Real life talk about student loans

when i graduated undergrad i had probably around ten thousand dollars worth of loans to pay off um it took me about six years just in time to take out new loans to go to grad school i finished grad school with about seventy thousand dollars in loans once i exited the grace period and started having these massive monthly payments someone i knew from grad school tipped me off to the prospect of refinancing your loans to get a better interest rate than you got in your initial loans so it was a trade-off i'm paying more every month but in the end because of the lower interest rate and the fewer years of payment i end up saving about 10 000 of interest that would have accrued on top of the 70 000 that i already owe so that's the decision i made it is a cut to my to my paycheck every month but it's worth it for me especially because i'm in a good position at work i'd rather pay it off faster before i started paying all the different loans were five thousand dollars here six thousand dollars here and i couldn't see it all as one solid figure it was a lot easier for me to say if i can't find them all i'll take care of it later like you know i'll deal with it tomorrow or the next year the next month so i decided about a year ago to consolidate them all into one amount in one place that's definitely been helpful as well as joining an income based program i started making payments six months after i graduated and so to date i have thirty seven thousand dollars that i owe on my school loans there's also a teacher loan forgiveness program if you make 120 payments which is about 10 years of payments on your school loans you can or and you're working for five consecutive years as a teacher within an at-risk school setting you can get some or part of your loans paid off so that's a great advantage to also working in the education space as well my student loan is still a hundred thousand dollars and if you try to conceive of that amount of money every day in terms of this is what i have to pay back you'll be depressed so just i think of it in terms of my monthly what i pay for my student loans i'm on what's called an income based repayment plan so you can normally you'd pay you can you pay a lot more but if you make under a certain amount of money you can minimize your monthly contributions to your student loan i you end up paying longer into the future but for the right now your payments are a little more manageable monthly