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Today, I spent 1/2 an hour holding and dealing with Sallie Mae on the telephone.  I wanted to increase my monthly payment.  They scheduled me to pay $457 a month for 10 years.  I wanted to change it to $547 a month for a few reasons: partly because it used the same numbers and that seemed nice and neat; partly because then it is almost exactly equivalent to the fixed expenses my fiance pays each month so it would be easier for us to ensure we’re each paying back an equal amount of our debt each month, and of course the main reason was this will reduce my payment time by 28 months.  Thats over 2 years less that I will have to pay, for an extra $90 a month.  

Sallie Mae, of course, didn’t want to allow me to do this online.  Although there is a button under the “Payment Options” window which says “Increase Your Payments,” whenever I actually try to increase them it gives me an “Error, Please Try Again” message.  Funnily enough, I don’t get the same message when I select the “Decrease Your Payment” option.  I’m not sure if this is Sallie Mae’s subversive effort to encourage me to stay in debt to them forever, or just a flaw in the programming design, but I wasn’t thrilled to have to spend the additional time today taking care of this problem.  

A big reason I want to get this all paid off is that this debt is really complicating my life.  We have to arrange our payments every month, and calculate what is best to pay on and when it is most advantageous to pay.  We just got a new bank account when we moved, so we have to set up all our payees and autopays and all that stuff.  Until our direct deposit kicks in (which won’t be until the 25th because it takes 1 pay period to process) we get charged by our bank for billpay (yes I know this is crazy but this is a small town and there just aren’t that many banks to choose from.)  It would be so much nicer if we didn’t have all these monthly obligations and were able to easily allocate our money.  

Aside from the logistics of setting up the payments, the current state of the economy is really affecting my loans.  First of all, because of the credit crisis and the impending credit crisis that will be hitting the student loan market, there are almost no loan consolidation options out there that are attractive to me.  Sallie Mae apparently has temporarily suspended their consolidation program, as had several other companies I looked at.  The companies that still have consolidation programs in place aren’t really offering great benefits, in my opinion.  The big selling point among these companies seems to be lowering my monthly payments by stretching my loans out for up to 25 years.  There is NO WAY I want to be paying off these loans when I’m 50, so it doesn’t make sense for me to spend all the time and effort consolidating for a benefit I don’t want.  

The other effect of the crazy economy is that they keep changing the interest rates of my loans.  I had a loan at 8.5% and some Sallie Mae’s at 5.5% and a Sallie Mae at 7%.  Well, my 8.5% loan went down to 7% and my 5.5% Sallie Mae’s went down to 3.5%.  This is great, but it definitely has thrown my whole plan as far as payment priority out of whack.  So, although I’m grateful for the interest rate reduction, I now have to rethink things and I’m also not sure how long it is going to last or when it is going to change again.

Long story short (or summed up anyway)… I hunger for the day when I merely have to allocate money to retirement and savings and not face all these bills each month!