How about a Student Loan Debt Recap?

What happens when a blogger has other crap on her mind and doesn't post a monthly student loan debt roundup for eight months?

If you were guessing she goes back to school and saddles on another $50,000 in student loans you would be wrong!

Thank God!

But, no, I assure you, the loans have still been getting paid. And today I decided it was time to see where I'm at. So here goes nothing:



Yes, that's right. Since my last update, I have knocked out close to $7k in student loan debt! The magical less-than-six-figures mark is within my grasp.

NB: The total amount paid off is showing an error right now. If it doesn't update soon I'll fix this later. Rest assured the real number is $6,655.49.

At this rate, I'll be under $105k by the end of the year and will reach the wonderful land of $99k by June, 2013. That's assuming I don't make any adjustments to the payment schedule.

DH and I hope to raise the amount we're paying as soon as we meet other financial goals but it's good to know we're on track. That's all for now!

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

Hello all! Work has finally quieted down and I'm on my way to a week long vacation tomorrow to celebrate a wedding and the anniversary of my own wedding. Can you believe it's been a year already? I can't!

But first, time to update the student loan numbers! I am getting excited to see the numbers slide down closer to the five figure mark. I predict I will owe under $100k in student loans by February 2014. Yay! Maybe I'll do something crazy to celebrate at that point like go back to school (boo!) or have a baby (yikes!).

As of today, I owe $118,180 for my fabulous education, over $800 less than last month.

Here are the details:




Hope you all have a fabulous 4th of July Weekend celebrating America: where anyone can get a higher education. :-)

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

Another month, another reduction in student loan debt.

I want to start throwing more money at the Perkins loan but we're still adjusting to our new budget and paying off some other debt so we're currently just paying $200 a month. I still think I can knock it out in 2011 somehow. It will feel awesome to only have two payments to make each month instead of three.

My husband is enjoying his new job. His travel schedule is a little crazy right now so we're adjusting to that as well. Just got back from an excellent Memorial Day weekend camping.

Here are the stats for this month:

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

Hi everyone and a Happy Royal Wedding day to you! Even though I live across the pond I still woke up at 5 a.m. to watch the festivities live (two hours earlier than I woke up on my own wedding day haha).

Since tomorrow is a Saturday and I will be celebrating some big news with my own handsome husband I decided to do my student loan debt roundup a day early. I'm happy to report that I am finally in the $110's!

Here are the numbers:




And stay tuned for some exciting news in the S.N. family!

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

I'm on the countdown to being in the $110's instead of the $120's in student loan debt. Oh for the day that it will be under six figures. I hope I'll still have some readers out there to celebrate with me when it hits a big fat zero. :-)

Unfortunately, a $200 payment I made a few days ago to my Perkins loan hasn't shown up yet so it looks the balance has increased instead of decreased. :-(

The good news, as always, is that the overall balance has gone down and I now owe $120,793.25 in student loans!

Here are the details:

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

I took a mini break from blogging as I've been so busy with work and some side hustles as my friend J. Money over at Budgets Are Sexy calls them. Hopefully a few will pay off. I'll keep you posted. :-)

Also there's some family financial news in the works (no we're not having a baby!) that I will share when it becomes official. Cross your fingers for us.

But I couldn't not do my monthly student loan debt roundup as I so look forward to seeing the numbers go down every month. Right now my current student loan balance is $121,418.12 - the lowest it's ever been!





I'm also happy to report that Defaulted Student Loan's balance is now at less than what I borrowed - woot woot! That makes three loans out of six that I've actually beaten back the capitalized interest they don't seem to tell you too much about when you take out the loans. Hopefully the Private Undergrad Loan will hit this milestone this year as well.

Getting married meant I lost most of my interest deduction on our taxes (boo) so out of the thousands of bucks in interest I paid last year, I think I got to deduct $400.

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

Wow, January flew by. Snow, work, snow, fun, life, snow.

All the while, reducing my student loan balance. As of today, I owe $122,218.97!




Here's hoping 2011 means the end of the Perkins loan! It's getting smaller and smaller!

Monthly (and Annual) Student Loan Debt Roundup

Posting this a day early as New Year's revelry plans are taking us out of town to visit friends in a few hours. The numbers are a little skewed on the Perkins loan because I paid them $225 and they must not have calculated this month's interest yet because it is showing a reduction of $220. Wouldn't that be nice?

This time last year I owed $132,872.72. As of today, my current debt stands at $123,010.35 - a reduction of nearly $10k! At my current rate of payment I will have all of my student loans paid off in a little over 11 years....but I hope to have them paid off in 8 years.

In October of this year I paid off my Law School loan, a loan given to me straight from the school at a killer interest rate of 8%. Now that it's gone I am attacking my Perkins loan, which is my highest interest and lowest balance loan standing at a rate of 5% and less than $7k remaining. I hope to somehow figure out a way to kill this loan too in 2011.

Here are the totals:



I hope everyone has a great New Year's!

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

Where did November go so fast?! DH and I had a great Thanksgiving with our families. We had a great system this year where we were able to spend time with everyone we wanted to see and not feel rushed or spend half the vacation in traffic. We even baked our first cheesecake together. It's nice to be able to start new traditions now that we're officially a married couple. We're putting up our Christmas tree soon - I can't wait!

But now onto the juicy stuff.

My student loan debt is.....$123,863.06 - the lowest it's ever been since graduation! (That's my new saying - it's positive, right?)

I had gotten used to seeing a four figure reduction in recent months when I was attacking the Law School Loan so this roundup seems lame in comparison, however I am working with a reduced snowball now that I am trying to max out my Roth I.R.A. Unfortunately I can't do everything at the same time.

At least the numbers are still going down. :-)

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

I realize it's not officially the end of the month, but I assume you the reader want to read a blog post on Halloween as much as I want to write one. And I was excited to write this roundup as it's the first ever with a zero in a "amount owed" column due to the glorious fact that I paid off one of my student loans earlier this month.

And I wanted to share something I probably should have looked into earlier as it has previously taken me about 30 minutes of research to determine how much of my federal loans were applied to each year of study. Well, apparently if you go to the National Student Loan Database you can find all this info in a nifty little chart like this one that shows how much you borrowed each year:

It's small but organized and you can get your very own at the Department of Education website (minus the ghost). Anyway, it reminds me that nearly two years after writing the post about still paying off my freshman year of college that I am still, in fact, underwater on my federal student loans. I am going to calculate how long it will be before I am above water but I've already done a lot of math today. It's not like I'm snowballing the loans by year of study since I am paying the highest interest rate first, but still I want to know these milestones.

So here are this month's totals, knocking out over $1200 in debt:

Happy Halloween everyone!

P.S. if you are looking really closely, yes I made a math error in last month's post, which frustrated me all day long as things weren't adding up. I'm working on fixing it now. :-)

I Paid Off My Law School Loan!

Only one of them. Don't anybody get too excited! I still have five left to pay off.

I've been waiting to post this for days! As you could tell from my last "where it went" I made an extra big payment to my Law School Loan courtesy of the extra money I was able to earn doing some outside work. After I made the payment I logged into my account for the next couple of days to see when the account would say zero. Instead, I owed $3.11 in accrued interest. And so I paid that and then waited some more. Finally, I am able to share this exciting image:

And as luck would have it, the smallest of my student loans also had the highest interest rate. 8% is wack. I'm SO glad it's gone. This means in addition to paying off the closed credit card account back in April I have lowered my monthly debt obligations by $165 in 2010! Plus I'm about to start saving $35 a month in health care costs, which effectively means I have $200 more a month to work with.

Getting rid of this loan was on both my 2009 AND 2010 resolutions so I'm glad to meet this goal at last. Freedom!

I started paying this loan in November of 2008 and had 60 months to pay it off. By knocking it out in 23 months I saved $286 in interest. That doesn't seem like much but I'll take any victory I can get at this point.

Now time to snowball my Perkins Loan!

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

I can't believe September has come and gone so quickly. It seems like just yesterday I was posting August's student loan debt roundup. Yet happily I was able to decrease the balance by over $1000 this month. Sometimes I make charts and spreadsheets and see how fast I could get rid of all my student loan debt and I get encouraged...until I realize that would mean ignoring all of our other financial goals. It's frustrating.

The good news, however, is that I am achingly close to paying off my first student loan! Because of my increased snowball, the balance stands at a measly $434.41. I hope knocking it out will give me the momentum I need to push harder at attacking the rest of the balances. (I also would like a raise but that's a whole other story.)

Anyway so here's my updated chart:



Thanks for reading and I hope we can celebrate the payoff of loan #1 soon!

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

Hello out there in blog land. I'm back and married and anxious to tell about my wedding, my fabulous honeymoon, my fine new husband and our married financial adventures. First, however, I bring you a monthly student loan debt roundup - only a day late after skipping the month of July.

Lest you think I ran off and changed my identity to avoid paying student loans forever, I am happy to report that in the past two months I have cleared over $1500 in debt. Here are the stats:



As you can see, since I started this spreadsheet on July 1, 2009 the total amount of student loan debt I've eliminated is $10,845.32!

Stay tuned for more in the chronicles of Sallie's Niece, the married version.

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

Wow, how is it the end of June already? Do you know what this means? This is my last monthly student loan debt roundup as a single gal! Yay!

There probably won't be a July roundup as I will be sitting on a beach in Hawaii next to my new husband, but in the meantime here's the current numbers:

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

Technically Monday is the end of the month, but I'll be enjoying a relaxing day off from work, so I figured I would do my monthly student loan roundup a few days early. It may skew the numbers a bit on the loans where they update the interest daily...but you get to see the basic picture..the balances are going down down down! My law school loan now stands at less than $1000. I can't wait to kiss that sucker goodbye!

Here are this month's numbers:




Have a Happy Memorial Day weekend, everyone!

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

It's everybody's favorite time of the month! Time to do my monthly student loan debt roundup!

I'm happy to say that I am in the $120s! Seeing one digit go down is encouraging - makes me think my desire to not have six figure student loan debt isn't so impossible.

And I'm happy to say that at least two (I think only two) of my loans are now at values of less than what I borrowed! Woo hoo!

Both the Perkins Loan (originally $8800) and the Law School loan (originally $2000) I took out my third year of law school when my scholarship money ran out and I had a tuition deficit to meet. I'm grateful for the loans since they helped me avoid taking out private loans - only needed one of those evil evil private loans in law school, but I want them and their high interest rates to be banished.

So here are this month's numbers:

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

It's the end of March so you know what that means.....time for my monthly student loan debt roundup!

The only thing to note this month is apparently two of my loans (with the same lender) went up instead of down since I just paid them today and it takes the system six days for the payment to kick in. Boo, I don't like to see numbers going the wrong way...especially since I paid double the minimum payment on one of those loans!!!

Oh well, here are the numbers. Almost below $130k, woo hoo! I really want to celebrate when I hit the below six figure mark but maybe I should celebrate smaller goals along the way too. The $120s aren't far away!

Financial Goals for 2010

I've been thinking a lot about planning our lives after the wedding and wanted to make a "Bucket List" of sorts. I've been adding to it in my head for days now...and it was getting a little intimidating. So, first, I thought I would list my immediate financial goals for 2010 - better late than never, right?

1. Get married without going into debt. There is a finite deadline on this goal - a hopefully beautiful Saturday in July and we're pretty confident we can pull it off with our combined savings.

2. Increase 457 Fund contributions. Check! After reading again and again that you should have one year's salary in your retirement funds by age 30 and feeling woefully inadequate at 30 years, 3 months and only around $10,000 saved, I bit the bullet and upped my contributions from 7 to 8%. It only means a $9 biweekly paycheck impact which I can handle.

3. Max out Roth IRA. After the wedding I will start funneling $400 a month towards this goal plus occasional snowflakes so that I can accomplish this goal by April 2011.

4. Buy back pension credits. As I've mentioned before, I have to buy eight months of credits into the pension system because I joined late. It's only going to be a couple hundred dollars and I will start this process right after the wedding as well. This way, I will be set to vest in my pension in August 2011.

5. Eliminate law school loan. This was one of my 2009 resolutions and I'm sad to say it hasn't happened yet, but now I've added the progress bar to the blog and have a plan to knock out the loan by November using some of the money currently going towards Wedding Savings (the rest is going to the Roth IRA).

In short, the rest of 2010 is going to be a great financial year for me. I'm going to marry a great guy, beef up my retirement savings, and start snowballing my student loan debt. Wish me luck!

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup!

Here it is, that time again to do a monthly roundup of my student loan debt.

February has flown by between Valentine's Day, work craziness, a weekend trip, and wedding planning. We are now just four and a half months away from saying "I do" which means lots of planning, decision-making and saving. I'll post more about our plans soon.

But in the meantime, here are the numbers. Freed myself of $741 student loan debt in this short month.

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup!

I can't believe it's already the end of January (or just about) and a whole year since I got engaged.

After lots of waiting and saving, the wedding is less than six months away!!!!

And little by little I've still been chipping away at my student loan debt.

So here is my monthly report card:



That's all for now, stay warm!