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Why is it so loving hard to math out student loan repayment stuff? It's trivial to find "estimates" but I'm really having trouble figuring out how to get actual numbers. Let's say I have multiple student loans with multiple APR's and when I do a normal payment, it goes towards interest first, then the loan with the highest APR. Ok, all well and good (though it would be nice to see an amortization table for this). Now let's say I want to pay extra each month towards my loan with the highest APR. When that loan gets paid off the extra money each month goes to the next highest APR, all the way down the line. I want to be able to plug in different numbers and see EXACTLY how much of a difference paying different additional amounts has on the life of my loans. I know on the surface this seems like a demanding ask, but it also seems like a SUPER common thing that someone would want to know, so how come it doesn't exist? Do I need to be an accountant just to do the math on my student loans? There's got to be an excel or a google sheets table that someone has put together somewhere doing this.
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Mar 7, 2018 17:05
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 04:57 |
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Ugh it's so hosed. Hot take I know. It's just frustrating when my wife calls and talks to her lender (fedLoan btw, these aren't private loans) and they give her straight up incorrect or conflicting info each time she calls. It took them so long to switch her from IBR to standard repayment, that they didn't even end up switching her, she got auto switched when she didn't send in the paperwork for the next year's IBR.
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Mar 7, 2018 22:50
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Ancillary Character posted:...explanation... It's nuts that you wrote all this out and gave multiple examples and it's still a pain to parse and understand (I may just be dumb though). Another thing is they bury the "pay ahead" stuff in a pretty insidious way. For fedLoan the only way to avoid pay ahead is to target your payment towards a specific loan (to be fair you should be doing this anyway to hit your high APR loans first). I'm surprised at the discrepancies between who handles your loans too, even within federal loans. I have Nelnet for my loans and they are much more upfront and it's pretty easy to see where your money is heading with them.
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Mar 8, 2018 00:31
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Quick dumb question: Student loan interest begins accruing again on Sept 1st, so if you were planning on paying off a big chunk of your loans, you'd want to do that before then, correct?
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Aug 24, 2023 22:01
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