Anyone graduate college with a lot of debt? Any ivy guys in here?

How much did you graduate with and how did you manage it. I'm pretty sure my salary is gonna be pretty high but the vision of having a lifestyle similar to that of a manager at Starbucks is not sinking in well. Clearly, I'm not gonna put myself into debt further, buy cars, anything like that.

 

Consolidate and repay. Pretty simple. It's like having a second mortgage.

AFAIK, all student loans and consolidated student loans have no prepayment penalty, so pre-pay principal when you can.

Student loan interest is not tax deductible if you make more then like $45K/year. Many people with high student loans try to roll them into real estate loans when they can so they can deduct the interest portion of the payments.

 

Remember, your student loan is likely to be the cheapest loans you are going to have. Having had said that, pay off those loans like you have no tomorrow. I graduated with $29,000 in debt. That wasn't too bad really. I paid off the higher rate Stafford loan for $20,000 my first year with part of my investment banking bonus. I had about $9000 in Perkins 5% loan which I've been paying off $75 a month. I should be fully paid off in a few years. Now if my home loan got little smaller....

 

Why did you choose to stretch out a $9000 loan so long rather than just pay it and get it over with?

And were you not making payments on the $20k loan before you got your bonus?

 

Yeah, I made my regular payments plus a little but the remaining loan (like $6500 now) is at 5% interest. I have bigger fish to fry with my home loans so I am paying off the higher rate loan (my 2nd loan on my home) instead of my student loan. That loan is good at 5% forever.

I view my job as making returns from borrowed money. So I can make much higher rate of return than 5% from my investments, so I'd rather just drag out the payments instead of just paying it off.

 

I see. What kind of investments are we talking here?

 

I graduated with about 25K loans, I consolidated with citibank studentloan.com and got a better interest rate and the payments are very low.

I pay around 130 bucks per month for a 30 year loan. After two years of paying on time, I will reduce the interest rate to 2.25%, which is great. I do have the money, but I would rather make more with it then to pay off my loan, which will stay at 2.25% for the life of it.

 

I have Citibank too - they let you work out a 30 year payment plan? I thought student loans were always 10 years?

 

My school costed $34k a yr, so with working part time 25+hr a week all 4 yrs and a few $18/hr internships. I still graduated with about 80k in debt. So with interest, thats probably 100k+.....Worst is I cant consolidate my loans because they were private loans since i didnt qualify for any govt loans. Luckily I have a pretty decent job, but that still sucks seeing the amount I am paying per month for the loans is enough to lease a new X5 or after i finish paying back my loan, thats enough for like half a condo.

 

I graduated 10 years ago with about 35k in debt - pretty simple to consolidate student loans - rates are low now and probably won't be too much higher by the time you graduate.

I don't recomend extending your payments out over 30 years though...

 

i graduated 3 years ago (i'm a columbia grad although not sure how that matters for debt).

whats ur debt? is it around 30k? if so thats not alot. is it more like 100k?

i don't make a killing, but a make a decent amount. had 30k in debt. paid off 6k in perkins loans. the rest is a stafford loan, which i'm paying in the regular monthly installments cuz the interest rate is so low. if i wanted to though, i have the cash saved up (due to excess salary savings & stock market gains) and then some.

 

Why would you pay off perkins before stafford? Perkins is way cheaper. I think Perkins is 5 and Stafford is all over the place. I hope you meant the other way around. For the first few years out of college, I think you can write off your student loan interest payments. I forget the exact rules but definitely take advantage of it.

 

when i finished w/ my bach, i had about $20k in loans. paid a bunch off in 2 years. got it deferred cuz i went back to school and picked up another 5k.

i consolidated before 7/1. now the interest rate is about 3.6%

 

Where did you consolidate at 3.6%? I have some old Perkins at 5% that I haven't consolidated but might want to.

 

You dudes with single digit interest don't realize how decent that is -- I had some SLS loans taken out in the late '80s at ~14% interest. I was overjoyed to later consolidate at 8%.

It's all about one's perspective...

 

You're right that stafford is all over the place, but if you consolidate a stafford loan, you lock in current loan interest rate (my rate is something like 3% i think i can't remember for sure).
Since the perkins is fixed at 5%, consolidating it does nothing, except locking in an already locked in 5%. consolidation doesn't change interest rates

And if you mix the two, there's no advantage either. Say you have stafford loan at 3.5% and perkins at 5%, equal debt for each loan. if you consolidate they'll take a weighted average and you'll end up with one loan at 4.25% (if i remember reading the paperwork correctly -- i consolidated about 3 years ago right outta college).

Hence the reason I paid off the perkins loan right away.

Its interesting, when I got the perkins it was supposed to be the great loan (only award to families with incomes less than some amount) since at the time when i started college (98) stafford was running around 8.5% or so. By the time I graduated the perkins was the weak link.

also can only write off student loans if your income is less than a certain amount (can't remember for sure something like 50k -- which didn't do me any good).