For this month’s student loan cycle, I’ve made some huge progress with Sallie Mae and made some changes with my College Avenue student loans.
Sallie Mae
First off, my Sallie Mae has seen a very big reduction in balance. My previous video had shown a balance of around $6,130 for the last Sallie Mae loan.
After a huge chunk of extra payment and continuous weekly payments, I have reduced that amount to $5,400+. That’s basically a huge $700+ drop just from last month.
Now, even I can’t believe I was able to make that amount of payments in just one student loan!
Of course, this type of amount won’t happen often, but it still delights my heart that I was able to do so. After all, that’s been my main goal ever since tackling my student loans.
It has been nice as well to also see that my previous two Sallie Mae loans have been paid before getting to #6489’s details in the mobile app. But I digress.
College Avenue
Lastly, College Avenue is making a cameo in my update video!
I’ve been thinking about the servicer for quite some time now on whether or not I should start paying the balance on a weekly basis. Although only making $60 (barely above my minimum), numerically speaking, it is saving my $0.15 to $0.20 in interest costs.
I enrolled the loan in a weekly payment schedule around September 22, and it made its first payment on the 27th. It had made payments of $15 weekly until today.
What I failed to realize is that it will only make 3 payments till the due date every 15th of the month. Thus today, the loan had an amount due of $5 left!
What I did is made a manual payment instead in order to avoid missing any payments for the month. After looking at the calendar, my weekly payments will cover my entire minimum payment and if the month gets 5 weeks in it, I’ll be making overpayments of $25 for the entire cycle.
EdFinancial (Fed Loans)
As of today, only a small amount has been deducted from my federal student loans. I made a payment of $75 during the last week of September, reducing my fed loan balance to around $11,800.
Since federal student loans are still in forbearance till the end of December 2020, I’m taking advantage of still making payments to my smallest student loan. This way, I can annihilate that small pesky loan by the time get to it in the next 2 years.