Last week’s article discussed the normal cycle of motivation while repaying your student loans.  If you’re looking to ramp up your motivation, today’s post will give you a few hacks to get from where you are to where you want to be. I’ll also share my journey through the stages of motivation.

 

Estimated read time ~ 8 min. Estimated watch time at 1.5x speed ~ 5 minutes

Hack#1

 

Pursue your curiosity and allow yourself to learn information without being obligated to take action.

Early on, borrowers often feel a huge weight of indecision. There’s too much information out there and it seems impossible to make a choice. By approaching learning with a sense of curiosity and no obligation to take action, you can look into the stuff you’ve been wondering about and start to learn and piece together the world of student loan debt. When you remove the pressure of action you aren’t crippled by the possibility of making an incorrect choice, because you’re not making a choice, you’re simply gathering information.

 

Hack#2

 

Make a decision about what you’re going to do with your student loans.

 

Once you’ve started collecting information you’re in the preparation phase. In order to move into the action phase a decision needs to be made. You’ll have to decide what exactly it is you want to do with your student loans.

 

If you don’t know what you want to do with your student loans, it’s going to be tough to take actions that land you in an ideal repayment situation. It’s OK to have one or two different options that you can start taking actions on. Your actions on both will help you move toward either choice and may help you finally decide which one is best.

 

Hack#3

 

Develop a plan that you can financially sustain and consistently work toward for the long term.

 

In order to have an action to maintain until you achieve your goal, you need to be able to sustain it. If your repayment goal is too aggressive, an emergency may arise and you won’t have the cash flow you need to both pay your student loans and deal with the emergency. If you make a misstep early on because your plan was too aggressive, you may lose motivation to work toward your goal entirely. That can leave you feeling unmotivated to sustain your repayment plan. You can always increase the intensity of your goal later if you find you’ve got a lot of room in your budget.

 

My Student Loan Motivation Journey

 

During College

 

While I was in college I wasn’t particularly motivated to worry about repaying my student loan debt. I worried enough that I worked two jobs, applied for scholarships, and borrowed only for tuition and fees but I didn’t worry enough to check my student loan balance regularly or think about the interest accumulating on my unsubsidized loans.

 

Immediately After Graduation

 

When I graduated college I became a pharmacy resident which meant instead of a six figure salary I was looking at a salary that was less than half of that. I was motivated to make payments and figure out a repayment strategy because at this point I realized I had accumulated $10,000 of interest on my unsubsidized student loans while I was in school.

 

Although I could enter forbearance and not make payments because I was in residency I didn’t want to do that because I would still accrue interest, and at an average interest rate of 6.5% for $128,000 that interest would accumulate fast. I had originally picked a 10 year standard repayment plan but discovered those payments were $1500 per month and I couldn’t afford to pay that much with my resident salary. I enrolled in the income-based repayment plan and paid about $380 each month and paid extra when I could afford to. That year I paid $6,000 on my student loans but that wasn’t enough to keep up with interest and my loan balance crept up to $132,000.

 

After Residency

 

When I was finally making full-time pharmacist salary I knew I had to tackle these loans quickly. The rate of interest accumulation was staggering, and I would dig myself into a deep hole quickly if I didn’t repay aggressively. So that’s what I did, I changed my repayment plan back to the 10 year standard plan and paid extra. My first year I paid over $28,000 toward my student loans, but then I had an unwelcome surprise.

 

I paid almost $14,000 in interest and couldn’t deduct any of it on my income taxes. I was really mad because the government was taking my money twice. I was being taxed on my earned income and then paying interest on my federal student loans. Then I discovered refinancing, halved my interest rate, and entered a 5 year repayment plan.

 

After Refinancing

 

After I refinanced my student loans I had an initial flood of motivation. My monthly payment was $1345 and my goal was to spend at least $3,000 a month on my student loans. However, I also realized I wanted to travel and I had the cash flow to do it if I just didn’t make an extra payment on my student loans that month.

 

So for a couple years I went on skipping extra payments and averaged paying about $2,000 a month toward my student loans. It’s not that this was terrible, but I wasn’t exactly meeting my goal.

 

Today I’m going to be out of student loan debt by September 2019, if I could be more aggressive it’d be awesome to be out before my 30th birthday (August 2019), but we’ll have to see about that. Because the end is so close for me I’m incredibly motivated again and I can almost taste the freedom from my student loan debt. I’ve been paying at least $3,000 per month on my student loans since January 2018 and I don’t let myself off the hook for making those payments.

 

Today, I owe just over $48,000 on my student loans. My motivation to get rid of that debt is here to stay until it’s gone.

 

What’s your student loan motivation journey? Have you had up’s and downs? What stage are you currently at? Let me know in the comments below or on the Repayable Facebook Page.