Welcome to my August 2018 student loan debt progress! If you are new here, every month, I post the progress I’ve made on paying off my student loans. I do this to hold myself accountable and to share my debt progress with others who are also facing debt payments of their own.

Debt paid this month: $2,000

Debt remaining: $96,171

Check out my debt progress so far from the very beginning here.

FYI: I am on the REPAYE program which allows me to make $0 minimum payments each month until 2019 hence why I am able to only make payments to one loan without having to put in minimum payments to all my other loans.

Updates for This Month

It’s not quite the end of August yet, but I am going to be busy with visitors over Labor Day Weekend so I did my August roundup 2 days early.

I contributed $2,000 this month, leaving me with a balance of $96,171. My contribution this month is a lot lower than the $5,000 I have been contributing the past couple of months. So that’s quite a bummer. But I have an explanation for that coming up!

I realized that I haven’t actually been calculating my accrued interest these last couple of months. So I decided to make the calculation and it turns out I accrued $168.81 in interest since last month.

To be honest, that’s not such a bad number. Especially compared to the $600+ I was paying in interest per month when I first started paying my student loans while on Standard Repayment Plan a year ago.

Changes for This Month

I did not meet my goal of contributing $3,000 to my loans this month that I set on my July 2018 Debt Progress. But I don’t think it’s because I’m hitting a slump.

I funded my Roth IRA and successfully rolled over my previous employer’s 401K to a Vanguard account which was my goal last month. I also started re-funding my emergency fund that was slowly dwindling as I made extra payments the last few months on my mission to getting under 6-figure debt.

So that’s my excuse for this month. Hopefully, I won’t have to make any excuses for next month!

Goals for September

I really like the idea of having goals for each month to keep myself on track and motivated so I create goals for the following month on each debt progress report.

The goal for September is to finally finish off my last 6.2% interest rate loan (my highest interest rate loan) since I am using the debt avalanche method. It will be my last loan with an interest rate > 6%!

This was actually the goal I set for this month that I failed to meet so fingers crossed that I’ll be able to do it next month.

This loan has a balance of $2,426 which I’m positive I’ll be able to finish off as soon as I receive my next paycheck.

My next goal after that is to tackle the lower balance of my two next highest interest rate loan. This will be the 5.84% loan with a balance of $17,181.

My stretch goal is to finish off this next loan by the end of 2018. But since I plan on keeping last month’s goal of contribution $3,000/month to my student loan, this loan may extend to the beginning of 2019 to get paid off.