The LOANiest Number

So, this post is going to cover the bane of every college grad's existence.  The L-word.

Loans.

As I said before, I have about 80,000 in loans to repay.  It's actually a couple thousand more but I figure that's a nice round number.  Now, the average loan repayment plan is 10 years in length.  BEFORE including the ever accruing interest, for me, that works about to be:

 $80,000 / (10 years x 12 months/year) = $666.66 per month.

What an evil number.  My undergrad loan, after making a voluntary payment a few days ago (the reason it's voluntary will be explained shortly) is under the $18,000 mark.  It's $17,751 and some odd cents.  So, working the calculation for this loan alone and accounting for the fact that it's been in repayment for about a year now, they want $217 a month in order for me to have it paid off by the magic 10 year mark.  Okay, that's cool.  But, I don't want be dealing with this when I'm in my 30s.  My goal is to have this one paid off in 3 years.  Why 3 years?  Because 1 year would make me broke and in 5 years I will be 30 (I'm 25 now if you're like me and can do complex math and simple math skills disappears to make room for it).

I have a friend who is doing a blog with the goal of paying off her under grad loan in 1 year.  If you're interested, her blog is here. I thought about challenging her to see which of us can pay off our undergrad loan faster but that might be a bad idea since:
1. Hers is about $7,000 less
2. She deferred her graduate loan (which is the same amount as mine by the way) for a year to do this.
3. It would just be mean if the winner bragged to the loser
4. I think she would win

Okay, so 3 years.  Adding money for evil interest that works out to roughly:

$17,800 / (3 years x 12 months.year) = $494.44 per month

Still a good chunk of change.  On average right now, I pay $200 a month.  Now before you say that an extra $300 can't be that bad if I have a graduate degree (or will very shortly anyways), I am also paying $820 a month for my graduate loan which sucks and I'm not even going to touch trying to get that one done early for a couple more years.  That might deserve it's own blog in a little bit.  So with my income right now, kind of stretching it there.  Will I try to do it? Yes.

Now to a point I mentioned earlier about my VOLUNTARY loan payment this month.  My loan company seems to have the repayment bills set up so that if I pay more than necessary one month, they will take that amount OFF the next bill.  As opposed to making all the subsequent payments less which I don't know if that would make me feel better or not since it would probably only take $1 each.  Since I've been a good girl with making payments over the required amount, added the fact that payments were being made while it was in deferment, I haven't had to pay an official full amount payment to date, about $217 I think because that's currently the amount I owe May 1st.  Yep, I technically don't have to make another payment towards that loan until May if I don't want to.

So there you have it, my official undergrad payoff goal.

I'm thinking my next post will shake things up a bit and post about my current job search and application woes.