My mortgage rate is already higher! My minimum payment for the loans sucks though. And can be paid off in a more reasonable timeframe
Colorado Moving
- Thread starter lBasket
- Start date
My mortgage rate is already higher! My minimum payment for the loans sucks though. And can be paid off in a more reasonable timeframe
If your mortgage rate is higher that should be your focus and you should continue with minimums on the school loans.
Mathematically yes but when you take into consideration what life looks like day to day, no.
My original minimum payment was almost 1100$. I had basically 0 wiggle room between that and my mortgage. Keeping that up for 10 years would have been a nightmare and very risky for any unexpected purchases
Are you paying on 5 separate student loans at the same time?
Have you looked into consolidating those loans into a single one?
That sounds like a terrible idea. Right now I have a bunch of lower balance loans I can pay off one by one, lowering my minimum payment.
Private student loan refinancing is a terrible idea for other reasons
do you have some aspect of your life that would specifically be better somewhere else?
"wherever you go, there you are"
If you went on vacation and decided you just can't stand to live that far away from the beach, or you developed some health problem and can't breathe above sea level, your state has passed legislation that meaningfully affects your life in a negative way (not just did something you disagree with), all your family has moved away and there is a state that offers meaningful financial benefit in retirement with respect to taxes and COL, or you want to be closer to family, those are all examples (but not an exhaustive list) of a good reason to pull up and go somewhere else. But I don't believe people that just go somewhere new for the sake of something different often find the secret to happiness and fulfillment that they're looking for.
One of the biggest predictors for longevity as well as life satisfaction in their later years is the depths of one's closest relationships. Picking up and starting somewhere new usually runs counter to that. Back to my dislike for Oklahoma - this place has the most awful climate of anywhere in the US, has few enjoyable opportunities for outdoor recreation, and has nothing whatsoever unique about it from a cultural standpoint, but it has my parents.
Yeah I mean I touched on a few of these throughout the thread. Family / friends moving away, not to mention I live in the middle of nowhere so new relationships of any kind are more difficult. Potential for financial situation improvement is also pretty high leaving a high COL state.
I don't have like a self esteem issue that I'm trying to run away from. But it does seem like there are benefits to be had and there is something to be said about not living in the same place your whole life, I think.
I haven't completely committed at this point though of course.
I've never had to do it, but I think I'd apply the Ramsey "snowball" strategy to your debt. If you sell your house and net something, I'd put that toward payoff.
I have been going to Greeley once or twice a year since 1990 (except when I lived in Springs from 2016-2021) and always exit at Bennett to avoid driving through Denver and having to double back east from I-25. It's been wild watching Bennett transform over the years.
I think that's a planning and infrastructure problem. A big part of the reason my family moved from CO to OK in 1990 was commute time for my dad to downtown Denver and the time it was costing with his kids. At that time, his colleagues in Aurora were taking just as long to get to work as he was from Greeley so there was no benefit to moving closer. They decided to just leave the Denver area entirely.
I did that in my mid-late 20s. It worked for me as long as I had the discipline to apply the newly freed payments to the remaining ones, and not just let it get absorbed by lifestyle inflation. My biggest "problem" was my student loans were small and interest was low, so my motivation to close them out varied based on what other things I could divert extra payments to.
The bit of advice i gave to everyone of my Subordinates or peers when they got married,
your living on one paycheck. stay living on one paycheck. take her entire pay and put it in savings.
did anyone ever listen. Nope two new cars furniture on loan, credit cards getting used. And the she would stop working. for whatever reason and they would be stressing out and missing payments.
With the exception of the house payment and the car loan on my new to me melissa ethrodge mobile. i’ve been debt free.
so when the day come @lBasket and you find the one. yes her pay to get the debt paid off and then save.
your living on one paycheck. stay living on one paycheck. take her entire pay and put it in savings.
did anyone ever listen. Nope two new cars furniture on loan, credit cards getting used. And the she would stop working. for whatever reason and they would be stressing out and missing payments.
With the exception of the house payment and the car loan on my new to me melissa ethrodge mobile. i’ve been debt free.
so when the day come @lBasket and you find the one. yes her pay to get the debt paid off and then save.
The town board has authorized 10,000 new homes.
it had a population of 3,000 people when we moved in.
WTF
Yes and yes, that is what I have been doing and what I will do if I end up selling house!
Realistically by the time I meet someone again I probably won't have any debt left save maybe a mortgage. I do not find people quickly
It is good advice though forsure. It would be nice to retire early. I can probably manage that by myself at this trajectory... Who knows when there is someone else and maybe kids in the picture.
Realistically by the time I meet someone again I probably won't have any debt left save maybe a mortgage. I do not find people quickly
It is good advice though forsure. It would be nice to retire early. I can probably manage that by myself at this trajectory... Who knows when there is someone else and maybe kids in the picture.
We were paying as we built our home and had a 5 year plan to be debt free . We got pregnant at the 3 1/2 year point which change our debt free status to 15 years . We have very strong convictions about a mom's place is at home with the kids . We have been debt free since 2002 and live within our means . Of course this makes you look real weird to the outside world . Our newest vehicles are 2004's and we don't have a RV , boat , second home. We also live a minimalist life style and really love that . It is good to be comfortable in your own skin .
tell me about it, we were military, living with in our means and momma stayed home.
had almost no similarities with my counterparts.
interesting thread
ok, i follow that and it ties back to working remote. I worked remote from 2019 until early 2025, with an interstate move in the middle of that, and the isolation after the move, out into the country no less, was brutal without having work as a place to rebuild a social network.
Research that pretty deeply before making a decision and don't just base that on raw real estate prices. I don't know much about Florissant and CO is all over the place but I found moving from Monument, CO to OK to have a much smaller difference in COL than I expected from the all the perception and cost of living comparision articles out there. When I moved up there in 2016 the house I bought was 40% more but my payment only went up by 23%. When I moved back in 2021 I only paid about 5% less for a similar property but the house payment ended up higher because OK has 50% higher property tax rates and 70% higher insurance premiums than Colorado. Gasoline is about 30c/gal less here, but there are other things that are higher for seemingly no reason, like milk and eggs are both significantly more. Income taxes are similar, vehicle taxes are a little lower, but overall I'd say any net improvement in our COL was very modest, if any, and certainly not noticeable in our day to day lives.
self-esteem wasn't exactly what I was thinking but I think you get what I'm saying. Some people just get into a headspace of basing their happiness on their circumstances, they go somewhere else and find new things to be unhappy about. I don't know you enough to say that's what's going on, I just thought it worth mentioning in case that's where your comment came from...we all have bad days now and then. And if you have your eye on specific tangible benefits, then it seems like you're on the right track.
I have opinions about whether our lives are any better with our own houses and lawns to continually maintain compared to cooperative, multigenerational housing which inherently means most people live their entire lives in the same place, but I'll spare those to avoid derailing the thread any more than I already have. There's definitely value in seeing different places and I concede that I could easily be taking for granted living in different places because I already have. Go sow your wild oats!
If you're basically drowning yourself in debt to the point of completely uprooting your life I'd say it's worth a look. Get some numbers on what consolidation would do in your case and see if it makes sense, don't dismiss it just because it "sounds terrible".
If you have federal loans it looks like it'd be pretty easy and relatively painless to lengthen the term and maintain about the same average interest, lessening your monthly burden.
Private, this is what I see for starting rates for student loan consolidation
Here's SoFi's calculator
https://www.sofi.com/student-loan-refinancing-calculator/
It may not make sense when you look into it or it may give you some breathing room and allow you a lower minimum monthly payment that you could still pay off faster when cash is more available.
Juggling 5 loans and a mortgage doesn't look fun.
Last edited:
My mortgage guy talked me out of a 15yr when we bought, not because we shouldn't pay it as if we had a 15 year but it allows a bit more flexibility IF we ever needed it. I imagine the same thing could apply to consolidated student loans. You're going to stretch the timing back out a little, but if you pay like you are today, it gives a little more breathing room where you may not actually be in debt during that longer time horizon that the flexibility gets you.
Looks like there's potential to lower the rates on 4 of the loans and not mess with the 5th.
