Graduating from the USC Rossier School of Education last spring

Well, that doctoral program has come and gone and I absolutely loved it. Soon, I intend to post an entry talking about the tremendous experience that I had as part of the University of Southern California’s online doctoral program. It was amazing and really rewrote the entire online learning experience for me. Again, though, that story is for another time. This update is about student loans.

To start, I do not intend to write a series of updates about my student loan repayment experience like I did after I graduated from Monmouth University and Rutgers University some 10+ years ago. Writing about my on-going repayment of the $120,603.31 in student loans that I incurred getting a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree was fun, but I have already provided that type of content to this blog and I do not want to write about the same issue in the same manner again. Also, my personal circumstances during this repayment are much different than they were back in 2006 when I started that repayment program. When I started repaying my first set of loans back in July 2006, I did not even have a full-time job yet. Now, I have two full-time jobs and two thriving small businesses… so yeah, my situation is a little bit different.

What is also different is the amount of student loan debt that I needed to incur to complete the doctoral program. All in, I took on $89,286.86 in new student loans. This number is comprised of $87,360.16 in loan principal, $1,878.84 in capitalized interest, and $47.86 in closing and refinancing fees. For those of you keeping count, when you combine all of the student loan principal, capitalized interest, and closing and refinancing fees that I have had to pay off in my lifetime, that number is $209,890.17.

Pretty amazing, right?

Just for fun, if you want to add in the $28,851.81 that I have already paid in interest during the first set of student loans, then the total amount that I have repaid and am still tasked with repaying is $238,741.98.

In terms of repayment, the first set of student loans took me seven years and one month to repay in full. Those seven years did not necessarily go by quickly in terms of financial time. In other words, repaying those loans was brutal to a young professional just getting his career started – in the nonprofit sector no less. Today, my repayment plan is a little bit different as my first payments began in December 2018 and I expect to have these loans paid in full sometime around the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021. My estimates are still somewhat off because I am unsure if I want to repay the loans earlier and, to be honest, I am contemplating a few different repayment structures that make more financial sense. Unfortunately, my income is at a point where I can no longer write off my student loan interest as a deduction on my taxes, so paying interest on the student loans really has no financial benefit at all.

But there are other ways to make student loan interest work for you. For example, I own a home now and I have a good deal of equity in the home. If I refinance my student loans into my mortgage, then the interest incurred on the increased amount of the mortgage loan would be tax deductible (up to a point, given the recent state and local Tax limits). Also, I could take out a loan from my 401k and repay my loans that way, too. By doing that, 100% of the interest paid on the 401k loan would go back into my 401k and I would earn all of the interest paid. Either one of these options seems like a better choice than just making payments on the student loans.

That is about it for this student loan update. Again, no regular updates on my repayment this time around, but I might post a random update here and there, so be on the lookout!

Undergraduates and alumni from Delta-Beta Chapter in February 2017

Before I became the Chapter Director at Monmouth, our Faculty Advisor held the position. Our Faculty Advisor is probably the best, most engaged Faculty Advisor in the entire fraternity (in fact, when Sigma Pi started giving out a #1 Faculty Advisor in the nation award, our advisor was the first recipient). However, when I graduated in 2003, the position was ripe for a new person to hold it. I spent two years as the President of my chapter and during that time I was required to research the many events, reports, and issues that our chapter was completely out of the loop on. Shortly after I graduated, the new President of the chapter and I traveled to Sigma Pi’s leadership school and talked to the fraternity’s Executive Director about our situation. During our trip, I was asked to become the new Chapter Director and we implemented that change immediately.

What I learned from my time as an undergraduate leader through my time as a young alumni volunteer and now to someone who has some seasoning as a volunteer is that undergraduates are, naturally, not as connected to the on-going workings of the national organization as one might expect. In other words, national student organizations like fraternities and sororities should not expect every single undergraduate leader at every single undergraduate chapter to take an impassioned interest in the finer points of completing and submitting monthly or quarterly or annual reports. There is going to be an equally less-than-enthusiastic understanding of why it is necessary and beneficial to attend national conferences and regional workshops.

It is one of the many jobs of a local and regional volunteer to connect with their undergraduates in an educational, uplifting, and genuine way. The connection must be educational because we need to make the mundane reporting relevant to their everyday experiences as undergraduate leaders. The connection must be uplifting because today’s young men are berated and denigrated by nearly every corner of society just because they are young men. Who will tell our young men, “Good job!” or “I’m proud of you,” if not for us?

But most importantly, the connection must be genuine because undergraduates can see through lies and falsehoods with laser-like accuracy. And they should cut through the nonsense!

I’ll be writing more about mentoring undergraduates soon, so stay tuned!

Greek State of Mind is growing!

With the start of the USC program at the end of last summer, I opted to stop all of my activities in whatever was left of Usable Web Solutions, LLC. Those activities included keeping several websites updated on a semi-regular basis and working to promote those websites via social media. Before completely stopping my activities with UWS, I was keeping at least one website regularly updated (“regularly” = almost daily) for about 20 years. Stopping those updates and moving away from my online business was a big change for me, though not an entirely bad one. The best part of relieving myself of my UWS duties was freeing up more of my time to focus on my other small business – a small, niche apparel company.

The apparel company that I co-own with another alumnus from my fraternity is doing very well, too. Our company – Greek State of Mind – had its biggest sales year in 2015. However, we are about 10 weeks into 2016 and we have generated more revenue this year than we did during the first 40 or so weeks of 2015. In the world of small business entrepreneurship, this is the type of growth that most companies dream of achieving. We are very happy with GSOM and are excited about expanding our product lines including a shirt celebrating the Monmouth University men’s basketball team and their Bench Mob.

And speaking of the Monmouth Bench Mob, I know that I speak for all Monmouth University basketball fans when I write that we are hopeful the NCAA selection committee will make the right decision and send the Hawks to the big dance this Sunday! #FlyHawks!

Sigma Pi Fraternity is working with Stockton University on a path to colonization

The weekend continued on Friday afternoon when the Delta-Beta Chapter at Monmouth University welcomed back a recent alumnus to lead a discussion on recruitment. The talk lasted about half an hour and focused proven, successful strategies for recruitment at Monmouth University. Check out a picture of the young alumnus talking to the undergraduates of the chapter during the workshop below.

Alumnus Andre Torrecuso talks to the Delta-Beta Chapter about recruitment

On Saturday, Sigma Pi celebrated the chartering of our newest chapter on the campus of St. John’s University in New York! The Iota-Tau Chapter chartered with more than 40 young men joining our brotherhood. These guys have spent the last few semesters working very hard to reach the pinnacle of the colonization process and this past Saturday, they achieved their goal. Take a look at the newest brothers of Sigma Pi Fraternity!

A shot of the the new Iota-Tau Chapter, posted by Regional Director Joe Turck

Just across the river from the chartering was the annual New Jersey Province’s Fall Semester Workshop. This workshop has grown in size over the years to a point where it now hosts hundreds of brothers each September. On Saturday, just over 200 Sigma Pi brothers (including some interest group members from Stockton) traveled to Seton Hall University for several hours of instruction and brotherhood. Here is a picture of some of the attendees at the workshop (more pictures are available on the Province Facebook page).

Over 200 Sigma Pi guys at Seton Hall University for New Jersey’s Fall Province Workshop

And on the other side of New Jersey’s other river (the Delaware River), the Mid-Atlantic Province Workshop was taking place at the University of Delaware. The workshop drew in 80 brothers from chapters including the host chapter at the University of Delaware, West Chester University, Ursinus College, and St. Joseph’s University. In addition, another 11 guys from the Stockton interest group made their way to the workshop, too. While I don’t have any pictures from the workshop, I’ll update this post as soon as they come in.

The pictures from the Mid-Atlantic Province Workshop haven’t been sent out… yet!

Then yesterday, the brothers of the Delta-Beta Chapter at Monmouth University held a suicide awareness event on the Great Lawn of Monmouth University. The event was held in collaboration with the sisters of Alpha Sigma Tau and focused on spreading awareness about suicide and prevention. One of Sigma Pi Fraternity’s national philanthropies is the Sean Vernon Feliciano Amazing Day Foundation, which remembers the life of Sean Vernon Feliciano through education about suicide awareness and prevention. Here is a picture of a balloon release that took place on the Great Lawn during the event.

Monmouth University’s Greek Life gathered on the Great Lawn

There was also a mini-reunion of some Delta-Beta alumni on Thursday night and nearly a dozen recruitment events around the New Jersey Province this weekend – and those are just the events that I know about! It was a great weekend for Sigma Pi Fraternity in New Jersey, the Mid-Atlantic, and New York City. In fact, Sigma Pi Fraternity needs more of these weekends, in more places, and much more often!

I’m not sure if the video adequately captures the excitement in the MAC when Andrew Nicholas sunk that 3 pointer to seal the deal for Monmouth. The place was electric. I’ve never seen the type of sheer excitement in the MAC as I saw after the game today. Even Monmouth Head Coach King Rice was jumping up and down, hugging Assistant Coach Rick Callahan the entire time. It was a great, well-deserved “feel good moment” for Monmouth.

There were a lot of players that came together with good performances to help push Monmouth ahead. You can read more about those performances in Josh Newman’s writeup over on the Asbury Park Press’ The Hawks Nest blog.

Now, enjoy the links! If you come across any interesting links, then please share them with us in the comments section below.

Get your weekend started right by checking out these links, starting a new, free Feedly account, and/or adding the blogs above (and JerseySmarts.com, too) to your existing Feedly or other RSS aggregator account. Enjoy!

And that’s the end of my student loans.

And not only is there nothing due on the loan, but it looks like MOHELA actually owes me 15 cents! Ha ha!

In July 2006 I began repaying $120,603.31 in student loan debt. This debt was comprised of $106,070.00 in loan principal, $12,434.58 in capitalized interest, and $2,098.73 in closing and refinancing fees. I made the final payment on this debt in August 2013. My lenders included the United States Department of Education’s (USED) Perkins loan program, the USED’s subsidized and unsubsidized Direct Loan programs, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority’s NJCLASS program, CitiBank, and the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (the USED sold my loan to MOHELA in April 2012). In total, I paid $149,455.12 to these lenders including $120,603.31 in consolidated principal and $28,851.81 in interest. You can read my entire student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.

Before I started an aggressive repayment plan in December 2009 it seemed like today would be impossible to realize. Think about the situation that I was faced with (and remember that many current large dollar student loan borrowers are still in similar situations): How could a guy manage to repay approximately $121 thousand in student loan debt with a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in Public Policy? Further, how could a guy repay such an astronomical figure much quicker than the 25 and 30 year repayment plans his lenders put him on? Worse yet, how could anyone who worked at a nonprofit organization, did not rely on outside financial support, did not live at home, paid all of their own bills (on-time), lived in the most expensive state in the union, and who felt a moral obligation to annually donate at least 10% of his income achieve this goal? To say that the odds were against this day coming as soon as it did is an understatement! This goal was nearly impossible for anyone to achieve.

It's over!

During my last “major announcement” post back in December 2010 I happily reported that I was done repaying the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority (NJHESAA). The NJHESAA’s series of smaller NJCLASS loans were – after consolidation – one of the two major student loans that I was obligated to repay after graduating from a master’s degree program at Rutgers back in 2006. The other major series of smaller loans – also consolidated into a single loan – were from the United States Department of Education (USED) and their Direct Loans program. Ultimately, the USED sold my loan to the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA) – the lender that received my final payment earlier today.

I also had loans from two smaller sources including $1,400 from the USED’s federal Perkins loan program through Monmouth University and $7,000 (plus an additional $1,071.52 in interest) from Citibank’s student loan program.

Just as I reported after paying off my NJHESAA loan, here are the stats as they pertain to repaying my USED/MOHELA loan (these figures include both the amount of the loan and the capitalized interest; also, these are my figures and may be a few pennies or a dollar or two off from what the USED/MOHELA keeps on file).

The list above shows the various USED loans that I consolidated into the final $59,020.15 loan that I began repaying in 2006. If you study that list above, there are three lines that will probably bounce out and hit you – my summer session in 2002, my part-time graduate semester in 2004, and my first year in graduate school as a full-time student in 2004 – 2005. The first two of these line items probably stand out because I did not incur any USED loans during those semesters. Why didn’t I take out any loans, you ask? Simple. As an undergraduate, the USED would not advance me any loans if I was a part-time student – that eliminated me from potentially getting a loan during the summer of 2002 (I made up the difference from NJHESAA that summer). And in the spring of 2004 I was still deciding if I wanted to apply to the Rutgers graduate program where I was a non matriculated student. Again, being a part-time student didn’t allow me to take out any loans from the USED.

Of course, I did wind up applying to the Rutgers program on a full-time basis and that first full-time year of graduate school is the other line item that stands out in the list above. This line item stands out because it is so much higher than the rest of the line items at a whopping $19,156.45. What in the world could I need that much money for in a student loan?! Again, the answer is somewhat simple: somewhere along the line I figured out that the USED would advance loan funds to pay for my “living expenses” while I was going to school full-time.

If there is one thing that I can point to that inflated my total student loan debt more than anything else it would be the ability to add my “living expenses” to my student loan requests. Even though I worked part-time at two different jobs during my undergraduate years and full-time during my graduate years (in addition to owning and operating a small business), I still included my living expenses in my student loan requests. Those living expenses including my monthly rent payments, cell phone payments, food money, automobile payments, and Lord knows what else. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the exact amount of my student loans were allocated to these living expenses, but let me put it in perspective this way…

Pretty much all of the tuition I was charged during graduate school was paid either by me, my family, or scholarships. You read that correctly – I did not need to take out student loans to pay for my tuition at Rutgers. In other words, if you look at the list above and add up the line items titled Graduate Year One (2004 – 2005), Summer Session (2005), and Graduate Year Two (2005 – 2006), then you’ll have the total dollar amount of student loans that I requested for reasons other than tuition. After doing the math, you can see that this amount equals $32,043.37. Just to be clear, of the $120,720 that I took out in student loans, at least $32,043.37 were for expenses other than tuition. I won’t set this number in stone as the definitive total amount of loan funds that I received for non-tuition expenses because I also applied for and received living expenses (primarily rent costs) from the NJHESAA’s NJCLASS program, too.

However, to estimate that approximately a third ($40,420) of my total student loan debt was for living expenses and not tuition would be a pretty good guess. Pretty frightening, I know.

And yet today still arrived. From an above-the-fold cover story in USA Today in June 2006 to fully repaying my NJHESAA loan in December 2010, to a nice mention in an online story on USA Today in May 2011, to the milestone of having repaid $100,000 in principal, to today – it’s been an incredible ride. If you’ve been following my student loan story from the beginning, then I offer my heartfelt thanks for your patronage and willingness to read my repayment story to the end. For those of you who have added comments to these blog entries from time to time, I thank you for being a part of the conversation. If you’re one of the many folks who’ve e-mailed me saying that I inspired you to take a more aggressive stance in your own student loan repayment, then I wish you luck.

Quickly and efficiently repaying a student loan is possible; even if that student loan is $120,603.31 on day one and you wind up paying an additional $28,851.81 in interest over the life of your repayment. The great truth that I learned over these past few years is that if you want to do something, then you will find a way to achieve it. In other words, no one can stop you – except you.

And if you’re trying to repay an enormous student loan, then contact me and share your story. Good luck!

In July 2006 I began repaying $120,603.31 in student loan debt. This debt was comprised of $106,070.00 in loan principal, $12,434.58 in capitalized interest, and $2,098.73 in closing and refinancing fees. I made the final payment on this debt in August 2013. My lenders included the United States Department of Education’s (USED) Perkins loan program, the USED’s subsidized and unsubsidized Direct Loan programs, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority’s NJCLASS program, CitiBank, and the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (the USED sold my loan to MOHELA in April 2012). In total, I paid $149,455.12 to these lenders including $120,603.31 in consolidated principal and $28,851.81 in interest. You can read my entire student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.

This weekend’s links are below for your reading pleasure. If you come across any interesting links, then please share them with us in the comments section below. Enjoy!

Get your weekend started right by checking out these links, starting a new Feedly account, and/or adding the blogs above (and JerseySmarts.com, too) to your existing Feedly or other RSS aggregator account. Enjoy!

Only $7 thousand left

The reason for this decision is that I need to do a better job preparing this blog to showcase the journey that I had to take to get from about $121 thousand in student loan debt all the way down to $0 in a matter of a little under 7 years. Not to toot my own horn, but I believe that in the pages upon pages of student loan updates that I’ve provided over the years there are a lot of great tips and pointers for people struggling with seemingly insurmountable levels of debt. If you’ve been reading these updates for a while, then you’ll remember that I used to constantly remind everyone that my accelerated payment was possible even though I do my best to meet or exceed donating 7% to 10% of my gross income each year to charity. Also, in some of my early student loan entries I was big on reminding folks that not only was I paying off my student loans at an accelerated pace, but I was also paying for all of my own expenses without any help from any government institutions or individuals. In addition, I mentioned in more than one of these updates that I was able to do all of this while working for a nonprofit organization – not some big, investment bank that was dominating Wall Street or a hedge fund that was kicking off a 7 or 8 figure salary. Nothing along those lines is going on here. And I think I even may have written in some of these updates that I’ve even managed to continue my education over the last seven years by completing a Graduate Certificate program and enrolling in a Post-Master’s Certificate program.

The quick lesson from all of this? Don’t believe that an incredible amount of student loan debt will automatically stifle your ability to earn money and make significant repayments! Remember, YOU are the one in control of your life and decisions – and that includes your financial life and decisions.

As I’ve been telling people who I am close with that I’m on the verge of completely repaying my student loans, they’ve been asking me how such an accomplishment is possible given the circumstances noted above. Well, I think a variety of the answers to the “How?” question are found within my past updates and I’m working on finalizing a separate page on the blog to catalog those answers.

But stay tuned, everyone. Once that separate page is created I fully intend on repaying the balance of this student loan and kissing the whole thing goodbye forever. The end is drawing near for these student loans…

On May 14, 2006, I graduated from Rutgers University with a master’s degree and $120,720 in student loan debt. In July 2006 I made my first payment on these student loans and, so far, I’ve repaid a total of $114 thousand in principal. My lenders include the United States Department of Education’s (USED) Perkins loan program, the USED’s subsidized and unsubsidized Direct Loan programs, the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority’s NJCLASS program, and CitiBank. The USED sold my student loan to the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA) on April 16, 2012. I currently owe about $7 thousand in principal to MOHELA. To date, I’ve repaid over $35 thousand in interest to these lenders. Follow my student loan repayment story on JerseySmarts.com.