Student Loan Update – Another Thousand Down, Much More to Come!

Can you believe it? Can you believe that it has been over two months since my last student loan update? Remember when I wrote that I was going to relax a little bit for the first half of 2011 and make my standard payments to the United States Department of Education (USDOE) student loan that I have outstanding?

Well, I wasn’t lying. 🙂

The reason why the last student loan update was nearly two and a half months ago is because I’ve redirected my financial focus towards rebuilding my savings account. And, thankfully, through my strict budgeting and financial monitoring I’ve been able to quickly build up a nice reserve in my ING Direct savings account. The truth, though, is that I’m only about a third of the way towards my interim savings goal so I’m going to continue banking money in my savings account for the time being.

However, I’ve been considering speeding up my student loan repayment plan. As you might recall, I previously suggested that I would begin putting a great deal of effort into paying off the USDOE student loan come the end of this summer. Well, as I sit here and review my finance and as I begin to finalize my living situation through June 2012, I realize that I’m capable of making additional payments on this student loan to the point where I could make some major progress in depleting this student loan balance by the end of the calendar year.

So… be prepared to read some more student loan updates in the near future! While I can’t guarantee that the updates will be as dramatic as my final few updates while I repaid my NJCLASS student loan from the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, I can absolutely guarantee that I’ll be putting more effort into getting rid of this student loan debt and getting on with bigger and better financial plans!

Be on the lookout – you never know when the next update is coming. Especially when I’m so close to breaking $50 thousand…

In May 2006, I graduated from Rutgers University with a Masters Degree and $120,720 in student loan debt. After completely repaying over $61 thousand in student loans from the federal Perkins loan program, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, and CitiBank, I currently owe $52 thousand to the United States Department of Education’s Direct Loans program. Follow my student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.