Interesting Interest
>> Saturday, January 3, 2009
Tracking my debt balances has been quite the eye opening experience.
I've always known how much student loan debt I had, but like I said, I always considered it normal. I always thought we were lucky or smarter than most because we didn't have any credit card debt.
I still consider ourselves lucky because my student loan debt is at very low interest rates, as opposed to a lot of people's credit card debt.
Tracking our balances, though, has made me realize how much of my monthly payment goes toward interest versus principal. It's disgusting.
It's very frustrating how much I pay each month for nothing!
For January, my monthly payment was $409.54 and of that, $192.80 went to interest or 47%!
Isn't that crazy?
It makes me want to pay them all of so much faster because I am sick of paying for nothing...
I challenge each of you this New Year to take a hard look at your finances and see how much you're paying someone else when you could be paying yourself instead.
Kelsalynn
2 comments:
You have a really high student loan payment. Maybe you're not stretching out over the 10 year period like the rest of us, huh?
I paid off my private student loans midway through last year and it was such an awesome feeling. Between my private loans and my federal loans, I was paying $1200 a month! Now, I just have federal loans with a 2.2% interest rate and I only pay $400 a month. I signed up for mint.com a few months ago...sad to see how much we actually spend each month. We don't buy a lot of crap, but it always surprises me how much we manage to spend! So excited for you and your marathon...good luck over the next 2 weeks!!
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