Student Loan Update #23

Another student loan update for the June to July cycle. I’ve started chipping away at my last private student loan and, dare I say, the progress is going amazing.

(Here’s a video for your convenience!)

College Avenue

My Payments

This is the last private student loan I hold right now. Last month, this balance was at $2,799.30. Prior to tackling this account, I’ve only been paying $15 a week in order to take advantage of the faster decline in interest accruals with doing a weekly repayment strategy. Being able to pay $60 to $70 every month effectively reduced my interest every month as well.

Now that I’ve focused my attention to this loan, I’ve dedicated $140 every week to it. I’m happy to share that the progress with this account has been going great. As of this writing, I’ve reduced that amount to $2,100.82! This is a reduction of $698.48 in only 4 weeks.

This isn’t the biggest amount I’ve ever made in a single cycle, but it still amazes me how you can achieve bigger amounts as long as you really put your focus to it. Here’s the breakdown of my payments every week from June 20 to July 11.

I started making my $140 payments to College Avenue in June 20 since I paid off Sallie Mae a week before that. Then on the 27th, I made two payments: $140 and $80, for a total of $220. This brings our total payment so far to $360.

I was able to make an extra payment of $80 because out of nowhere my sister gave me a cash gift. When I asked her why, she said that she just wanted to pay me for some of the things I gave her. I’ve given her a lot of different things before, so I didn’t exactly understand her logic here because those things weren’t $80 worth.

But you know what? I’m going to think that she was just very grateful for her big brother and she wanted to give back. I’ll leave it at that.

The next payment happened on July 4th and I made my usual payment of $140. Nothing special happened during this week. So the total payment now is $500.

The most recent payment was made on July 11th and I made a payment of $210 on that day. This is supposed to be two payments, but I decided to just put them together. The usual payment is still $140, but during this week I was able to cash out my Prolific earnings of $74. I decided to add the $70 — so it’s a clean number — to my weekly payment.

I did it this way because I wanted to see if it was easier to add extra payments manually or simply change a part of the recurring series in College Avenue. I still don’t have an answer to this, so I’m going to keep experimenting. But anyway, this finally brings my total payment for the month to $710!

My Interest Accruals

If you look at my interest accruals, you can definitely see a bigger decline. Prior to paying $140 every week, interest accruals would only see a reduction of 1 to 2 cents a week.

The first week I made my $140 payment, the interest accrual was at $3.74. Then the next payment on June 27th, the interest accrual went down to $3.55. And down to $3.27 on July 4th. And finally, down to $3.09 on July 11th. Interest for this cycle total to $13.65.

This is in line with my calculations in my last student loan update. 10 cents to 20 cents would be removed in interest accruals every time I make my weekly payment. And this is actually what motivates me. And if you’ve been following me, this is what I keep saying that keeps me going. While the falling loan balance is something to be happy about, the falling interest charges makes me happier because I know I’m saving more. But that’s just me.

One thing I’ve also noticed with College Avenue is that there are separate interest charges happening. I notice that it happens on the 15th, the 20th and the last day of the month, 30th or 31st.

As you can see on my screenshot, on June 20, there is an interest accrual of $0.50 which was added on my June 27th interest of $3.05. Same thing happened on the 30th. $1.87 was added to the interest that accrued till I made a payment on July 4th.

This is not a big deal to be honest because it doesn’t have significant impacts on the interest that I owe. I just don’t understand why they do that. It’s similar to Sallie Mae’s, which for me happened on the 16th. I tried to look for answers online, but I didn’t find any. Maybe it’s their system doing that. I don’t get it.

Weeks Left to Payoff

I’m going to add this to my student loan analysis moving forward as well, just so that it’s always top of mind when I look at my loan numbers. So let’s see how many weeks I have left to payoff this loan.

With the $2,100.82 loan balance, it is estimated that I will be paying off this loan in 16 weeks. Compared to my previous update, this number was at 21. 4 weeks have only passed but we shortened it by an extra 1 week to the timeline, all thanks to that extra $150 this month.

With the new timeline, I estimate that I’m fully paying off this loan by end of October instead of the previous estimate of first week of November.

EdFinancial

For my Federal loans at EdFinancial, it still sits at $11,343.14. No change here yet because payments are still paused at the moment.

There haven’t been any big developments about student loan cancellation or an extension to the payment pause. Only talks regarding it and Democratic senators and representatives urging President Biden to extend the payment pause or cancel student loans. You know, the usual. But you can read more about the latest student loan news in my previous article.

Balance as of July 13, 2021 for my entire student loan is $13,443.96!

We’re close to hitting the $12K threshold now, and I’m really excited for this. I’m expecting a small obstacle to this in the next coming months because a portion of my income has dipped. I’m still committed to my weekly repayments, but if I see that there is no choice but to reduce my student loan payments, I will have to do that and reduce my payments. But other than that, I’m going to keep pushing to reduce my student loans and finally pay them off!

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How’s your student loan payoff journey?