It took me a Saturday morning, two cups of coffee and one annoyed sigh from my dad, who wanted the kitchen table back for his crossword. By lunch I had all six of my student loans on one screen for the first time since I graduated.
That sounds like a low bar. It is. But for almost three years I only ever looked at the total and the monthly bill. My servicer's site shows the loans as a stack you have to click open one by one, and I never bothered. I knew I owed about $24,600. I did not know which parts of that were expensive.
How I set up the sheet
I added a new tab to the club sheet and gave each loan one row. The columns are simple: which school year it's from, whether it's subsidized or unsubsidized, the interest rate, the current balance, the monthly minimum and the daily interest. Here's what the six rows look like, rounded to the dollar:
- 2018-19 unsubsidized, 5.05%: $5,600
- 2019-20 subsidized, 4.53%: $3,900
- 2019-20 unsubsidized, 4.53%: $1,900
- 2020-21 subsidized, 2.75%: $4,700
- 2021-22 subsidized, 3.73%: $5,300
- 2021-22 unsubsidized, 3.73%: $3,200
Total: $24,600. Federal undergraduate loans get one fixed rate for the school year they're taken out, which is why my rates jump around. Freshman year was the most expensive money I borrowed, and the year everything shut down was the cheapest.
The subsidized versus unsubsidized column turned out to matter more than I thought. On subsidized loans, interest didn't build up while I was in school. On unsubsidized loans, it did, from the day the money was paid out. That's part of why my freshman loan is still so large. It spent four years quietly growing before I paid a cent.
The daily interest number
This is the part that made me put my coffee down. Federal loans charge simple interest that builds daily, so I calculated it for each loan: balance times rate, divided by 365.
The 5.05% loan alone costs me about 77 cents a day. All six together come to about $2.72 a day, or roughly $82 a month. That means of the $330 I pay every month, about $82 goes to interest before a single dollar touches what I actually borrowed.
Put another way, $2.72 a day is about $990 a year. That's about what I pay my dad for my share of the car insurance over ten months, except this buys me nothing. It's not catastrophic, and I know people with much bigger balances at much higher rates. But it's not nothing, and seeing it as a daily number made it feel real in a way the monthly statement never did.
What I noticed once it was all in one place
A few things jumped out right away. First, almost half of my balance, $11,400, sits at 4.53% or above. Those are the loans that cost the most to keep around. Second, the 2.75% loan is cheap enough that it almost doesn't bother me, which is its own kind of trap. Third, two of the loans are small enough that I could picture them being gone within a year, which is a nice thought for a Saturday morning.
I also noticed I'd been making a quiet assumption that my extra payments were going somewhere useful. When I checked, my servicer had been spreading the few extra dollars I sent across all six loans. That's not wrong, exactly, but it means every loan shrinks a tiny bit and none of them ever disappears. I want to change that, and I'll write about how once I've decided which loan to aim at first.
Right now my extra money is going to the credit card, which charges 27.24% and makes everything on this list look friendly. That's still the plan until it's gone. But building this sheet now means that the day the card hits zero, I already know where the next dollar goes. I won't spend a month deciding.
If you're doing the same thing, the boring advice is the real advice: log in, open every loan, and write down the rate and balance yourself. It took me about two hours, and most of that was me second-guessing my formula. My dad got his table back by noon. He looked at the screen, said "That's a lot of rows for one degree," and went back to his crossword.
