The Kick Off

Over the past few months I've been stressing about my graduate student loans. A few years ago I left my job and went back to grad school. This took place right after the recession hit, and my thinking was I would wait out the bad job market in school. Unfortunately, while I was waiting out the recession I was burying myself in debt. Not my smartest move.

For the sake of transparency, I'm cringing to tell you, that I now have $91,540.02 in student loans and a job that pays over $10,000 less a year than my job pre-grad school. I'm making roughly $33,000 a year. Looking at those numbers I've become overwhelmed. Most examples I've read about people paying off that amount of debt were about people earning around $50,000 and living frugally. Well, at $33,000 I'm already living frugally, so where does that leave my loan situation?

At one point I gave up hope of paying off my loans in my lifetime, and resigned myself to always having a monthly payment. This thinking is S-T-U-P-I-D. I've decided to take control of my situation and aggressively work on paying down my loans.

First order of business: creating a budget. I've searched for some budget templates to help me with this task, and found this article on different budget tools: http://www.doughroller.net/tools-resources/10-online-budget-tools/, and this article on an app that specifically focuses on student loans(!): http://mashable.com/2013/08/13/tuitionio/.

I'm going to give Mint and Tuitionio a go; I'll let you know my thoughts on these soon.