Jen and Ashwin
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- May 28, 2015
Since I know we are done for 2016 (using YNAB and last month's income), I thought I'd add a little summary here...
When my student loans came due in Summer 2014, I started reading up on them, the payment plans, finance blogs, snowball vs interest rate to pay them off early... and I made some extra payments here and there, paid off two small, high interest loans. Df and I got engaged in early 2015 and we squirreled away money for a wedding and possibly a house. Currently, we've been living with his parents since just before we got engaged - first it was until I found a job, then to save for the wedding, etc.
At the beginning of 2016, I owed around $28k and DF owed around $26k in student loans. Around March/April, we made the decision to push our wedding back about a year due to some family drama, and decided to really start paying extra on our student loans. We also started using YNAB to budget. We figured out what monthly savings amounts fit in our budget, figured out how much we could save for our goals (wedding, honeymoon, down payment) with our new timeline (we've always planned on moving out around the wedding), and took the extra money we'd saved up and each made a payment into our loans on May 1st : $6300 each.
Since then, we've worked up a budget that accounts for each of us paying an extra $300 on our loans each month. When we do the next month's budget, we take any extra we made over our typical paychecks, split it, and add it to our extra payments. I was still really surprised when I added up what we paid on our loans this year: $28,400! Our minimum payments at the beginning of the year were $785 a month, so after taking out our $6300 lump payments we averaged around $1300 a month. Really it was more than that because we didn't pay any extra for the first few months this year. We've gone from 18 loans together to 9, and our minimum payments are now $450 a month.
I really enjoy this thread, reading about other people's successes and the support offered when people run into difficulties! I'm glad I found you all!
Now what I haven't mentioned is we took out two car loans, mine in Jan 2016, DF's in May 2015... I think they'll feature on the 2017 thread
This is such a great accomplishment! It really is quite amazing what we can do when we act with intention. I know that for DH and I, using YNAB made the difference for us because it helped us really see our money and be much more purposeful in how we spent it. I will soon be writing up a 2016 postmortem too once our final paychecks arrive this week.