It's awesome to see so many people killing off their student loans, and now I can add to the chorus. After making the minimum payment on my student loans every month since 2005, I decided I was sick of looking at that dumb $5k-ish balance in Mint all the time and should just pay them off as fast as I could. After finding MMM, I started tracking my monthly expenses to the penny. After I understood what my monthly expenses were, I decided to keep 1.5x that number in checking, and pay all the excess against my student loans every time I got paid (salary and rental income). I also kept making my minimum payment automatically. Here's how that looked:
6/14/2013: $141.28 auto-pay
7/1/2013: $1000
7/5/2013: $700
7/14/2013: $141.28 auto-pay
7/22/2013: $770
7/31/2013: $2204.49
TOTAL: $4957.05 - DONE!
I actually projected my payoff date as this Friday, when I'll have both salary and rental income coming in, but I just got impatient and decided to do it this morning!
