How I Feel About My Debt Consolidation
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My debt consolidation officially went through, so now all of my student loans are with 1 company except for 1 private loan. It’s a little scary to see such a huge number in my consolidation account ($113K). It seemed a bit more manageable when it looked like $8500 there and $10,000 there.
But, now I am going to put that into deferment (if I can) or forbearance. I’m going to pay off the private loan really aggressively, sending every extra cent I have towards it. When I get the private loan down to a few thousand, I’m going to try to do a 0% balance transfer on that loan to help me pay it off even faster (hey, since the economy is so terrible we aren’t going to buy a house soon anyway, may as well do a ton of short term damage to my credit report).
The good thing is this makes my life easier because I don’t have so many different loan balances to keep track of. Psychologically it makes it seem harder, but after I get the private loans paid off I’ll just have to create a bunch of little milestones for myself in order to have concrete goals.
I definitely don’t like seeing the payment plan that the government has laid out for me, which involves paying about $700 a month for the next 10 years and repaying about as much in interest as the loans are worth right now. Seeing that laid out there, and thinking that they want me to pay until I am 35, definitely motivates me to start looking for alternative income so that I can get rid of this a heck of a lot sooner.
