Dec 172012
 
English: Day 3 of the protest Occupy Wall Stre...

English: Day 3 of the protest Occupy Wall Street in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Happy Monday, you guys!

In today’s installment of Mondays and Tips, I’d like to talk about student loans. My international friends probably have no idea what I’m talking about (you lucky ducks), but for the rest of you Americans who will be stuck throwing a big chunk of your paychecks to these huge stupid corporations for the foreseeable future because you didn’t know any better when you were 18, I’m sure you can commiserate.

Either way, with all of the moving expenses I incurred, in addition to attempting to pay down credit card debt that has accumulated with the last few years of galavanting around Europe on a Slovenian salary, as well as now living in one of the most expensive places in the world, making my monthly student loan payments has become more and more difficult as of late. To combat that, I applied to postpone my loans for a few months this morning via forbearance while I get settled into NYC living and attempt to pay off some debt. What is forbearance, you might ask? Well, I did a bit of research and found out that there are two ways of postponing your loans – deferment and forbearance.

Deferment means that the government pays interest on your loans during the period of postponement.

Forbearance means that you are responsible for the interest accrued.

Obviously deferment is the better option because the government helps you out, but there are some qualifications you have to meet in order to be eligible for deferment, such as demonstration of financial hardship (which means making less than 150% of the official poverty level of the place where you live), or serving in the military or peace corps. I don’t meet any of those qualifications, so I went with forbearance. The application process (via stupid Sallie Mae) was straightforward and simple, and I called afterwards to confirm that it went through OK, and hopefully the next few months will allow me to get my financial situation sorted out a bit.

That’s all for now. Debt-free by 2014 or bust!

(I’m assuming it’ll likely be bust. Either that or all of our financial burdens will be absolved in the next few days with the coming apocalypse anyway, right?)

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