First of all, I managed to get a friend to help me with creating graphics for this blog! At the top is a table that shows all of our loans, balances, interest rates and minimum monthly payments. The loan names are just the descriptors put on them by the lenders so that I can easily identify them. Next is a graph of our current savings goal, which I have tentatively set at $6000 to be applied toward the closing costs on the house. Since I assigned priority numbers to each loan in the table, I decided to do a visual representation of how close we are to paying off the current priority goal. At this time, we are on #1, but I plan on creating a new graph for each loan as we pay them off. Lastly, I made a graph to track the progress of paying off our total debt load. As I said in a previous post, these graphs are my gold star. Filling in portions of the graphs as we progress is a nice visual reminder and reward!
When I first began exploring the best method of paying off student loans I managed to find this worksheet. Page 1 asks you to put in all of your loans and debts along with your current monthly payments. It also gives you the ability to put in a start date, and any additional payment you plan on putting towards your debt. After you insert all of this information, Page 2 of the worksheet gives you a complete month-to-month breakdown of the balance and interest on all of your loans. As you scroll to the right you can see how your balance will be affected, and as soon as you pay off one loan, the payment from that loan is automatically added to the next loan's payment (the process known as snowballing). Page 2 also gives you the opportunity to add in 1 time bonus payments to the appropriate month (i.e. I add in a bonus payment in April since we apply most of our tax return to the loans). I LOVE this worksheet. Being able to see the numbers and project when each of our loans will be paid off and see the balance dropping keeps me motivated and makes me want to stay on track!!!
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