| Zero, thanks to my wonderful parents. |
Ok, then you should pay my car loan and/or small business loan. Is that still myopic? So sick of losers whining about their student loans. Take it up with the radically progressive institutions that are ripping everyone off. |
+10000 |
Yep, because these owed debts aren't being paid back. YOU obviously can't see that the everyday tax payer has to pick up the tab for people borrowing money they can't afford to pay back. No thanks! PAY YOUR OWN WAY. You didn't pay for me. |
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Everybody set up your auto-pay for .25% interest reduction.
We didn’t do this for the last 7 years (well 2 years of it was the National forbearance, so 5 years). I always thought it didn’t make a difference, was afraid of setting it automatically, meaning we wouldn’t pay the extra we really need to pay. We always pay like 2000 extra monthly because the minimums make it rise. But that was stupid, I don’t know why we didn’t do it the first 5 years. I set it up last week. Doesn’t make a massive difference, right?, but I’ll keep every dollar I can. Or maybe it does add up.. I’ll go do some math
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Me again. For example, we’d pay roughly $2400/month even though the minimum was $400. The number is always different depending on other stuff going on for us. So I didn’t see a need to set an autopay. Now I see, set the autopay to minimum for that interest reduction, then it accrues ever-so-slightly less over the month. And, we can put our extra 2,000 or whatever it is on top of that autopay. |
That's federal loans for undergrads. More than that would be private loans, usually co-signed by a parent, parent loans that the parents are expecting the student to pay, and/or grad school loans. I generally think if you borrowed money you should pay it back. We made choices to go to lower cost schools to avoid loans so I don't have a lot of sympathy for those who took the line that you should just take out loans to go to a higher ranked school. Or, in the last couple years, said just borrow money because it will be forgiven. But, I also think there should be resources for bankruptcy or resetting to a lower interest rate and those who qualify for public service forgiveness should absolutely get that. I know a lot of people were screwed over by that process. |
| $25K in loans left. Payment is $485/month, but will pay $900/month. HHI is $820K. |
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Not all of what you see above is for undergrad.
Also, our ballooned in the first two years when it was harder to make payments - lower salary the first year, still recovering from moving and setting up a small home. Last, there is some compounding process that happens when the payments start. Where we borrowed 125k (some undergrad, some post grad for 2 people), at its highest, it was 180k+
We now have it down to 100k and are making fast progress. |
Is there something special about that number? |
It’s not that interesting, but since it’s a funny number I’ll answer
We pay $3k/month usually. Especially during the pause. We got to 100k, and decided to stop about there for a few months, pick it back up this month. It was pretty much dead on 100k, so we were going to make it 100k exact. At the last second we joked, one more penny to make it 99,999.99. So it has been sitting there since July. |
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DH and I are both non-profit attorneys. HHI is $460k.
We had the balance of our loans forgiven last year under the public interest program (PSLF). He had $40k forgiven, I had $45k forgiven. It has been amazing to get that weight lifted. I am a huge fan of forgiveness in exchange foe 10 years of non-profit or government work. My DH and I are both life-long public interest lawyers - 15+ years in non-profit or government. We started off earning $50k each in the DOJ Honors program, when we could have gone the Biglaw route (then starting at $125k). |
You aren't exactly keeping money given the interest you are paying over the years and then having to pay them off when your kids are in college makes it even harder. |
At your income level, that's really gross you are getting loan forgiveness. That's not exactly a real non-profit salary. |
I knew someone would come on and say this. We each paid our loans for 10+ years before forgiveness - so we both paid the full principal borrowed and then some. We were also earning very little ($50k each) for years while we handled our loan payments. For years we earned way less that our counterparts (and now really make peanuts compared to my law school counterparts who are all now partners at firms). You need to encourage good attorneys to enter the public sector in some way. The pay is peanuts compared to what we can earn privately. We only recently started earning >$300k - and trust me, we are real non-profit attorneys. I have zero “fancy” resources at my disposal for the amount of work/hours I put into my work. My work makes a real difference. It’s only with seniority that they pay has caught up. |