Unlike my last student loan entry, I didn’t want to wait months before providing an update and marking off a major milestone in my student loan repayment history. In fact, I only waited a few days to make this major announcement! Yesterday, I sent off another payment to MOHELA and the payment was enough for my total outstanding balance to drop down to approximately $21 thousand. If you’ve been following along my repayment story, then you know that this outstanding balance marks a major milestone in my repayment efforts:

One hundred thousand dollars – and that’s just in principal! When you add in the interest that I’ve paid over the last 6+ years of repaying these loans, then the total amount that I’ve given to these student loan companies is somewhere around $135 thousand. Let me rewrite that for added dramatic effect:

I’ve paid out over one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars to student loan companies since graduating from graduate school in 2006.

In many respects, this is utterly disgusting. Just the other day I posted a video of a no-good scumbag scam artist who received $70,000 of free money from the government to go to college. And make no mistake about it (let’s be real here, folks) – this guy received that free money because of his ethnicity and socioeconomic status, period. As a somewhat still young, middle-class, highly educated, intelligent, hard-working, white guy of European descent – I’m screwed in this country. There’s no way I could ever qualify for the race and ethnicity-based free money that the scumbag in that video was able to procure. But, I’ve moved beyond the innate anger that I have about our racist, sexist, class-based system that drives down otherwise good, determined students just because they have light skin and are males.

In another respect, this milestone is a reminder of all the great things that I don’t have right now in my life… and the aggravating comments that I constantly get from friends and coworkers – among others – about how I should do this and do that with my free time (they simply don’t understand).

However, the way I choose to accept reaching this milestone is to redouble my efforts to eliminate the remainder of this debt so I can get on with trying to craft as close to a normal – albeit delayed – life as possible. I’ve had enough of making these damn payments, which are now averaging somewhere around $2,250 per month (it used to be higher, but I had to buy a new car). Imagine your monthly take-home pay. Got that number in your head? Good. Now imagine deducting $2,250 right off the top of it (before any other expense). How much does that suck?

Trust me – I know.

So… hooray (in that crazy Mel Gibson voice) for me for reaching this milestone. The end of the road is drawing near for these loans and I’m going to pick it up so I can get there sooner rather than later. When Christmas 2013 comes around, I don’t want to have to worry about how much of my income needs to be sliced off the top so I can send it off to pay student loans. Enough is enough with this already.

Onward and upward!

Or should that be onward and downward because I’m paying down the loan? Whatever, you get the point that I’m trying to make here.

In May 2006, I graduated from Rutgers University with a Masters Degree and $120,720 in student loan debt. Since I started repaying my student loans in July 2006, I’ve repaid a total of $100 thousand in principal to various lenders including the federal Perkins loan program, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, and CitiBank. I currently owe $21 thousand in principal to the United States Department of Education’s federal Direct Loans program. This loan is serviced by the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority. To date, I’ve repaid over $35 thousand in interest to these lenders. Follow my student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.

As of this coming Monday, I’ll have a remaining student loan balance of approximately $25 thousand. This is a good accomplish and it continues the march toward the next milestone of having just $21 thousand outstanding. Once I hit that milestone later this fall season, I’ll have repaid $100 thousand in student loan principal. Frightening.

There’s no great “rah rah” moment for me to report in this update. No great wisdom to impart to you all during this update. I know that some of you like reading about the little financial details that I track both on a historical and regular basis, so I’ll give you some of those to placate you until next month’s student loan update.

For example, the $25 thousand balance that I’m left with represents about the cost of my student loans through the end of my Sophomore year of college. In other words, I’m currently paying off expenses that I incurred during the 2000 – 2001 academic year. That’s more than a decade ago.

Sucks.

Here’s another little financial detail for you: after Monday’s payment gets processed I’ll be accruing $3.10 in interest costs – daily. That’s right. Everyday of the week, imagine taking three crisp one dollar bills and setting them on fire… then throwing a dime at them in a futile attempt to stop the flame. That’s my daily bleed from paying these student loans. Just to show you how much of a financial strain losing $3.10 each day is, that amount translates to $1,131.50 each year.

If I didn’t make any more payments on this loan (which would be stupid), I’d still be pissing away over $1,100 each year.

And that’s your student loan update for this month. Can you tell that this repayment stuff is getting tiring?

In May 2006, I graduated from Rutgers University with a Masters Degree and $120,720 in student loan debt. Since I started repaying my student loans in July 2006, I’ve repaid a total of $95 thousand in principal to various lenders including the federal Perkins loan program, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, and CitiBank. I currently owe $25 thousand in principal to the United States Department of Education’s federal Direct Loans program. This loan is serviced by the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority. To date, I’ve repaid over $35 thousand in interest to these lenders. Follow my student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.

Even though its been about a month and a half since my last student loan update, I’ve been working at slowly continuing to chip away at the overall debt. At the last update, I still had $28 thousand left outstanding. Today, I’m down to about $26 thousand outstanding. Not so bad for a month and a half.

I’m closing in on another significant milestone with the student loan repayment – the day when I’ve repaid a total of $100,000 in principal. By my calculations (more on those in the next paragraph), I should be making that major payment sometime in the late fall – around late October or November. It’s one of those bizarre milestones where you think to yourself, “Wow. What an accomplishment! Oh shit… I still don’t own a home or have a sufficient retirement fund for someone my age. Damn it…”

With respect to my calculations on this student loan repayment – you all know that I’ve been on a very aggressive repayment schedule up until a few months ago when I was hit with a dead Honda Civic, a need to purchase a brand new car, and a tax bill that wrecked my financial planning. All of those expenses hit between February and early April (when I paid my income taxes). Believe it or not, its taken me about three months to recover from that financial kick in the face. The bad thing about that recovery is that it took about three months. The good thing is that I can get somewhat aggressive again in my repayment of my remaining student loan balance. On that topic (and now that I’m six full years into repayment – two years and seven months into the aggressive repayment), I’m ready to be done with this damn albatross already.

Before I completely finish up my student loan repayment and entries like this one get fewer and fewer on the blog, I’m going to sit down and figure out just how much money I’ve paid/lost in student loan-related payments over the years. Despite my best efforts, I’m going to guess that when all of this is said and done I’ll wind up paying $175,000 in total payments (principal, interest, and consolidation fees). Wonderful. Just f’ing wonderful.

And people out there wonder why people in my generation are putting off major life events like moving to a different part of the country, getting married, starting a family, or buying a house? When I figure out what that “total payment” number is, then you’ll know why people are putting off these major events. Ridiculous.

In May 2006, I graduated from Rutgers University with a Masters Degree and $120,720 in student loan debt. Since I started repaying my student loans in July 2006, I’ve repaid a total of $95 thousand in principal to various lenders including the federal Perkins loan program, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, and CitiBank. I currently owe $26 thousand in principal to the United States Department of Education’s federal Direct Loans program. This loan is serviced by the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority. To date, I’ve repaid well over $30 thousand in interest to these lenders. Follow my student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.