Student Loan Progress – November 2014

As 2014 comes to a close, I have now made my second to last payments for this year and things are moving along at a great pace. As I wrote about recently, I was able to refinance my private student loans for a second time. This brings my interest rate down from 6.5% to 5.49% and will save me some money in the total amount paid over the life of my loan. I continued making my payments of $2300 a month as I have been doing most of the year as I try to meet all of my repayment goals. But first let’s take a look at the numbers to see exactly how things went this month!

Student loan progress after November payments were made:

So as you can see from the above chart, I’m now under $40,000 which is great! I feel like once I’m under $30,000 things will really start to move as I enter the “home stretch” of paying back my loans. You may have also noticed that I didn’t make any actual progress on my private student loans. That is because I was stuck in limbo, waiting for SoFi to pay off my old student loan. It got closer to the due date for my original payment, so I was forced to make that portion of my payment anyways.

That payment fell on a Monday, so I scheduled my payment on a Friday to be on the safe side, and guess what happened? My payment went through on Monday and that was also the date that they received the check from SoFi paying off the full loan balance. So now my new loan balance is higher than it should be because it’s missing a payment.

Unfortunately I have to wait for my old student loan provider to reimburse me which will take until December. Right now I have around a negative $500 balance which will be sent back to me via check. They told me that my account is currently under “paid in full pending status” for November. That will change on December 3rd when my next payment would have been due to “paid in full status”. I can then expect to receive the check for the remaining balance within 30 days.

My new loan also doesn’t have a payment until December 9th, so it’s basically like I lost double the progress due to the poor timing of everything. It’s not a huge deal though, as I expect to “recover” in either December or January. I might even put that extra money towards one of my government student loans since that is what I’ve been focusing on.

For my government student loans, a huge chunk of my payment went towards Government Loan #7 this month. I should be able to pay that off with next month’s payment. That would leave me with just two remaining government student loans and I would end the year on a high note even if I don’t reach my extra goal. I’m estimating that I should have both of those loans paid in full by April or May of next year as well.

And now here are what my goals look like after making the November payments:

Main Goal: $20,000 Principal Reduction: $25,224.28 so far = DONE!
Stretch Goal: $25,000 Principal Reduction $25,224.28 so far = DONE!
Extra Goal: $30,000 Principal Reduction $25,224.28 so far = 84.1%

I have now completed my stretch goal this month in additional to surpassing my main goal, and that’s even with not having the progress from my private student loan! I’ve also managed to push even closer towards my extra goal of hitting $30,000 principal reduction for the year. I think I’m going to fall just short of this goal, because I don’t realistically see myself coming up with a $5000 payment next month. This was an extra goal for a reason though, and I’m not disappointed at all. I’ve made amazing progress this year and even just getting near that goal is an achievement.

photo credit: Dakiny via photopin cc