And so it has all come to today. My last day of freedom before returning to the daily grind. All I have to say is, It is about time. 

Success! I received an email this afternoon stating that my new pin was ready to use and so I went to the Direct Consolidation Loan site and retrieved my application. For some reason it lost all my loan information so I had to reenter all 11 loans again, but once I finished that I was in business. Read through the promissory note and electronically signed and now I just have to mail in two forms and wait for approval. Here is hoping that I get approved and that I will have a low monthly payment right now so I can start living life a little more comfortably. Maybe buy a house with one of these!

Got home today and discovered our beta fish had passed. Ouhaha, you will be missed.

So, student loans suck, well owing money sucks, but student loans are a pain. I mean the whole system is a little screwed up if you think about it. We are told to go to school to get a degree which is supposed to help us earn more money once we get a job. But if we owe a mountain of debt that extra money we are making is just going to paying off those loans. I suppose that down the road we will come out ahead at some time but I will probably be paying off my loans until I am 40+ years old so whats was the point again? 

That aside, I tried applying for student loan consolidation today through https://loanconsolidation.ed.gov which was going pretty easily if not time consuming. I have 11 different loans handled by three different banks and I had to gather up all that information to pass into the website. Now this is the year 2010, I should be able to just give you my personal info and hit find and have you gather all my student loan information. I mean come on, isn’t that info all held somewhere with my credit score. Well I get all that information put in there, give them information about how much I earn and get some different repayment options to choose from. Now things start to get a little confusing.

I am looking into these different loan options and I notice that some of the repayment options allow your monthly payment to be less than your accumulated monthly interest and then after a set time dump that interest back into your account added on to your principal balance. That is similar to what happened to all these people who took out home loans that they couldn’t afford and when their interest got added into their principal balance their new payment shot up to a balance they couldn’t afford! I don’t want that to happen with my loan.

Even with that as a possibility, the draw of a reduced monthly payment is too much to pass up. (See I am just as dumb and greedy as these people who purchased homes out of their price point.) One awesome thing about these loans though is that if I have not paid the loan off in full after 25 years they are forgiven and any remaining balance will be considered taxable income. I will let future Brandon worry about that.

A little more on my rant about today’s current state of technology and where I am at on the loan process. Once you finish giving the program all your information about all your different loans; balance, interest rate, servicing bank, you have to sign it. Well how do I sign something that is online you might ask? Well you create a pin and sign it. So I am passed over to another government website and I attempt to create a pin, all goes well except I have to wait 1-3 days for this pin to be approved. WHAT?! Like someone is there going into the back room verifying that my information is correct, BS! This is all done by computers and it should be instant. Geez I want my pin so I can be done already. 

So now I sit here, waiting, hoping that my inbox will soon read “one new message”. Refresh, nope, not there yet. :/