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You went to college and got your teaching degree because you care about young people and want to educate them, but your own education can start to feel more like a punishment than a privilege when you’re carrying a heavy student loan debt. Teaching is far from one of the highest paid professions around, but you can pay off the loan with careful and strategic planning.

Reducing What You Owe

Your first step should be to find out if you can lower the overall amount that you owe. That can sound too good to be true, but refinancing may give you a more favorable payment plan and a lower interest rate. By refinancing student loans with NaviRefi, it may make it easier for you to pay off your loans in a shorter time frame. There might be other ways to reduce the total owed as well. If you have federal loans, you may be eligible for the Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program if you meet certain other criteria.

Tracking Spending and Making a Budget

Your next step and one of several simple money management tips is to take a look at your overall spending. Most don’t know what they spend or where their money is going, and if this sounds familiar, you’ll need to track your spending for a while to answer that question. While there are apps that can help you with this, if you prefer the old-fashioned approach of writing down everything you spend money on, this is equally as good as long as you stick to it. 

With around three months of tracking information, you should have enough to help you create a budget. Be sure that you make note of infrequently purchased items or once-a-year expenses, such as vacations, birthdays or holidays. Look at ways that you might be able to spend less, freeing up money to put toward your student loan debt. However, make sure that your budget is not too restrictive or you may find yourself unable to stick to it.

Make a Plan

Once you know how much you are spending, where you can save, and what you need for various expenses, you can make a plan to pay off your loan. Decide how much you can pay each month, and figure out how long it will take you. It may be a few years, but as long as you have done the math right and understand how interest will affect the total of what you owe, your plan should work. If it’s going to take longer than you want, see if you can free up cash somewhere. Even cancelling subscriptions on streaming services could give you an extra $200 or $300 per year or more, which adds up. 

You could also consider picking up some additional work. While this may be difficult to do during the busy school year, working another job or picking up some gig work during the summer might help you pay off that debt faster. Set smaller goals along the way so that you can give yourself rewards as you reach certain milestones.