This person is a moron. Clearly she did not study math in school...
She has been paying $117 a month for twenty-three years, falling behind a little more each year. If she had just paid $140 a month, she could have retired the loan in ten. One Starbucks coffee a week, is all it would have taken...
I know the interest rates today are in the 1.5% range but I wonder what they were in the 80s and 90s. Just after the Carter presidency they must have been astronomical.
Agree.... 23 years later and she hasn’t paid off 26K? I’d empower the IRS to go get it from her if it was my call.
$117? More like around $110. As a first-order estimate I averaged the student loan interest rates that would have applied to this fruitcake’s loans if she’s really been paying on them for 23 years (which means she started paying on them in about 1988); that averaged rate comes out to about 6.33%. The monthly fixed payment that would result in her still owing about $45k on an initial balance of $26,400 is approximately $110.
$140 would most likely not have paid it off because, again using that averaged rate, that would just cover interest, plus a few pennies more. At $140/mo she still wouldn’t have full paid in 50 years.
However, a monthly payment of about $298, again using that averaged rate, would have full paid in 10 years.
Still a pathetic, useless, parasitic cry-baby if you ask me. She probably studied art history and figured she’d get a comfy, lucrative position as director of some museum straight out of undergrad.
OK, I didn’t study business, either. Her payment would have to be $300 a month, instead of the $118 she has been paying, to retire the debt in ten years. The difference between a new car and a used car. Still doable and still worth doing.
She could have been on the right side of the savings rate for the last thirteen years, instead she volunteered to stay shackled to her bank.
If she had been socking away $300 a month, first paying the bank and then into savings, she would be $38,000 ahead instead of $45,000 behind.