This website has already discussed a number of ways that borrowers can devote extra money to student loans. If you follow the advice on this website, you should be able to prepay a substantial amount of student loans so that the due date on this debt is months or even years into the future. However, there may come a time when you miss a student loan payment, and if this happens, it is important to immediately take steps to protect your credit and ensure you are still on a good path toward debt repayment.
During my student debt repayment saga, there were several student loans that I did not prepay and that I needed to submit payments for each month. A few of my loans had extremely low interest rates that were similar to the rate of inflation. It did not make sense for me to prepay this debt, since the interest that was accruing on these loans was minimal.
Although I never intended to miss a student loan payment, there were a few times that I completely forgot to submit my monthly payment. I had to log onto three different websites to keep track of my student loans, and it was difficult each month to keep track of the debt that I had already paid. In addition, I was simply busy with work or other responsibilities at times in my student debt repayment saga, and this made me miss a student loan payment on a few occasions.
Each time that I forgot to pay my student loans, I would receive an email from my lender notifying me that payment was due. However, sometimes this email would go to my spam folder and I would not see it. As a result, it pays to stay on top of your student debt, since you cannot rely on your lender stepping in and notifying you that you are late in paying your student loans.
Each time I accidentally failed to submit a student loan payment, I made sure to immediately log into the student loan website and submit my payment. Even though a few of my payments were submitted outside of the grace period established by the lender, I never faced any consequences from failing to timely submit a student loan payment. So long as you submit your student loan payment within a reasonable amount of time after it is due, it seems like missing a payment is not reported to the credit bureaus or has any other negative impact on your financial status.
One of the ways you can minimize the chance you will miss a student loan payment is to automatically have the payment deducted from your bank account when it is due. I know a number of people who opt into this service, and this eliminates the need to log onto your lenders’ websites each month and manually submit the payment. However, I did not opt into such a service for a number of reasons.
For one, I wanted to have complete control of my student debt situation. I felt that if money was automatically deducted from my account each month, I would lose track about details regarding my student debt, and would have less control of my student debt situation. In addition, it would be harder to increase my payment under an automatic system, and I tried to challenge myself and increase my payments whenever I could.
Furthermore, logging onto my student loan websites each month allowed me to see all of the information about the principal of my student debt and the interest that was accruing on these loans. This made me feel like my student loans were an emergency that needed to be dealt with immediately. This mindset helped me stay on course while I was paying off my student loans at an accelerated pace.
I’m not going to lie, I was also a little paranoid about enrolling in an automatic payments service. One of my landlords offered a similar service to tenants who lived in my building. One month, the landlord took too much money out of everyone’s bank accounts, and this created a lot of issues in my building. As a result, I rarely enroll in automatic billing options, since I want to have total control over where my money goes.
Of course, this article only addressed what you should do if you accidentally miss a student loan payment. It is far more common to miss a student loan payment because you do not have the funds to pay this debt. If this is the case, you should consider applying for forbearance based on your economic circumstances. You can also try to change your student loan payment plan, since this could lower the amount you need to pay towards student loans each month. In other scenarios, you might consider borrowing the money to make student loan payments from friends or family, or taking this money from funds you have set aside for retirement or other purposes.
In the end, people have busy lives, and it is sometimes easy to miss a student loan payment at some point or another. So long as you make the payment as soon as possible, you are unlikely to face serious consequences. In addition, if you are simply unable to make your student loan payment because of economic circumstances, you should consider a few different strategies to lessen any financial pressure.