How Much of the Student Loan Have We’ve Paid Off?
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It's been a bit since I shared our student loan balance and since there is a new provider, I'll update you on how things are going.
There is change with payments that the new loan service provider notified me about this week.
Adjusting Our Student Loan Payments
When we were with the old student loan service provider, when we made extra payments, it pushed back our due dates for the payment.
The automatic debits from them actually stopped because we were 3 years ahead of the schedule.
It felt great that we were making progress, but it meant we had to schedule put going payments from our bank to get them sent. Well, that's all about to end.
Starting in May, we will be having auto debits from our joint checking again. I went ahead and updated our banking system for the new change.
Looking at the balance, we're happy to see this student loan keep decreasing. It's been a fun couple of months as we've been trying to knock down this debt.
Paying Down the Student Loan
Since January we have sent in scheduled payments of at least $330/month. As part of The Debt Movement, we added the student loan to the pile to encourage us to be more aggressive with paying this debt down.
When we started this year, our balance stood at $19,453.14. During the month, we made our regular payment and we made one extra payment.
The Debt Movement started in February and at the time the balance was $19,222.62. We sold the VW Jetta and used a portion of that money to pay down the student loan.
March was a good month as our balance started off with $17,471.93 and we used most of our tax refund to knock another chunk off the the loan balance.
Now that April is winding down, where do we stand on the student loan? I logged into my account today and found the balance now $15,091.01.
We've paid off $4,362.13 off since January 1st. That means we decreased our student loan balance by 25%!
What's the plan now? We don't expect any bonuses or bumps in income in the near future.
Our progress is going to have to come from making the extra snowball and snowflake payments.
We've automated a minimum, but if we do get extra money in our budget it will go towards reducing the student loan even faster.
Thoughts on Paying Down Student Loans
I'd love to hear from you about paying down debt. What are your debt reduction goals for this year? Looking for strategies to reduce your debt?
Please check out my debt reduction tips I’ve used as well as some strategies that have worked for other people.
Awesome! My student loans should hopefully be gone by next month, and I am oh so excited 🙂
Only one more month with your student loans? That’s great news!
Congratulations, Elle! My husband and i paid off our debt a long time ago and it allowed us to save enough to pay cash for most everything. It was only recently that we’ve borrowed when the interest rate was lower than what we would lose if we removed the money from our investment portfolio. Even though it is the right thing to do, we still don’t like it.
We can’t wait until we are debt free. So glad you got your debts paid off years ago.
Well, we are a lot older than you are. There were times when I didn’t think it would happen. You are way ahead of where we were at your age.