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  3. Six Steps to Tackling Your Student Loans [A]Any payment is a good debt payment, but a strategy can be useful too— even if your s

Six Steps to Tackling Your Student Loans [A]Any payment is a good debt payment, but a strategy can be useful too— even if your s

admin2014-06-30  44
问题                     Six Steps to Tackling Your Student Loans
[A]Any payment is a good debt payment, but a strategy can be useful too— even if your strategy means opening the envelope.
Open the envelope
[B]This is the hardest thing to do. The bills come with the "Sallie Mae" or "Discover" logo on them and you toss them aside, hoping to deal with them when you feel less besieged(围攻). You know you started owing some amount— $ 20,000, $ 50,000, $ 100,000—and that the interest is piling up, but you don’t know exactly how much or how. When faced with heavy debt, many people try to avoid seeing the numbers.
[C]This doesn’t work, even psychologically. Anyone who has let credit-card bills or mortgage bills pile up, unopened, knows that avoiding the envelope does not reduce your anxiety; it increases it. As those envelopes multiply, they take over your psychological state. In horror movies, it’s like the monster in the room behind the door. You don’t know what it looks like, but it keeps you scared and immobile. So, open the envelope.
[D]Or, even better, log in online. All student loan providers have a web site where you can see what you owe, your interest rates, and your payment schedules. SallieMae. com is no-frills, but still allows you to see your loans on one screen, including your interest rates. Discover, com also has a pretty basic site. Citibank has a more complex site. Get used to logging into these sites pretty often; if you need motivation, think of it as visiting your money while it’s in prison.
[E]The websites all have one thing in common: they let you see how much you owe, and what your interest is, and they make it easy to pay—but they don’t let you see how much your debt load is growing. This is a major motivating factor in paying down your loans.
Identify your loans
[F]Are your loans held by the federal government—usually through Sallie Mae—or through "private" lenders like Citibank or Discover? If you don’t know who holds your loans, you can find out here, at the National Student Loan Data System.
[G]Why do you need to know who holds your loans? This will make a difference to your payment options and your interest rates. If you have a federal loan, for instance, your interest rate is probably very low, around 32% ; if you have private loans, the interest rates are likely to be much higher, around 48% . Federal loans also give you options like requesting forbearance(延期还贷)if you’re out of work or if your income is too low—handy for the times when you’re down on your luck.
Start seeing your debt in new ways
[H]The websites of lenders are often limited and only have basic information. To really tackle your student loans, it can often be useful to visualize how much progress you’re making. There are several ways to do that.
[I]One really useful new free site is Tuition, io, which gathers information for all your loans in one place. You can see your debt in colorful charts, play around with repayment plans, and, once you start paying your loans, you can see the numbers start to fall. That can be very motivating.
[J]For the same effect that you can customize yourself, try a Google Docs spreadsheet. There’s a template that already exists for paying down loans; it has the unpromising title of " Loan amortization schedule by Vertex42. com" but it has very handy calculators built in so that you can tweak your monthly payments to see how much progress you can make if you increase or decrease your payments in any given month. If you don’t like that template, just create a Google Docs spreadsheet with the categories you need: date; loan name/number; loan interest rate; starting loan amount(including how much you owe on that date); payment amount you made on that date; ending loan amount after that payment. After you have enough entries, you can start creating graphs; there are few things more satisfying than seeing that graph move downward as you pay off your debt.
[K]If you want to see your loans in a larger context of your whole financial picture, LearnVest is a great mobile app for iPhone. It gathers all your information—income, loans, credit card debt—by linking to your accounts. It serves up useful graphs on your net worth, comparing your assets to what you owe—and there’s nothing more motivating than seeing a "minus" sign next to your financial picture. LearnVest also lets you track your spending, which may make it easier to see where to cut down on expenses so that you can put more into your loan payments. LearnVest also has a good website full of useful advice.
Don’t be afraid to scare yourself
[L]Student loans can often be scary—and that’s why you should slay them. The more you see how much you owe, and how fast your interest is rising, the more motivated you can be to fight back by paying those loans. One staffer, after she saw how much money she was wasting on interest payments, increased her student loan payments by $ 75 a month.
[M]It can also be tempting to believe that your student debt is so big that nothing you do can ever make a dent in it. That’s completely untrue. Only paying your loans will shrink them. It will take years, true. It will take even longer if you don’t pay, or pay the minimum. There’s only one outcome of shirking your loans: ending up with bigger loans. Then you’re in an even bigger bind. No one is going to save you from student loans. Action counts.
Choose a strategy
[N]Any payment is a good payment, but a strategy can be very useful too. There are two aspects to loans: principal and interest. Principal is how much you’ve borrowed, and the interest is what you’re paying every month for the privilege of having borrowed that money. Your goal is to pay down as much of the principal as possible. Your chief enemy here is interest: it grows fast, and makes the principal recede more distantly.
[O]So make sure you know the rank of your loans, in order from smallest to largest, and lowest interest to highest interest. Do whatever is possible to reduce the interest; as our columnist Helaine Olen points out, Sallie Mae offers you a 0. 25% reduction in your loan interest if you sign up for an automatic debit(借方)plan—just make sure the money is always going to be in your account. If you don’t want to do that, follow Helaine’s other piece of advice: you’re smarter to pay off the loans with the higher interest rate first. This will create the biggest impact. Another popular strategy is the "snowball" method, where you pay the most on the smallest debt owed. So if you have a $20,000 loan and a $ 10,000 loan, the " snowball" method means you will start paying more towards the $10,000 loan. You’ll see it disappear faster. These two methods don’t always go together; so try what feels comfortable. The important thing is to see and track your progress.
[P]If your income isn’t enough, consider other methods of producing money; side projects, odd jobs, or selling things you don’t need on eBay or Craigslist. For those whose parents can afford it, working out a joint payment plan can make sense. One graduate we know struck a savvy(精明的)deal with his parents: if he made the minimum student loan payment every month, they would contribute $ 100 toward his student loans. That’s $ 100 he doesn’t have to cut from his own budget. As a benefit, making bigger payments will help you pay down the principal of the loan, since the minimum payments often only end up reducing your interest, which balloons back later. Even $50 more a month can help.
[Q]Here’s an example: if you have a $ 20,000 loan, with a 4.2% interest rate, you will end up paying an extra $ 2,814 in interest alone over six and a half years. If you increase your payment by only $ 50 a month, you’ll cut that interest by $ 500; if you can find a way to pay $ 100 more a month, you’ll save nearly $800 in interest. That’s $800 more in the bank, and $800 less wasted on pointless interest payments.
Take it in stride
[R]Most Americans owe some form of debt; learning how to handle it is a lifelong process. Most of all, don’t beat yourself up if you’re not perfect at paying down your loans. Some of the savviest financial players struggled for years with their own finances. We all learn in our own time and we find what works for us and what doesn’t. Accept your own progress.
With Google Docs spreadsheet, you can create your own personalized debt graphs.
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