This past weekend, I started Phase 2 of my Sallie Mae Accelerated Repayment Plan (SMARP) by making the first significant overpayment to my spouse’s student loan. I’ll be on Phase 2 for a while because Phase 3 is looking at the payoff amount and paying it all off, which won’t come for a little while yet. Because that’s my only truly exciting news, let’s just get right to the numbers:

  • Debt at start of blog (6/19/07) : $36,451.71
  • Current total as of 03/10/08: $25,066.25
  • Principal paid to date $11,168.48
  • Broken down into:
  • Student loan: $11,550.22 (made $144.50 minimum payment)
  • Spouse student loan: $10,596.32 (made payment of $1015.31)
  • Car loan: $2919.71

The good news is that making this large of a payment did indeed trigger a screen that asked me if I wanted to advance my due date or apply the extra money directly to principal. It even had apply to principal as the default selection, so maybe Sallie Mae is improving on letting people prepay their loans. I was pleased, and yes, selected apply to principal. I may have been concerned for nothing because the selections explained that if I selected “advance my due date” the money would be applied to accrued interest and then to principal, so in effect it may have done a similar thing. I was wondering where Sallie Mae would hold my money instead of applying to principal, after all. We’ll see. I checked after the payment posted to the account and the overpayment portion was indeed applied to the principal balance.

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