We’re aggressively paying off $63,000 in student loans, making an extra $3,400 payment per month on top of the $700 minimum payments. With interest rates between 8-14%, refinancing wasn’t giving us great options, so we decided to just throw everything at the debt and clear it in about 18 months.
How We’re Managing Payments The challenge wasn’t just making the payments but also tracking them effectively with cash flow. I tried:
- Ally’s Buckets – Didn’t work how I wanted.
- Quicken Simplifi’s Planned Spending – Didn’t impact cash flow estimates which I need.
Our solution: Every month, I review our cash flow, manually add a "Bill" in Quicken, and schedule the extra payment when the timing works best. It’s not the most automated system, but it keeps things on track how I need it to be for just a few minutes a month.
Slowly working towards FI! Hope this post helps somebody - I feel like I've spent way too much time trying to find the "Right" way to track and see it all.
