I don't have much to add that isn't already in the sidebar, but I wanted to give a shoutout to the whole community here for giving me the motivation to absolutely crush my student loan debt extremely aggressively. After graduating and my 6 month deferrment period, I started with $30,267.64 in student debt, and I was a typical student in that it hadn't really hit me until I started paying it back that it was going to suck. I started doing more research, specifically here on /r/personalfinance, and decided that I wanted to be debt free as soon as possible. Based on my circumstances, I decided on the avalanch method. I had a mix of subsidized and unsubsidized loans at interest rates from 6.55% down to 3.15%. I realize that the market could yield better returns than aggressively paying the low interest loans, however I thought that it would be better mentally and for my cash flow to just 'be done with them', so I decided to finish them off as well. I have during this year, also opened up a Roth IRA with Vanguard and invested in their target retirement fund for 2055 just as a simple way of getting started for retirement saving (I'm currently 25 years old).
Although I made several large payments, you can see the drastic dip in the chart I posted. This was due to me saving far too much in my first year as a 1099 worker for taxes, leaving me with a very large chunk (even after some unnecessary expenses, thanks /r/motorcycles) that I dedicated towards paying loans. After that, it became addicting to see the individual loans zero out on myfedloan. Every time I felt comfortable with my extra cash, I would pay large chunks towards the highest interest loan(s). If there were 2 or more loans at the same interest rate, I still abided by the avalanch method by focusing on them, but I would pay towards the smallest remaining balance for the relief of seeing another 0 and knowing there was one less loan to worry about.
Other information people might want to know based on seeing other threads, I do not live at home nor did I get any type of windfall to accomplish this. I save an extrordinary amount of money by renting a room in a house with roommates rather than having my own apartment. I currently make about $65k per year, which has been increasing in the past few months since I work in sales. Anyway, I know this has been a somewhat rambling post, but I just felt the need to share since I would not have done this if I hadn't stumbled across this community and wanted to thank everyone here for their contributions.
Submitted June 20, 2017 at 04:56PM by jdgsr http://ift.tt/2tLizuZ
