I gave a call to the bank on my potential student loan refinance, because I got conflicting emails. Turns out, when they initially entered my monthly mortgage payment into their system, they added an extra digit somewhere, resulting in a $13,000 monthly payment. I now understand why they wanted a cosigner!
But they confirmed that it was fixed and requested some documentation, which was easy to produce (paystub, current loan statement). I checked the status today and not only was I approved, but I was approved for the lowest possible interest rate! I will now have to pay $558 as my monthly payment, instead of $501, but I’ll be moving from an interest rate of 6.625% to 4.74% (after the .25 reduction for setting up automatic payments, which I did).
Too much text. Let’s see some screenshots of what this gets us:
Paying $575 (rounding up my minimum) at my old rate:
Paying $575 at my shiny new interest rate:
Paid off a year and a half earlier with a whopping $8,519 in total interest saved! And this is without any additional snowballing to the loan to pay it off earlier.
My original intent was to pay of my undergraduate loans (3.25% – with a cosigner), then decide between attempting to pay off my higher interest federal loans (6.625%) or my “law school loans” (5%). Now that my “federal” loans are at a lower interest rate I think it makes sense to hit them in the following order:
UG3: $537.28 (Projected November 2014)
UG4: $3,131.99 (Projected March 2014/bonus time?)
UG5: $4,646.23 (I can’t predict the future here)
Perkins Loan: $6,387.96
Law School Loan: $13,683.27
“Federal Loan”: $70,300 (ish)
I will also pay off any remaining balance on my federal loan (interest accruing before the refinance payment comes through) next month. I’m happy that all of the smaller chunks in the “law school loans” category will now be at higher interest rates than the big daddy federal loan, so that eventually/$28,000 from now, I’ll only have one loan open!