My last student loan – for my doctorate – showing a zero balance

There you go, folks. That is what it looks like to no longer owe anything in student loans. Not only does it look pretty good, but it feels pretty good, too. Also, here is another screenshot from another part of the student loan website showing the zero balance. Check it out:

My student loans are fully repaid – all of them

As I mentioned the other day, I plan on writing more about student loans from time to time, but I just do not have much more to write about my own repayment journey because it is now, completely, over.

I repaid $244,826.91 in undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral student loans. The debt was comprised of $193,430.16 in loan principal, $14,313.42 in capitalized interest, $2,146.59 in closing and refinancing fees, and $34,936.74 in interest. My lenders included the United States Department of Education’s (USED) Perkins loan program, their subsidized and unsubsidized Direct Loan programs, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority’s NJCLASS program, CitiBank, and SoFi. You can read my entire student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.

A screenshot of my last student loan payment, which went out this morning

Then two years later in August 2015, I started on a new academic journey to earn a doctorate. That quest ended in May 2018 when I earned my doctorate from the University of Southern California at a grand total cost of $89,286.86. I also financed my doctoral program through student loan debt. Repayment on those student loans began in December 2018 and now, just about two years later, I am happy to announce that I have fully repaid the doctoral student loans as of this morning. When I have a screenshot available of that student loan balance coming in at $0, then I will share it here for everyone to see.

The final count for the doctoral student loans is as follows:

$87,360.16 in loan principal
$1,878.84 in capitalized interest
$47.86 in closing and refinancing fees
$6,084.93 in interest

Total Amount Repaid: $95,371.79

When you add up the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral student loans, the total amount I repaid is $244,826.91. I never missed a payment, never incurred a late fee, and never asked for a deferment for any reason. I took out this debt knowing that it meant I would have to repay the obligations I was incurring. I never asked for my loans to be forgiven. I never contemplated a world where I would want them to be forgiven. I never believed that other people should be forced to pay for my student loans. The discipline needed to pay off these loans gave me a near perfect credit score.

While I am thankful that my student loan repayment journey is at an end (for good, this time), I am even more thankful of the financial discipline and education that I was able to garner over the last 14 years. Stay tuned to my blog for more student loan entries in the future… they just will not be covering my own student loan repayment because it’s finally over!

I repaid $244,826.91 in undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral student loans. The debt was comprised of $193,430.16 in loan principal, $14,313.42 in capitalized interest, $2,146.59 in closing and refinancing fees, and $34,936.74 in interest. My lenders included the United States Department of Education’s (USED) Perkins loan program, their subsidized and unsubsidized Direct Loan programs, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority’s NJCLASS program, CitiBank, and SoFi. You can read my entire student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.

Several years ago, the Sigma Pi Educational Foundation (the Foundation) started a program to create Chapter Educational Funds (CEF). Before we talk about what a CEF is and what it can do for you and your chapter, you should know that the Foundation is a 501c3 tax-exempt organization. This means that donations made to the Foundation are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law. In other words, if you write a check to the Foundation for $5, $50, or $5,000, then all of those funds can be list as charitable contributions when you or your accountant prepares your deductions for the tax year.

Sigma Pi Fraternity (the Fraternity) and the Foundation have done a lot of research over the years. For the Foundation, that research was focused on what it could do to entice more of our 50,000+ living alumni to donate for the advancement of the Fraternity. In 2003, the Foundation commissioned a report from a third party group to ascertain – among other goals – whether it could raise significant funds from our alumni base to support national programs. The report gave the Foundation many results, including the fact that most alumni want to find a way to support their local chapter more so than the national organization.

Several years later in 2010, the Foundation again studied what Sigma Pi alumni felt strongly about as it put together its strategic plan. During the focus groups and outreach in 2010 it was clear, again, that our alumni love Sigma Pi and would love for the Foundation to provide an option that allowed them to donate for the benefit of their local chapter. This finding would be one of the many outcomes in late 2011 when another third party group researched the prospects of raising significant funds to support national programs.

The message is clear – Sigma Pi alumni are willing and able to donate to the Foundation. They prefer that those donations help their local chapters succeed.

The Foundation has always welcomed those individual alumni or groups of alumni who seek to set up a scholarship to honor a living mentor or as a memorial to a brother who has passed away. In fact, the Foundation awards several national honorarium and memorial scholarships each year. Yet, the research showed that the Fraternity’s alumni wanted to donate to something more directly aligned with their local chapter. Thus was born the CEF program.

The CEF program allows a group of local alumni – called a Local Advisory Committee (LAC) – to create a specific fund at the Foundation where money donated to that fund is used solely for the benefit of their local chapter. Like a traditional Foundation scholarship, a CEF can allow the LAC to award scholarships to members of their local chapter. Yet, a CEF is a more flexible tool to help the local chapter improve because of the other various uses of donated funds. In addition to scholarships, a CEF may provide fellowships for graduate members of a chapter to pursue advanced degrees or professional development programs.

Any use that is academic or educational in nature is an allowable use of money donated to a CEF.

In the recent past, CEFs have been used to provide full reimbursements of registration fees for undergraduates to attend Sigma Pi University (now called Sigma Pi UIFI). Similarly, CEFs have been used to provide full reimbursement of travel costs for undergraduates to attend the Mid-Year Leadership Conference as well as Sigma Pi University. On a more local level, CEFs have been used to pay for the event reservation fees and food costs for academic and leadership training breakfasts and luncheons hosted on-campus where instruction is provided by highly-qualified local alumni and/or invited guest speakers. In other words, if your chapter’s alumni want to host an annual brunch for your undergraduates where you can instruct the undergraduates on issues related to their academic and/or educational growth, then you can pay for the costs of that event through donations to your local CEF.

A CEF can also be used to purchase academic or educational equipment for the chapter. What does that mean? Well, it means if your chapter owns a chapter house and there is space for a library or study area in the house, then funds donated to a CEF can be used to outfit that space with academic equipment (i.e. computers, software, and networking needs).

The uses stated above are what can be achieved when money that you donate to your local CEF is granted (i.e. given away) to a specific cause. However, if you opt to keep the funds in the CEF (i.e. you’re not granting them away), then the flexibility of your CEF increases.

In this option, money donated to a CEF can be used to provide a loan to the local chapter, alumni club, or housing corporation to make improvements to a chapter house. The breadth and scope of those improvements do not have the same academic and educational limitations as when money is granted from the CEF because in this instance, the money in the CEF isn’t being given away. Instead, an LAC may request a loan from its CEF for any housing-related reason including making immediate quality-of-life repairs to a chapter house, building an addition on to an existing chapter house, or even helping a chapter purchase a new house. In those scenarios where a loan is provided by your CEF, the LAC should expect a full underwriting and approval process – just like getting a loan from a local bank. Typically, interest will accrue on the loan at a rate agreed upon by the LAC and the Foundation and the CEF will have to pay an origination fee (which can be negotiated). Unlike a bank, however, it is typical for half of the interest that is paid by the borrower to be placed back into the chapter’s CEF and for the other half of the interest to be paid to the Foundation, which helps it operate (once the interest funds are put back into the CEF, they can be used for the same purposes noted above). Several Sigma Pi chapters around the country currently have loans outstanding from their CEFs with similar repayment terms.

There are some other ins and outs that an alumnus or group of alumni need to know before opening a CEF, but those issues can be better discussed directly with the Foundation. What is important to understand is that if you want your chapter to have an annual scholarship or some academic fellowships, if you would like to see your chapter’s registration fees and travel costs to attend most national conferences fully reimbursed, or if you’d like to see your chapter receive a loan (where they’re actually getting a portion of the interest back!) to address housing issues, then you really should consider the Foundation’s CEF program.

Hey, that’s understandable – no worries! They also sent along the following information.

But just as an FYI – First place went to Akshay Rajagopal, an 11-year-old 6th grader from Lincoln, Nebraska. He won a $25,000 college scholarship and a lifetime membership to the National Geographic Society. The runners up included:

* 2nd place, Heather Bledsoe, age 13, Trussville, Alabama, winner of a $15,000 college scholarship
* 3rd place, William Lee, age 13, Woburn, Massachusetts, winner of a $10,000 college scholarship

Additionally, you may watch the final questions of the National Geography Bee by clicking here. Enjoy!

I thought you might be interested to know that 13 year old Nikhil Desai from Fremont, New Jersey was part of the 10 finalists chosen for National Geographic children’s National Geographic Bee. Now celebrating its 20th anniversary, the contest focuses on important knowledge concerning world geography. The complete finalists are:

* Heather Bledsoe, age 13, Trussville, Alabama
* Nikhil Desai, age 13, Fremont, New Jersey
* Benjamin Geyer, age 14, District of Columbia
* Erik Troske, age 14, Michigan City, Indiana
* William Lee, age 13, Woburn, Massachusetts
* Isaac Pasley, age 14, Columbia, Missouri
* Joseph Perea, age 13, Eureka, Montana
* Akshay Rajagopal, age 11, Lincoln, Nebraska
* Milan Sandhu, age 13, Bedford, New Hampshire
* Taylor Morris, age 13, Swannanoa, North Carolina

Hosted by Alex Trebek, the finalists are competing for a $25,000 college scholarship and a lifetime membership to the National Geographic Society. Think you are as smart as these kids? Take our National Geographic Bee quiz at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/geobee/today.html

For more information about the National Geography Bee, please visit http://www.nationalgeographic.com/geographybee/

The team here at JerseySmarts.com offers our best wishes to Nikhil Desai in winning that scholarship. Good luck!

The woman who wrote the article did a great job of getting some preliminary information out there about student loans and how they are affecting many college and graduate school graduates. And remember, this was before there was a scandal or before it became burgeoning chic to talk about gigantic student loans.

But in that transformation from a one-time front page article in USA Today to the social cause that student loan debt has become, a bad trend has emerged. Namely, this trend is to make those of us who have mega student loans look like we’re victims.

I’m no victim.

Let me make it very clear – I took out all of those student loans with my signature to advance my education to make myself a more well-informed person in a competitive work force and in a competitive world. Me – I did it. No one else did it for me. I wasn’t duped, I wasn’t fooled – I wasn’t taken advantage of by someone one day and found out I had a 6-figure debt the next.

I took out that money to pay for an education that I could not have afforded without it. Plain and simple. Now, if you want to get into my beliefs on how I feel the general education system took advantage of me, then that’s a story I can talk about. If you want to know how teachers who are brainwashed to repeat the mantra of “do good in school, be involved in extracurricular activities, be responsible, go to college,” took advantage of me and every other public school student out there, then we can talk about that.

My issue isn’t with my massive debt (though believe me, it’s a bitch – especially when you’re trying to buy a house). My issue is with those folks who told me since I was a child this ridiculous mantra of how to get ahead in school. They didn’t tell me that young, Caucasian, suburban, intelligent males aren’t the ones who get the free rides to college.

They didn’t tell me that if you’re young, then society believes that you can pay your own way through college. What about those of us who had to work to simply pay our bills and living expenses?

They didn’t tell me that if you’re white, then society says that you must have an advantage over the other students by virtue of your skin color. I had no advantages and I can tell you numerous minority students who went to my undergraduate college for free just because they were Latino or black. Being white didn’t help me (nor does it help anyone who goes to a regular, non-Ivy League college).

They didn’t tell me that if you live in the suburbans, then society believes that you must come from a family with money. Bullshit on that! My family works hard for everything that they have and we are not rich nor are we upper-middle class. We are a regular family in America that struggles to get by – just like 99% of the families in this country. Being from a suburb didn’t help me a damn bit.

They didn’t tell me that if you’re intelligent, then society automatically assumes you are going to get a free ride to college and thus puts their money with the less fortunate. I graduated high school with a 4.02 and more activities, leadership positions, and sports than you could imagine. I got a $4,000 per year “break” on my tuition from my undergraduate institution which was taken away when I moved off campus (now does that make sense?). Being smart didn’t help me get a break with paying for college.

And then there is the fact that I’m a guy. Think about that for a minute. When was the last time you heard of a scholarship for smart, young white guys who live in the suburbs? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

THAT is my issue that is ancillary to the student loan problem – this is what I told the woman who wrote that article about me. I’m not a victim of student loan companies or a corrupted student loan system. I’m an example of what happens when our society turns ultra-liberal and where saying, “Good job,” to a young, white, suburban male is seen as xenophobic and racist against the “less fortunate.”

But as far as these people who are out there saying that they are victims, I have a message for them: get a grip. You signed the paperwork, you took out the loan. Live with it like the rest of us and pay it off as soon as you can.