We feel your pain.
There no real easy way out so give it your best. Don’t expect the loan servicers to have your best interest in mind. They’d love to keep you paying as long as possible and do so by making it difficult for borrowers to track balances and to make payments in amounts that make the principal balance decrease.
Even if you’re paying your loan bill on time every month, are you paying attention to your principal amount each month? Is it going up? Is it going down?
If your principal is not going down, you will NEVER pay off the loan and the principal is probably going UP. This means, each time you make a loan payment you’re only paying more and more interest.
You need to find a better plan, and sorry… but for most people, student loan forgiveness is nothing more than political ploys.
Take some time to figure out how to get your principal to decrease every month. This means looking at your bill in detail every single month, and directing your payments to focus on chunking down one loan at a time.
If you’re just sending in a payment, but not directing it to a particular loan (within the loan) you’ll take much longer to pay off the loans, and thus will ultimately pay way more than you could and should.