it won't change our current timeline. So yeah, I would rather sock away $500/month into a 529 than add $500/month to our debt.

Our debt is also low-interest. All of our loans are under 5%. I once looked at how long it would take if we did forego these other things (except retirement - I can't ever get behind that), and I think it would save us something like 2 years if we stopped the home improvements and travel. That trade-off is not at all worth it to us.

But we just have different priorities. We own our decisions on this, and it works for us. I mean, it will be great when the debt is done but to be honest... I don't really know what we would do with that extra money in our cash flow each month. Probably give more away, probably increase our investments... but I don't really see us spending much more than we spend now.

KAdams767 · June 2015

simplyelise said:

Question on "live our lives"... For you, what is an acceptable sacrifice for what payoff?

For us, we could have paid about $620 a month (12% of takehome) for 10 years to pay off the student loans. Instead, we are paying $2500 (49% of takehome) and anything extra for 18 months to have them done. That's 8.5 years of debt freedom that we get for our sacrifice.

In terms of what we're sacrificing, I suppose we are delaying vacations for 18 months, delaying buying a house or new cars, missing one year of retirement investments, living with our hodge podge of used and hand-me-down furniture, and sometimes saying "no" to invitations out.

But I certainly don't feel like we are waiting to live our lives. We get to go on a date every month, we make good food, as long as we know about it more than a couple weeks in advance, DH can golf with friends (on groupon), we can visit any of our parent groups (2-4 hours away) for a weekend trip, and we can still give to church and give gifts to friends for events.

Obviously everyone's situations are different, not the least of differences is debt to income ratio, which would obviously affect the length of your sacrifices. For us, our starting debt amount last October was 85% of our yearly takehome.

So what level of sacrifice are you satisfied with leveraging for your payoff?

Obviously it depends on personal situation, but for me, my loan payment is such a blip on my radar, I wouldn't sacrifice much to pay them early. But my interest rate and minimum payment are both low.

Leaving the fun stuff like travel and other stuff out of it, I would be in a worse financial situation now if I had diverted my savings for the past 7 years to my loans rather than a down payment on my house, retirement, and regular investment savings. I would not sacrifice any of those things to pay my loans off early. At this point, honestly, the only point I consider paying them early is with bonus money. I see no need to cut into my regular budget to pay extra on them right now.

vlagrl29 · June 2015

I am one of those that isn't in a hurry to pay ours off. We are currently paying a little more than the minimum, but aren't dumping all of our excess into them. For me it's not really about "living our lives" but to be able to still continue to put money in savings and contribute to retirement. One day DH will need a new car and I want to save money to do some upgrades to the house (minimal landscaping, hardwood floors, and finished basement). Considering my loans are our only debt at the moment I don't feel bad about it. Also the interest rate is 2.85%, now if the interest was much higher I would probably consider paying them off sooner.

FirstMate06 · June 2015

My SLs started at $32,500 in 2010 and my H had $76,000 in 2010. I was fortunate enough to start working right away and I got mine paid off last year, so I was in debt for 4 years but luckily it was only 2% interest. My H interned for awhile and then started working a good job about 6 months after college which is when he moved into a guest house at his parents' house and basically paid 75% of his take home pay to his SLs; he applied anything leftover after paying his bills and rent to his parents and lived very minimalistic. Since he attacked them so aggressively his debt was paid off super quickly by 2013. I don't think he felt deprived because he was contributing so much to debt because he grew up living a very modest lifestyle and saw no real change in his quality of life.

Together, looking towards our next debt (future mortgage) we are saving up a large DP so that we'll hopefully pay off our mortgage in 15-20 years max. We are really into travel and we haven't been married long so there is a ton of stuff that we want to explore and experience together before we have kids or large expenses like mortgage payments to worry about. I can't see us prioritizing debt payoff over travel, going out to eat or our hobbies (car tools/parts for H and books for me) but I know that we will just budget accordingly to make sure we aren't unnecessarily drawing out our indebtedness nor losing a bunch to interest.

Personally, I'm not very debt averse so I would rather pay the minimum on a (low interest) loan payment and put anything leftover toward other short-term savings goals, retirement or other investments if I had to choose.

als1982 · June 2015

Our financial strategy is centered around 'living our lives' but our hope is by getting rid of debt and amassing wealth during our time as DINKS, we'll have more flexibity and freedom to focus on making a life, not making a living, when we have a family. Essentially, our main focus is mid to long term and not short and immediate.

RosieC18 · June 2015

Our student loan journey has been unusual. H and I both graduated from college debt-free, thanks to scholarships and help from parents. H got a scholarship for his Master's but switched schools mid-way and took out some loans for the second year. We went to the same law school, he took out more loans, but had some savings and help from parents so in total he had about $40k in debt when we graduated in 2013.

I got a full ride for law school, but I took out loans for living expenses, which ended up at $67k. I also got around $55k from my parents that was leftover in my 529 account from undergrad.

I talked it over with my parents and we decided it was better to take out the loans and hold onto the money during school, for a few reasons. I was making more with that money in an index fund than I racked up in interest on the loans and we knew that my school had a public interest loan forgiveness program. Now that I'm married our income is too high, but I got several thousand dollars of my loans covered. After graduation I paid back all but one of my loans with the 529 money. I have $9,100 left, and H is down to $32k.

We're not prioritizing loans right now. The interest rates are not great, 6.55%, but we have other savings goals that come first, namely buying a house. We're paying a touch over the minimum and throwing as much as we can at a down payment and closing costs for the next 9 months or so. The housing market in our area is so hot we don't want to wait and get priced out. We also want to buy while interest rates are still low.

We're planning on buying based on what we can afford with just H's salary and focusing mine on loans after we buy. If we focused all our savings at our loans we could be done in less than a year. It's not going to make that much of a difference if that year is 2017 instead of 2016, but it will make a difference for our house purchase so that's what makes sense for us.

dragonstarjk · June 2015

I don't have any student loans because I made the decision to get my Associate's degree and then not continue. I am now back in school working on my Bachelor's degree but I am paying for that out of pocket (with help from my employer). That comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages, but I am glad that I don't have student loans because I would have gotten a degree that would not be doing me any good right now! I'm glad I had the foresight to see that and figure out a career before I spent all the money on college.

I am not sure what H's student loan started out as when we started dating; I think it was over $20K. It is down to about $7K right now. Honestly, we are in no hurry to pay this off. It's not very MM, but we are not debt-averse and really don't have a strong drive to be 'debt free'. As long as we don't have bad debts (credit cards) and are paying low interest on what we do have, it doesn't bother me to have debt. We are currently making more of a priority out of saving for retirement-H is really behind, and like @hoffse, we even prioritize traveling over getting the student loan paid off.

If it was really stressing our financial situation, we would probably have a different view.

irishfemme · June 2015

I started with somewhere around $60,000 after undergrad, then took about another $20,000 for my master's. I'm down to under $40,000 total now (about 10 years of payments). I've paid for my doc work as I've gone, so no extra loans, just paying off. I got really serious about paying off my private loans a few years ago and have aggressively paid that down from $38,000 at the time to $19,000 today.

DH had $5200 in a student loan from his undergrad (the first time). We are still paying it off (down to about $1300 now) because it's interest free, as he's back in school now, too.

At this rate, I'm hoping to be out of student loan debt in the next two years, when DH graduates.

ETA: In terms of our priorities right now, this is it. We are really hoping to move to an upgraded home when DH is finished with school and has a full-time (well-paying) job, probably at least tripling our current mortgage. If we can find what we are looking for, the setting of our dream home will also provide us with the vacation lifestyle we want (on the lake). We are both homebodies, so we don't do a whole lot of extensive travel and are very content to hang around the house together. We'd just like to be able to do that on the water some day!

We also make retirement a top priority and have never stopped saving for that. We fully fund our Roth IRAs and DH now contributes to his Roth 401K to the point of the match. I will also get a pension upon retirement, to which both my employer and I contribute. I may set up a 403b at some point, too.

bmo88 · July 2015

-----------------------UPDATE---------------------

I hope everyone's week went well and you have an exciting weekend ahead! My plans for this weekend are: SLEEP! I am exhausted. My new job is kicking my butt after a 70 hour week, but at least I am enjoying (when I am not frustrated/grumpy).

Anyway, it's been almost one month since my last student loan update and I was feeling ambitious with repayment. With my increase in pay, I decided to do a higher payment this month and now my student loan balance is $485.40.

I am actually going to knock that out at the end of this month with my second paycheck (bi-monthly salary), so I will be done with student loans by July 31, 2015!

That's a month earlier than I though in June and 5 months earlier than the pace I was on at the beginning of this year.

ETA: We also made a bigger payment on DH's loans and his balance his now $18,600.

How has everyone's student loan repayment been going?

als1982 · July 2015

Congratulations!! @bmo88

Here are our numbers:

In June we started right around $58,000
Since June 1, we have paid $5,130.40.
During that time period we paid $488.30 in interest (which is CRAZY and why we're working to kill this ASAP)
Our current balance is $53,308.57
At this point, we are on track to have it paid off by October 2016

Good luck and keep trucking everyone!!

simplyelise · July 2015

My last update here was June 21 and we were at 34k. Our principle today is $32,082 and our interest is $47. We have another ~$1300 payment to make this month, so our ending July balance should be about $31,000. We paid about $210 in interest in June and we'll pay about $188 on interest in July.

We are still on track for payoff in July 2016. One more year!!!

abrewer5 · July 2015

Just doubled my student loan payment last month from $150/month to $300/month for the time being, in October (once summer is over) I'll be more than doubling it and start paying $710/month. In addition I do bi-weekly payments which results in one extra payment a year which helps too!

ETA: In January 2016 I'll be upping the payment to $910/month.

My starting balance was $12,188 and my current balance is $9,568.80. I haven't focused a ton on my student loans until now but I am hoping to have them paid off by June 2016.

orangehills · July 2015

I'm paying off my last $750 on my loan in October!! It started as $6000. And then we'll have $3000 left of DH loans, which started as $10,000. I hope to have his paid off by the end of 2016. We're paying off our last car payment in Feb of 2016, so I'll focus on his loan after that!

orangehills · July 2015

I actually just paid off my loan. Now just DH is left. That was a nice feeling

bmo88 · August 2015

Final Update on this thread for me: I got ambitious and wanted it paid off in July, so I made the final payment yesterday. No more student loans for me! Now on to DH's loans.

Best of luck to others on their pay off journey!

Student Loan Payments--Share your progress and accomplishments!

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