i have about $14,000 more left from college: $165 per month

i dont even know how much im going to accumulate from grad school, ut i'd rather not think about it. wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I'm right even with Lena V. My husband has close to $75K, and he's not paying them off with any regularity. They haven't arrested him yet, and we even have a mortgage - student loans must not reflect badly on credit ratings.

i consolidated mine with the feds. i called them last year and asked for what i thought was my last deferment, but the woman on the other end said that technically you could a deferment forever...what a thought! who said that you can't take it with you!?

i have 11k from undergrad. after consolidation that came to $78/month (i still have maybe 9k left to repay). i'm looking at an additional 100k for grad school.

i luckily came out of undergrad debt free but grad school is looking to be around 90k without some help...

I think SPELLING BEE might pay this post a visit.

what?

Check this...

I once heard that an art professor over at Cal Arts was paying off student debt with Social Security. That's beautiful! The poetry of the finance industry!!!

i must be paying up to 340 per month. fucking bummer. most of it is from undergrad. even though i didnt have to pay grad school tuition and had a TA job, i still had to take out for some extra laundry money. that little bit is set to be payed back in something like a 10 yr period and so the payments are too steep right now. i hate banks, needless to say. on the plus side, i think i only owe 400 bucks to my credit card. i'll get rid of that next month.

Zero DOLLA!

I had scholarships through undergrad and savings/inheritance (and by inheritance I mean pretty much EXACTLY enough for college while living on a meager budget, not a shitload of $) to pay the balance & living expenses.

I am in a master's program right now - Museum Studies, not M.Arch - which I am doing part-time, and has to be completed in not more than 5 years. I saved up the tuition for my first class, and this was helped by my employer paying half of the tuition. I am only taking 1-2 classes at a time so I can continue to work, and by the time I am done with one semester I am able to save up enough money for the next semester's tuition.. and if something happens where I am unable to save the money, then I'll wait a term to take my next class. I just resigned from my 9-5 job (on good terms with my awesome employers, anyone know a graphic designer seeking work?!) so I can focus on the schoolwork, and commute once week to Massachusetts for classes I can't complete online, while still maintaining my freelance design & illustrations clients, independent projects, and my night job at a bar in Manhattan. Freelance pays the bills, night job pays for the tuition & for my haircuts and clothes and whatnot.

So yeah. The structure & flexibility of this program is awesome. And I wish the top arch schools weren't so grinding, 2-straight-years-through, full-time-required. I may still apply eventually to a full time graduate program, but right now it's not right for me.

Hearing about people's debt problems & frustrations from school on Archinect was a key factor in deciding to do my graduate work this way rather than taking out huge loans and possibly financially crippling myself. And also in helping me realize that what I want to do is related to & requires an understanding of architecture and spatial design, and the abilty to communicate with & think like architects, but not necessarily an architecture degree. I don't mean to get all emotional but I owe a lot to y'all over the past few years!

I'm at about 85,000 +, will consolidate Federal in June and hopefully private sometime in late summer.

can you consolidate private loans? i thought that was only an option for federal loans.

ball n chain baby ball n chain

i do not think you can consolidate private loans my dear

i also have to finish paying off about 500 maracas of a key bank loan and that couldnt be consolidated with other loans

I haven't researched them completely, but my Fed. financial aid advisor here said she had heard of Next Student, and that some of the things looked pretty good. Will check in after graduation.

http://www.wellsfargo.com/student/loans/repayment/consolidation/consolidator.jhtml

http://www.nextstudent.com/private-consolidation-loans/private-consolidation.asp

http://www.studentloanconsolidator.com/private/

if you are planning on deferring your student loans "forever"-I heard on the news the other day that W is planning on making sure those that do defer, will pay out eventually through their social security-not that we are depending on ss to take care of us when we are old and gray-but it will be even less if you don't pay off student loans.
I have 14,000 left for undergrad, and my grad won't require any loans at all!

Myself: $35,000 after a masters in construction management
My wife: +$100,000 after a business bachelors from NYU

neither of us in Arch programs but some hefty student debt around here nevertheless.

okay everyone! lets all default together and bring this corrupt usury system down like a house of cards. okay who's with me? power to the people!!!!! oh my new design within reach catalog is here. hooray

just paid off the last bill this month of ten years at a $200/month...

those of you grad schoolers with +100k debt who have paided your loans down (or are slowly trying) to zero or nearly 0, how did you find salary levels when you left school? umm, in other words, making what you made, was it easy or difficult to make payments ?

it seems like beginning level salaries are always super low and would make it really hard to make a payment of 400-800 bucks a month....