How to Prevent Student Loans from Hurting Your Finances

Whether you’re a fresh grad or you’ve been in the workforce for a long time, student loans are a financial burden. And more and more people out there are facing student loan debt these days. Student loans now top an astonishing $1 trillion in the total amount owed, and that number is increasing every day. With so much at stake, it’s vital that you protect your finances from being negatively impacted by student loans. Since they are the one type of loan...

4 Student Loan Mistakes that Make Interest Rates Soar

This guest post comes from our friends over at SoFi, an innovative marketplace that connects alumni borrowers and investors for refinancing private and federal student loans.[1] If you’ve borrowed student loans to invest in your education, you know that paying interest on those loans is simply part of the deal. But while “interest” can seem like an abstract notion when you first take out loans, over time it becomes a force to be reckoned with –...

$18 Billion in Student Loan Debt Threatening Livelihood of Senior Citizens

When I first graduated from college, I loved to joke that I’d be in student loan debt forever. After all, graduating with tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a degree in comparative literature pretty much meant I was on a long road to my eventual payoff. Of course, my joke ended up making light of what has become a very real – and very scary – situation for today’s senior citizens. As much as I joked about being in retirement and in debt, there are...

How I Paid Off All My Student Loans in Just 2 Years

In March last year, I proudly announced that I had paid off my student loans and requested a celebratory flyover by the Blue Angels. While the Blue Angels never came, it has been wonderful to spend nearly a year without paying a cent of student loan interest. Here is how I did it. How I Paid Off My Student Loans in Two Years… How I Got Into Student Debt in the First Place Undergrad When I was seven years old, I joined the local Cub Scout pack. After...

The Cost Of Education, A Worthy Investment?

While I’m (obviously) not an attorney and while I don’t have a Juris Doctorate degree either I get to meet a lot (a ton) of lawyers because of job as a clerk for the state. Sometimes it feels like everyone I know is a lawyer. So often I hear about people graduating law school with $100,000 – $150,000 in student loans. Now that is an intense amount of debt, and it makes my $40,000 photo school education feel like a bargain. It’s all relative right. I get...