[Sarah Sangster]

I recently graduated from Graduate School and have almost 100,000 of student loan debt to pay off. I am a stay at home mom with an online business. What is the best way to go about paying this off?

[Schnelle Acevedo]

I’d love to know this too as I am in a similar situation!

[Sum180 Lead Coach]

You both are in good company as nowadays there is more student loan debt than credit card debt in our country. To speed up the paying off of student loans, refinancing your loans is one of the best options. When you refinance your student loans, you’ll have one consolidated loan with a single monthly payment and a lower interest rate, which is important so that more of each payment goes towards paying down the balanced owed. Companies like SocialFinance’s (SoFi) have a strong refinancing offering. We also like Student Loan Hero’s The Ultimate Guide to Paying Off Student Loans Faster for more ideas. What ideas seem most doable to you?

[Antoinette Minor – Ambassador]

Do you have federal or private student loans? Do you have both? I’m in a similar situation. I owe a little over 100k and my personal approach is to pay off the private loans as fast as possible and to have my federal loans forgiven under the income based repayment program. IBR allows you to pay based on your income and household size. Under this plan your loans will be forgiven after 25 years. Sounds like an insane amount of time but at least for now while my income is not where it needs to be to pay off this loan in a reasonable amount of time, I am able to live and I won’t be paying the full amount. Since there are no options for private and its a very small sum of my student loans I’ll be paying that quickly to get rid of the debt.

Other than that I would say use the typical strategies such as paying more than the minimum and throwing any extra money (bonuses, extra clients, unexpected income) to the loans as well to have them paid off faster.