Yay!
Thursday, February 26, 2009 | Permalink
In the fall of 1998 I enrolled at university. From that time I've had a small study loan. Now more than 10 years later I've finally paid it back.
Feels great to finally finish this chapter of my life. No more debt for me! Oh wait, I have a mortgage ...
Funny enough, for a long time I could've paid it back at any time. But study loans are subsidized in Sweden, so it never made much sense for me to pay back any more than they asked for. It was better for me to just shove my money into a savings account since that gave me a higher interest rate. And for several years after I finished my studies they didn't even ask me to pay any. I suppose that's because while I lived in Canada I never had an income registered in Sweden. I think 2007 was the first year they required me to start making small payments. Anyway, I never paid more than I had to simply because it made no sense to do so. Now with the financial crisis the interest rates are dropping heavily. Meanwhile, the interest rate for study loans actually increased for 2009, for some obscure reason. So suddenly the interest rate for my mortgage is lower than the interest rate on the study loans, and that's not even counting the fact that my mortgage is tax deductible, unlike the study loan. So I had some money I had put aside for making a mortgage payment, but given this sudden change of things it made more sense to pay back the study loan instead. So I did.
yosh64
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Congrats, I think it will be years and years before I ever pay, or begin to pay my study loan back :.
