My Tips For Paying Off Your Student Loans

Recently I did an IGTV video with my tips for paying off your student loans. I successfully did so in 2017, which was about 7 years after I graduated. I had over 60K in loans, most from graduate school and it was my goal to pay them off as soon as humanly possible.

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert, by any means. These are just the things I did!

Here are my tips:

1. Pay close attention to all your different loans. I had several federal unsubsidized and subsidized loans, all with different interest rates. Log on to your lender’s website often because that gave me the drive to keep going.

2. Sign up for auto-debit. A lot of lenders will give you an interest rate break (I think mine was 0.25%). It doesn’t sound like a lot, but every little bit helps. This will also ensure that you’re never late with a payment.

3. Tackle the high interest ones first. I went one by one and took down the higher interest ones. I think this is the opposite of what Dave Ramsey suggests (I believe he recommends going the other way with the snowball method). This ties in closely with my 4^th tip.

 

4. Make two payments each month. The first one I set to be the auto-debit in the beginning of the month and then I made a second payment halfway through the month. I targeted the second payment towards one of the higher interest loans and set it to go right to the principal amount.

 

5. If you’re able to, find a side hustle. For me, I started my blog and Teachers Pay Teachers store. Initially, my sole goal was to try to make a little extra money that I could throw at my loans. Little did I know that it would become so much more, but that was a happy accident. Find something else you can do and somewhat enjoy doing to make some extra cash and use that money towards the second payment.

 

6. Keep your goal in plain view. I had a sticky note on my laptop with amounts of the loans I was going after and would decrease it every time I made a payment. Why? Because it kept me motivated and I liked to see the number go DOWN.

 

So those are my tips. I know student loans are the bane of a lot of people’s existence. I did get questions on why I didn’t go for the Teacher Loan Forgiveness (which I could have because I have been in a Title 1 school for the past 5 years) or the Public Service Loan Forgiveness. My answer is that I started to make a lot of progress on it and felt that I could do it quicker than the 10 years. So if you are planning to do one of those programs, go ahead! I just had a goal in mind, didn’t want to keep paying on them if I didn’t have to, and had the means to make extra payments.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Was this helpful?