Another Two Grand Knocked Off the Student Loan Balance – More to Come!

Even though its been about a month and a half since my last student loan update, I’ve been working at slowly continuing to chip away at the overall debt. At the last update, I still had $28 thousand left outstanding. Today, I’m down to about $26 thousand outstanding. Not so bad for a month and a half.

I’m closing in on another significant milestone with the student loan repayment – the day when I’ve repaid a total of $100,000 in principal. By my calculations (more on those in the next paragraph), I should be making that major payment sometime in the late fall – around late October or November. It’s one of those bizarre milestones where you think to yourself, “Wow. What an accomplishment! Oh shit… I still don’t own a home or have a sufficient retirement fund for someone my age. Damn it…”

With respect to my calculations on this student loan repayment – you all know that I’ve been on a very aggressive repayment schedule up until a few months ago when I was hit with a dead Honda Civic, a need to purchase a brand new car, and a tax bill that wrecked my financial planning. All of those expenses hit between February and early April (when I paid my income taxes). Believe it or not, its taken me about three months to recover from that financial kick in the face. The bad thing about that recovery is that it took about three months. The good thing is that I can get somewhat aggressive again in my repayment of my remaining student loan balance. On that topic (and now that I’m six full years into repayment – two years and seven months into the aggressive repayment), I’m ready to be done with this damn albatross already.

Before I completely finish up my student loan repayment and entries like this one get fewer and fewer on the blog, I’m going to sit down and figure out just how much money I’ve paid/lost in student loan-related payments over the years. Despite my best efforts, I’m going to guess that when all of this is said and done I’ll wind up paying $175,000 in total payments (principal, interest, and consolidation fees). Wonderful. Just f’ing wonderful.

And people out there wonder why people in my generation are putting off major life events like moving to a different part of the country, getting married, starting a family, or buying a house? When I figure out what that “total payment” number is, then you’ll know why people are putting off these major events. Ridiculous.

In May 2006, I graduated from Rutgers University with a Masters Degree and $120,720 in student loan debt. Since I started repaying my student loans in July 2006, I’ve repaid a total of $95 thousand in principal to various lenders including the federal Perkins loan program, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, and CitiBank. I currently owe $26 thousand in principal to the United States Department of Education’s federal Direct Loans program. This loan is serviced by the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority. To date, I’ve repaid well over $30 thousand in interest to these lenders. Follow my student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.