interest sucks!

because i didn't want j to pay his student loan (SL) payment late this month (like last month), i asked him to pay it this week. the monthly due date is every 14th, and last month he totally forgot about it and paid on the 18th. sigh. men.

so today i checked his SL account online anticipating a slight reduction. to my dismay it wasn't reduced. if anything, it increased by some $100 USD! as you know i'm from NZ and the current rate is NZ$1=US$0.77. i was annoyed! j told me that the good thing about his SL was that there is no fees for late payments. i must've confused fees being inclusive of interests.

"the specific amount of interest taken from each payment depends on how many days there are between your payments, the principal balance of the loan, and the interest rate."

it's just really frustrating especially when you have goal to reduce debt. it would have made me feel better to see even a slight reduction you know. it's the biggest debt our family has and the longer we keep a balance in it, the longer it would take us from buying a house and saving more. anyway, given that quote up there, it annoys me because not all months have the same number of days. the best bet we could do is to pay fortnightly, just like how we do with our health insurance and savings. the problem is not having enough funds to shell out $600 every 2 weeks for SL. we are going to try splitting the monthly payment to $300 to be paid every 2 weeks, but i'm not sure if the transaction fee of $16 is fixed for every payment though. ugh. fees, fees, fees!!! they suck!

j and i have a plan for the next 4 or 5 years to pay off debt. maybe even less if we're gonna be good about paying more than we should! i'll write about that next time.