Boing Boing Staging

$6,000 payments against student loan reduces debt by $700

Bill Boegeman racked up a student loan debit of $82,961.02 to get a B.S. in social studies education from Minnesota State University, Mankato. It’s going to take a very long time to pay it off.

Here’s the part that really makes me mad: For 12 months, I have been making student loan payments of just over $500 a month. That means that over the course of a year, I put about a $6,000 dent into my student loan debt, or so I thought. On Oct. 17, 2015, a year to the day after I began paying off my loans, my total student loan debt was …

$82,264.27

If you don’t have a calculator handy, that adds up to just under $700 less than I owed a year ago— $700 out of the $6,000 I put in that actually went toward reducing my debt. That’s about 11 percent of the total amount paid, just enough to reduce my total debt by almost 1 percent.

Where did the other 89 percent ($5,300) go? Interest.

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