I’ve been waiting for a rather big cheque to finish clearing in my account this past week. I woke up this morning, logged into my online banking, and noticed it had cleared, so I decided I would finally make the call I have waited almost ten years to make, and pay off my first student loan.
At one point I had nearly $40,000 in student loans, something that seems almost insurmountable when you finish school. But unfortunately, that is the high price of an education nowadays, and banks sure don’t seem to mind capitalizing on that.
Back in March I paid the final $8,000 of my car, and today I placed the call to pay off the final $9,348.45 of my Royal Bank student loan. So assuming the transaction occurs tomorrow, I’ll be free of that massive beast once and for all sometime tomorrow. I was actually a bit surprised (and delighted) when before hanging up the phone the customer service rep. stopped to congratulate me on finally paying it off – it was a nice gesture. I was paying around $270 a month on that one, so that’s money back in my pocket each month now.
I still have about $2,500 in other smaller student loans (amounting to about $100 a month in payments), and I’ll knock those ones off as well over the next few weeks. If I were to pay them off now too, it would leave me running fairly close to the rails, so I might wait another month. We’ll see though.
Congrats! I can’t wait to be able to post something similar to your entry here, though my debt isn’t from furthering my education, it’s from retail therapy. I have a loan of roughly 4 grand that’s been weighing on me since March, and while I got things sorted out and the horrible feeling of not having things under control has died down a bit, it’s still something I think about all the time. I’ve had to cut back on a lot of things and keep things in a budget (which I hate- but I don’t want my debt to grow). This whole problem would be solved if I didn’t live Downtown, but I’m not willing to give up my apartment because I truly love my place. I’m glad you are almost free!
When you say ~CA$40,000 in loans, it may sound like a lot to you, but in the UK that is the average amount of debt incurred by ‘most’ uni students – i.e. those from a middle-class background – after just three years of study!
Here, it usually costs roughly (the equivalent of) ~CA$11,000 per year of study (half tuition fees, half maintenance loans) – increasing as you go to masters etc.