Aggressive student loan paydown update

A month ago I started an action plan to kill our consolidated student loans. In that month, I’ve thrown $2,638.09 at that loan. I sold $2,194.64 worth of Disney and Microsoft shares. I made our standard $218.09 and I’ve since doubled up on that payment by sending an additional $220 that gets applied directly to principal.

And I’m kicking myself in the ass for not doing this months sooner, but I finally opened a United Heritage Credit Union account. UHCU offers 6.01% on their Heritage Checking. The only stipulations are that you have to have direct deposit or an auto ACH (done), sign up for eStatements (I guess so I can get my statements via email versus paper mail. Done.), and we have to make 10 debit card transactions per month. The latter sucks because we don’t use debit cards. We use a MasterCard to make all of our purchases so we can rack up airline miles (not debt — we pay the balance every month). So I’ve got to figure out a trick (PayPal maybe) to make 10 minimal debit card transactions each month. If it means I have to stop at the convenience store on the way to work and buy a $0.05 piece of gum for 10 days, I guess I’ll have to do that. Either way, can’t pass up 6% on checking. That’s hundreds of dollars in interest we’ll earn each month, and that’s going straight toward the student loan.

My goal: shrink that remaining 14 year repayment amortization down to less than 2 years. That would be sweet. Wish me luck!