Getting Out of Debt - 5 down 5 (really huge) loans to go

Something really cool happened last week.  

We paid off another student loan.  And not just any student loan.  This one was the last one that was managed by Fedloan.  That means from here on out I only have to deal with two student loan management companies.  

This is the loan that I was hoping to pay off with part of our tax refund back in February.  However, we weren't able to pay it off because there were other things that needed the money more.  (For one, Brandon wanted air conditioning in the jeep this summer.)  So for the past 5 months I've been putting all of our double payment money toward that last Fedloan account.  

The way the double payments work is like this.  With the first paycheck of the month I pay the minimum payment on all the accounts.  Then with the second paycheck I pay an amount equal to those minimum payments on the Fedloan account. Those extra payments shrunk the Fedloan account really fast. 

Now our debt pay off tracker is almost half way uncovered.  I love to stare at it and remember back to when we only had part of the waterfall uncovered.  That was only 4 years ago.  In the past four years we've managed to make 6 1/2 years worth of monthly payments.  That's pretty amazing. 

But we aren't out of the woods yet.  In fact, in some ways we've only been chopping down the tiny trees the past four years.  See, Brandon originally had 10 student loans.  Six of them were each under $10,000.  Four of them were each over $10,000.  Over the past four years we've been able to pay off the five smallest loans.  Now that they are gone we still have 5 loans left.  And four of them are huge!  These are the loans that accrued interest the whole time Brandon was in college. (I was not in the picture when that decision was made, but I ignored the situation for several years.)

The good news is that with the smaller loans out of the way we can throw more money at the larger loans. If we keep up our current loan payment momentum we could have the loans paid off in the next 4 to 5 years.  

And check this out.  It's only June, but so far we've already paid off more student loan debt this year than we did any other year.  Those double payments have really made a difference.

This is the part where I would say something cool like, "with our current plan we should have the next loan almost paid off by the end of the year." And that would be really great, and if we were going to keep making double payments it would be totally doable. 

But we aren't going to keep making double payments - at least right now.  

Brandon's current situation with the Army has us thinking about the possibility of life away from the sheltered world of the Department of Defense. If we become a civilian family again we are going to need somewhere to live.  And that means we should consider buying a house.  And that means we'll need a down payment. Even if we don't buy a house right away, we are probably going to need a larger savings account than we have now.

So for the foreseeable future our "double payment money" is going into a special savings account.  When we know more about what the future might hold we'll decide whether or not to put the money toward debt or to something else.  

We'll still be making the minimum payments so the debt will continue to shrink.  Just not as fast as it has been.  

Even though things are a little up in the air with our debt pay off plan, I'm so glad that we only have 5 loans left to deal with instead of 10. I have to keep reminding myself that slow progress is still progress.