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Student loans: 5 steps to pay down your debt

Student loans aren't far from your mind if you've graduated. Now comes the hard part: paying for the education that you’ve just completed. Where to begin? Collect all your loan paperwork and then follow these five smart steps to paying off your student loans.

5. Choose a repayment option

Matt Smith/The Express-Times/AP/File
In this May 2012 file photo, graduation candidates add some personality to their caps during the Centenary College Commencement Ceremony Saturday in Hackettstown, N.J.

  • By Maura Kastberg Contributor

Once you know how much you have to spend monthly, consider your repayment options. For federal loans there are a few options to check out:

- The standard repayment (10-year repayment)
- Graduated repayment (starting with lower payments with gradual increases every
two years)

- Extended repayment (25 years to repay, with lower monthly payments but higher total interest costs)

- Long-term repayment (30 years to repay, which lowers monthly payments even more but is the most expensive option because of the added interest costs)

- Income-based repayment (a payment amount proportional to your income and family size)

- Income-contingent repayment (the repayment amount is calculated each year based on your adjusted gross income, family size, and total amount of your debt.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

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If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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