Since I’ve been a little overwhelmed with all this moving stuff (I only have three boxes packed so far out of an entire apartment…) and since I knew the due dates on the loans had been pushed back since I’d been paying consistently for two years, I let it slide for just one month, since I knew there wouldn’t be late fees.
I shouldn’t have.
To explain why, let me give you a few numbers. On March 22nd, my total debt was $94,515.66.
May 3rd (April payment) it was down a hundredish to $94,382.74. (Which is actually a little low. The difference between February and March’s debt total, for example, was around eight hundred ?. And between January and February was five hundred.)
My May payment, May 28th, it was down almost seven hundred to $93,684.33. (Following the snowball method, I’ve been throwing extra money at the smallest loan, which is slowly making a dent. So yes, the snowball method works, but rather slowly.)
Anyway, as I said, for one reason or another, I never made a June payment. So what happened to the debt total when I went to pay for July? It went up, of course. I had known that there was a good chance it might, due to interest. But even so…!
Today, July 20th, my total debt was back up to $94,382.05. In other words, only sixty nine cents less than it was back when I made an April payment. ? It was as if I had never made that payment in May.
Let me say that again. Even with NO LATE FEES, skipping just one, ONE! month of payments upped my debt seven. hundred. dollars. That’s not just interest anymore. That’s flat out extortion.
And yet loan companies still have the nerve to wonder why people are defaulting or not paying them back. I’ve been lucky the last few years, that I was making enough to afford to throw extra at the loans and still have enougn money for food and to live comfortably. I know there are others who aren’t that lucky, and more and more it makes me doubt all those “we paid off our six figure debt in a year” stories. Not on an under $40,000 job you didn’t! There’s no possible way. So even if you’re struggling with loans and want to believe there’s an easy way out… I’m sorry to tell you, but there isn’t. Those stories are pretty much just clickbait.
So now that my one month of skipped payments has made my debt think I skipped two, you can bet that as long as I can afford to I will never again miss a payment, even if the loan says no payment is due, thus no late fee. Which also means that I don’t really have time to take a break…once all this packing stuff is done, I need to hop right back into job searching, something I’ve been doing unsuccessfully since March. :-\