+$100k of Student loans

+$100k of Student Loans

By the time I was 18 years old I had already worked a few jobs. Most notably as a cashier at McDonalds and as a sales associate at The Gap. From an early age I was always led to believe (as I'm sure many millennials were as well) that college was the only "guaranteed" way to succeed in life. So strong was the pressure in fact that college was all anyone could talk about in their senior year. 

The popular trend among my peers was to go to a university that was far from home so that for the very first time in our lives we could flex our independence. Naturally this is also what I wanted. I was very disappointed when college decisions came back and I had only 2 acceptance letters. One was for NYU (whose prices were astronomical) and the other for our local university Florida International University. There was nothing wrong with FIU, in fact I really enjoyed doing my freshman year there, but something inside of me always wanted something more. 

That being said, I applied as a transfer student to Georgia Tech with little hope of actually getting in. In the meantime, I dreamed of what it would be like to go to Georgia Tech. I would talk to my parents about it very often and all they could say was that they were concerned about the cost of the school. This is where I started doing some intense research and calculations. I even made them a short presentation (yes, in powerpoint) showing them my expected salary after graduation, expected loan amount and how long it would take me to pay the debt off. I could tell they were not convinced to let their youngest leave the house (as it is not common in hispanic families to "go away" for college). But since I had only just submitted the application I was simply told... "we will see".

I was in NYC volunteering in a 3 month camp for undeserved communities (will write more about this later) when I finally got the letter telling me I got accepted. I could not believe it. I called my parents and told them the news.

The rest sort of flew by. Before I knew it I was sitting in my dorm room at one of Georgia Tech's on-campus housing on my bed surrounded by boxes crying a little. Not really sure if I had takenthe right decision.

This isn't really a story about my college experience so I'll just mention a few highlights. I met the girl of my dreams, I interned and got a job offer at NASA's Johnson Space Center and graduated Cumulate with a degree in Aerospace Engineering.

After I graduated I thought to myself..."my life has finally come together". The very next day I got a letter from my loan servicer Great Lakes (https://mygreatlakes.org/) letting me know that my student loans in excess of $100k were about to start accumulating interest. 

All of a sudden, the sudden jolt of happiness I had gotten from graduating quickly fainted away as I realized that, for perhaps the first time, how big of a number $100k was and how long 10-15 years of repayment would be. 

That's when my soon to be wife and myself decided that the struggle was not over but in fact it had just begun. I'm happy to say that we were able to wipe out our student loan debt within the first 2 years of graduating. We were lucky to both have started off with good high-paying jobs but this does not take away from the fact that for those 2 years we lived like college students.

All of our furniture was second hand. We did not go out to eat and opted to cook at home. We did not take any vacations or anything of the sort and it paid off. Paying loans off as quickly as possible is key to financial independence. Letting a loan live 15+ years literally makes it so that you are paying ridiculous amounts of interest for the entire life of the loan.  I will write a separate blog outlining the different strategies we employed to decrease our loan amount as fast as possible.