Borrowing Costs: March 2008($67.82)
I apologize for being late with these posts. I remain dedicated to this blog and continue to find bits of time to keep up with drafts, etc… Unfortunately/fortunately I don’t sit at a computer at work and thus I am always 24-48hrs(a week perhaps) behind the latest news of the blogsphere.
A positive tidbit about being busy is that until I sit down and fill out my spreadsheets, I don’t have an idea how we are doing each month.
From what I see here, we did well in March on containing the borrowing costs for our $197,000s worth of Debt!!!
Although having over six-figures of student loan debt will be significant financial burden for many years into the future, I choose to focus on a couple of positive points.
- The first benefit is steady work. My wife and I used our time in college(and after) to gain marketable skills in industries that had a history of having steady jobs. I actively pursued a career in health care knowing that in the future I should at least have a job if economic times got bad.
- The other positive point is that a student loan is one of the better forms of debt to have. This year my wife and I were able to reduce our taxable income through the interest paid on our student loans. It doesn’t reduce our taxes dollar for dollar like a tax credit could but it does help with the mental anguish.
Those of you who have been following along may notice that I have removed the $4,000+ of student loan interest I accumulated in 2007 from my February totals. I have been using a modified form of cash accounting with this series and do not want to account for the interest accumulated until it is actually paid.
The trap of doing this it that it visually appears to minimize the total costs of carrying these loans for a full 30 years. To keep the total costs of these loans in perspective I will total the interest paid for the life of the loan.
