Paying off my student loan is going to be a humongous task which will take several years. My goal is to have it paid off in less than ten years. I’d like to pay it off quicker than that, but even the ten-year goal is a stretch based on my current finances. My expenses are about as low as I can get them so most of my strategies for paying off my student loan sooner will be related to earning more income. Since it will take years to pay off my student loan some of these strategies will likely change over time while others will be abandoned entirely and new strategies adopted as they become available and/or I become aware of them.
My first strategy for paying off my student loan quicker is signing up to have my student loan payment automatically debited from my checking account. Doing this lowered my interest rate from 6.875% to 6.62%. That isn’t much of a decrease in the interest rate but when you are dealing with six figures of debt it does make a difference. It will be about a $25 month decrease in interest on my loan.
I also want to refinance my loan. I applied to refinance my loan with Sofi. They have variable rates as low as 1.9% and fixed rates as low as 3.5% which would save me a lot of money. Despite my 798 credit score my loan application was swiftly rejected due to my income being so low relative to the amount of my debt. I can’t really blame them for rejecting my application. I’m considering reapplying to refinance just part of my loan later this year. I have found that there are a number of new refinancing companies with competitive rates and term lengths. Does anyone have any recommendations for a student loan refinancing companies? I’d love to hear in the comments below.
Another way to refinance part of my student loan is with my credit cards. One of my credit cards offered me a 0% interest rate for 18 months on a balance transfer with a 2% transaction fee. I signed up for the deal and am having my credit card company transfer part of my student loan to my credit card. The transfer is still processing so I’m not sure if it will work the way I planned. After this transfer is done I might do another balance transfer deal on another of my credit cards. I just have to make sure that I can pay the balance off before the 0% interest rate ends.
Reducing the cost of the loan is helpful but to make significant progress on paying it down I need to make more money. A lot more money. I should have a document review job starting next week and I’m hoping that there will be a steady amount of document review jobs the rest of the year. These jobs are currently my best source of guaranteed income so I’ll keep working them until I know for sure that I can make more money elsewhere. Whatever I make from the job above my basic expenses will go to paying down my loan.
One job won’t be enough to pay off the loan quickly though. That is why I signed up for Uber. This weekend will be my first weekend driving for them. After the weekend I should have a good idea of how much I can make through Uber. If nothing else, it should provide me with a little extra income when I’m between jobs. My plan is to drive for them nights and weekends while working my regular job. I really like that I can drive for Uber whenever I have time and don’t have to commit to a schedule.
I’m still working my Amazon FBA business and I think I’m slowly learning and getting better at it. I’m hoping to make at least enough from FBA to pay my regular student loan payment.
Blog income has mostly dried up, but I’m hoping I can revive it somewhat. I need to work on increasing my affiliate and referral income from my blogs. Posting regularly on my Bank Bonuses blog should help with that. I also plan to have one or two posts a month on this blog about products or services for which I have affiliate or referral links. I only write about services/products that I actually use and think are a win/win so you don’t have to worry about this becoming a spammy blog.
This past week I’ve made some decent progress on my e-book. I’ve procrastinated writing this book for years, but I am finally going to get it finished. It should be done by the end of this month. Once that book is done I have a couple more ideas of books to write. If I am able to publish two or three books by the end of the year they will hopefully produce a nice bit of additional income.
Those are the strategies I currently am using/am planning to use to reduce the cost of my loan and make more money. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.
when I paid off my house, I hit the ground running so don’t know if this would really work after a period of time. or whether student loans would work like a house. I printed off a 30 year amortization schedule.
The first month was a freebie, but I paid it anyway to principal and it chopped off 11 months of my mortgage. When I made the first payment I was already down to 29 years.
I took out a secured loan from the credit union for just a bit of that and put it all towards the mortgage – another 5 years gone! Since it was early on, most of the payment was interest so you don’t have to pay that much to cut years out. I then paid on both the mortgage and the secured loan, at the same time.
Well then I inherited some money and put that towards it and then cut out about another 10 years. A few years passed also and so about 6 more years were gone. I then just decided to dig into my savings and pay it off.
Harley – That is great that you were able to cut off so many years from your mortgage. Student loan interest works differently than a mortgage so the extra payments won’t help as much. Extra payments now do save me from paying more interest later so I do want to pay as much as I can as soon as I can.