Foundations of Finance

Monthly student loan payments can be something very difficult to carry for many students who occur debt over the course of their studies. Whether you’re a freshman at a your local university or a graduate student studying abroad in another country you still need to be careful about your financial choices.

Five steps for lowering your monthly student loan payments:

1. Make a spreadsheet document that includes all of the lenders that you owe, the amount that you owe them and the minimum monthly payments. Calculate the total amount of money that you owe on your student loans.

2. Research the lowest interest rates offered for student loans by looking online and/or visiting local banks. You will find that it is often easiest to use your current bank to refinance your loan but in the long run it isn’t always cheaper.

3. Check out the availability of federal loan consolidation programs that may be provided through your school or the government.

4. Decide which bank you are going to use to consolidate and refinance your loans. This means that you will take out a loan big enough to pay off all of the individual loans and lower your payments while slightly increasing the time it takes to pay off the total loan.

5. Sign a promissory note to begin making payments to your new lender on a lower monthly payment schedule.

Warning: Debt consolidation can be used to lower your payments but it will not necessarily lower the total payment of your loan. There are many students who do not understand debt consolidation loans and occur even more debt because they have lower payments and end up spending more when they should be applying their excess income to paying off their consolidated debt.

• Don’t put off getting started. Even if you pack a peanut butter and jelly sandwich once a week and save the $10 you would have spent on lunch that day, you will be saving $40 a month or $480 a year. (That should cover a trip to the dentist.)
  

  Unexpected expenses can be taken care of with an emergency savings fund.

• Trim nonessentials from your budget. Stop paying for premium cable, daily mocha lattes and brand name food and clothing and you could save as much as $1,600 in one year.

• Consider getting a part-time job. Even if it is three to four hours a week at night or on the weekend, the extra income could go a long way to creating that cushion you need.

• Give the $5 bill saving plan a try. For those folks who use cash regularly, this plan involves keeping any $5 bills that you receive throughout the day and week and placing them into savings rather than spending them. A conservative estimate of savings using this plan would be $20 a week or more than $1,000 a year.

• Save half of all ‘extra’ money. When you receive a raise in pay, place half of your new earnings into savings.Have the money deducted automatically from your payroll and placed into your savings account, and you will never miss it. Likewise, save half of any tax refunds or an inheritance.

• Continue to make your car or other loan payment after you have paid off the balance due.Put the money into savings each month just as if you are continuing to pay the note. It takes discipline to accomplish this, but I assure you, if you don’t put the money in savings, it will get spent. To convince yourself to stick to your savings plan, think how nice it will be when the car needs service and you have the funds to pay for it with no additional interest charges tacked on to the total.
  

  After the work is done, reward yourself!

• Include saving for something fun once you reach your goal. After you reach your emergency savings goal of three to six months of living expenses, you will have developed the habit of saving. Continue to save, only this time for something fun. The dream vacation to Disneyland you never could afford, a European vacation … you get the idea.

    Its seems as though the “Macintosh vs pc” topic has been an ongoing battle for decades. Many claim that PC’s are the cheaper buy. My family has always owned PC’s. Even the alienware customs and another custom ordered PC’s. No arguement, They have cheaper prices! Economical? maybe…. I’ve wasted so many hours rendering, updating, troubleshooting, installing the “redo-disks”..I’m quite the expert in fixing the recurring issues I’ve battled with using my pc’s. Last year I converted to mac. Outside of my own opinion, I’ve done a little research, I hope you enjoy what few facts have helped me see just how much of a gap there is between Mac versus Pc.

         When NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston switched from Mac to Windows, troubleshooting calls grew consistently from 68,000 calls to 142,000 in just 2 years. Thats almost double the trouble with PC’s.

       There has been over 20,000 pc viruses detected on the internet daily. PC viruses are targeted at software and hardware components of your computer. Pc viruses can reach the flash BIOS and render the computer’s hardware totally inoperable. There has been a total of 40 detected viruses for mac on the internet. Of these, there has not been a mac virus created yet that has been able to reach any hardware devices. If you have a PC make sure you buy extra firewall protection and ant-virus programs such as Macafee. (This also includes a fun extra 10-15 seconds of load time for your anti-virus program when your PC is to turning on!)

          The average Wintel home user spends 50-60 hours a year troubleshooting their computer. The average mac user spends less than 5 hours per year. PC support costs are 4 times more than Mac support.

          Not only that, Listen to this…. The industry standard for Windows systems is 1 computer technician for every 25 to 60 computers. By contrast, the standard for Macintosh support is one person for every 100 to 200 machines. In fact, Gulfstream (a jet manufacturer) has 1 mac support technician for all 450 of their macs! Even Windows magazine Editor-in-Chief Mike Elgan’s agree’s and said, “Windows has become a bloated, unwieldy product only experts can use without confusion, crashes and endless compatibility problems.”

         Used pc’s do not maintain warantee with change of owner. Mac’s have a full coverage that allows owners to sell their computers with coverage. The owner of the used mac continues to recieve the full coverage Macintosh provides!

         For the average joe working at his business, a single windows server service call to Microsoft costs $195. A year of Apple support only costs $70.

         Macintosh has had the best performing computer stock since 1998.  Be confident the service, quality and level of maitained value will reflected in your mac. The imac has been the best-selling computer-line in CompUSA’s 13-year history.

Read the rest of this entry