We took out student loans when one of us were in grad school. There were two loans taken out.
- A Federal Sallie Mae (spun-off into Navient) loan in 2014 for $20,500 at a fixed rate of 6.21%
- A private Discover student loan in 2015 for $15,000 at a variable rate of 4.99% (at origination), which now stands at 5.615%
- A grand total of $35,500 student loan was taken out
The coursework of this program took 3 and half years. The total cost of this degree was about $80,000 including tuition, books, papers, case studies, “collegiate fees”, a two-week international component, parking – basically everything included. So we paid out-of-pocket for the remaining $45k.
We’ve been making payments on the loans since they were taken out, even though nothing was due till after graduation, with a grace period built in. We’ve been pumping in around $1,500 each month into these loans for the past 5 months. Now that the last of the coursework is done, we decided to roll them into one low-cost fixed-loan and pay them off in the next 9 to 6 months. Here are the current outstanding balances on the loans
- Navient: $2,745.67
- Discover: $12,999.64
- A grand total of $15,745.31 loan is outstanding at end of program
Earnest was the provider we went with and locked in a fixed rate of 3.25%. In the next post we’ll talk about our experiences with Earnest and a couple of other highly rated student loans consolidation services.
Net Worth, Anon 
One thought on “A deep dive into student loans”