Waiting to Pay off Your Student Loan is a Big Mistake

Forget the Grace Period

There is no cheap way to get a college degree anymore, and very little chance of having a good career or even getting a good job without a degree. Students that attended college in 2017 were paying an average of over $39,000 in student loan debt in fact, and that is just student loans, there is tuition, books, the cost of living. Face it, college is expensive, and to get ahead in the world it is almost mandatory today. But to get a degree and pay for it over 95% of students go deeply into debt.

Then they start making mistakes when they pay it back, and it hounds them for years or even their entire life, destroying credit, becoming an endless payment that destroys the quality of life that you worked so hard to get the opportunity to earn. But there are some ways to get ahead of the game, to manage student loan debt and to get the student loan monkey off your back.

Start paying your loans back early, consider student loan consolidation to knock down interest and make loans manageable, and to get ahead of the game instead of waiting for it to come to you. Over 40 million Americans are deeply in debt with student loans, to the tune of one and a half trillion dollars.

Student Loan Consolidation & Eating Costly Interest

The two biggest things that can be done involve student loan consolidation and paying back the loan as quickly as possible. In both cases costly interest can be chipped away, and in the end that is what hurts most people with student loans. To be fair, the loan process is designed to allow students to get through school and find a job that pays and get started before they have to begin repaying a loan, but this is a trap.

Forget that grace period exists, ignore it. In fact take a job while in college and start paying down the student loan debt as soon as possible. Throw every dollar you can at it before you even graduate and it can get you well ahead in the process. Take extra Christmas or birthday money, whatever you can spare, and pay down the principal before the loan clock even starts. Pre-paying a couple thousand dollars before your loan is first due can save you several costly years in payments, and you can send as little or as much as you like as often as you like without penalties before the loan payback period begins, it goes straight to paying off the loaned money itself.

People with multiple loans can also take advantage of student loan consolidation. Student loan consolidation is a process where multiple student loans are combined into one to get the lowest interest rate on all loans and make it so you have one manageable payment. It is another smart method of not only managing student loans, but eliminating some of the costly interest payments that tend to hurt people the most over time.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON

in

Power & Money

Photo of author

Rasha

Rasha writes about family, parenting, and home décor for Unfinished Man. Drawing from her experiences raising her own kids, she provides tips on creating warm, welcoming spaces. Rasha also shares home staging expertise to help transform houses into magazine-worthy dream homes.

Leave a Comment