Saturday, March 19, 2011

Paid Off My Private Student Loans

I purged the variable-rate-debt snake from my household and paid off my private student loans on St. Paddy's Day. Yep, made one lump sum payment of $31,584.24 to pay it off. Now I have approximately $51.5k in federally subsidized student loans remaining. I'm less concerned about paying my federally subsidized student loan off because: (a) it has a fixed interest rate of 5.125% and (b) the monthly payment is only $360.08/month.

You may be wondering how I got the money to make a huge lump-sum payment. Back in December 2009, I came across a significant windfall of ~$33k. (Due to a confidentiality clause, I can't divulge the source or the reason for the windfall.) I spent some of the windfall on various things, but managed to hold onto $28.5k for over a year. I didn't know what I wanted to do with the money. Should I keep it as a potential down payment for my first home? Should I just stash it as my secondary emergency fund? Or should I pay off my student loans?

I finally worked up the courage to use the money to pay off my private student loans. Although the interest rates are really low right now (3.583% APR), I'm not sure how much longer it will stay low since it is a variable rate loan. Secondly, I've been accruing anemic interest on my savings accounts ranging between 0.5% - 1.59% APY. Thirdly, if you add my EF balance and my "earmarked" savings, I have approximately $24,000 remaining in the bank. I felt I had enough of a financial cushion to pull the trigger.

I was planning to snowball my entire student loans but I've changed my mind. As I've indicated above, the minimum monthly payment and the fixed interest rates on my remaining federal student loans are both relatively low. Although the balance is still relatively high, I feel less urgent to pay it off.

Instead, I'm going to focus on saving money for a down payment on my first home. Although I'm pretty confident that interest rates aren't going to skyrocket any time soon (in the next five years or so), I want to be able to have money to buy something before it does.

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congrats on eliminating your private student loans! It must feel awesome.

It's great that you're saving for a down payment. I've started a fund for that, even though I've still got lots of student loan debt. It definitely is tricky trying to weigh the interest rates of loans against the paltry returns on savings accounts. I've struggled with deciding if I should focus on paying off the loans faster or saving more for a down payment. One point I've heard people make is that you might get a better interest rate on your mortgage if you have less debt. I'm not sure if that's true, but if it is, it makes me want to pay off my debt faster. Of course, I do like hoarding money. And I know it's important to have the down payment, otherwise you're pretty out of luck.

Anyway, yay for paying off debt. Do you have an idea of how much you'll need for a down payment?

Sallie's Niece said...

Congrats on paying off your loans! Hope you've been well.

444 said...

Great news! We've done some loan-paying-off, too, but on a much smaller scale, like a bank loan for about $3,000. Feels good to be rid of it, though, doesn't it?

Louise said...

congrats on the loan payoff!!

paranoidasteroid said...

Congratulations! I know those loans have really been bugging you!

Ms. MoneyChat said...

oh man .... congratulations!!!!

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