I called Sallie Mae and Lo and Behold they had my income based repayment information but its not processed!!! Its sitting there doing nothing. So I had her do something with it.
While I had her on the phone I asked a few questions about how do I go about paying my loans if I want to pay extra on them. In my previous thoughts if I made a little extra money I could put extra just toward one loan at a time in order to pay them off. Not all at once. If I can keep the general payments low with the IBR then I might have a chance to save up money here and there by other means like a extra job, ebay, dog sitting ect to put toward just one loan at a time. The answer to this is yes you can do this!!!
A little trick I learned today as well. First do not use a debit or credit card. Pay from a checking account or a savings. So what I would do it open a checking just for this purpose. Keep little money in it so just in case of identy fraud you will not loose a lot. It happens just be safer than sorry. Make it your student loan account and just use it for that. Then if you do this online or talk to a person. Tell them you want to make next months payment. So this ways your extra payments goes toward the principal not the intrest!
These are small things they do not tell you that you can do when you have all those loans clumped into one. By tacking one loan at a time you have a better chance of paying off your loans sooner with less intrest in the long run. At least in theory it can work.
Now that I have that question answered all I need to do is see if my IBR goes though and I can see where my non budget is at now. I can see how much extra I will need to make in a month to do this. And I"ll have an idea of how to move ahead.
The end goal is to get out from under this debt asap. Breaking it down into smaller amounts and one loan at a time is easier than looking at the whole picture.
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