Student Loans

Because leg-splitting Jesus on a candlestick, it would be good to be done with this albatross. Even a small one.

My student loans date back to 2005, when I was in chiropractic school. (God, wasn't that a time? Less said, the better.) I checked my balance today, and I have just shy of $5,000 left. Also turns out I have 59 payments left to make, so going by monthly payments, these loans were 25 year loans, and I have 5 years left to go.

The amazing thing about these loans is that I got them at an unbelievable rate. I don't remember what they were, but I'm thinking they were around 2.5%...with a stipulation that if I were to make my first two years of payments on time, I'd get an additional 1% knocked off of that. Great incentive, and I met it. So this means that since the summer of 2007, I've been paying a meager 1.5% interest on my loans. For a while, I was seeing some horror stories. People were experiencing such high interest rates on their loans that they wouldn't even begin to touch the principal on their loan for years. That's just plain criminal, and I can't believe the government would allow such a thing. (Trust me...the government has disabused me of a shit ton of assumptions that they'd be reasonable. It's 2025 in America—do the math.) I don't know how high those interest rates would be, but I'd imagine it would be near pawn shop rates. Again: criminal.

Anyhow, I'd hoped that I could be done with these loans sooner than the summer of 2030, but hey. If I really wanted to, I could just make a lump payment and be done with it, but right now, finances are such it's just not necessary. It's a psychological issue for me that I probably should push aside. A monthly payment of just over $250 is handleable. There are other debts I have that take precedent over those simply because they carry a higher interest rate (see: any and all credit cards).