Section B
Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to-it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.
Six Steps to Tackling Your Student Loans
[A] Any payment is a good debt payment, but a strategy can be useful too-even if your strategy means opening the envelope.
Open the envelope
[B] This is the hardest thing to do. The bills come with the "Sallie Mae" or "Discover" logo on them and you toss them aside, hoping to deal with them when you feel less besieged (围攻). You know you started owing some amount- $20,000, $50,000, $100,000—and that the interest is piling up, but you don't know exactly how much or how. When faced with heavy debt, many people try to avoid seeing the numbers.
[C] This doesn't work, even psychologically. Anyone who has let credit-card bills or mortgage bills pile up, 1reopened, knows that avoiding the envelope does not reduce your anxiety; it increases it. As those envelopes multiply, they take over your psychological state. In horror movies, it's like the monster in the room behind the door. You don't know what it looks like, but it keeps you scared and immobile. So, open the envelope.
[D] Or, even better, log in online. All student loan providers have a web site where you can see what you owe, your interest rates, and your payment schedules. SallieMae. com is no-frills, but still allows you to see your loans on one screen, including your interest rates. Discover. corn also has a pretty basic site. Citibank has a more complex site. Get used to logging into these sites pretty often; ff you need motivation, think of it as visiting your money while it's in prison.
[E] The websites all have one thing in common: they let you see how much you owe, and what your interest is, and they make it easy to pay-but they don't let you see how much your debt load is growing. This is a major motivating factor in paying down your loans. Identify your loans
[F] Are your loans held by the federal government--usually through Sallie Mae--or through "private" lenders like Citibank or Discover? if you don't know who holds your loans, you can find out here, at the National Student Loan Data System.
[G] Why do you need to know who holds your loans? This will make a difference to your payment options and your interest rates, if you have a federal loan, for instance, your interest rate is probably very low, around 32% ; ff you have private loans, the interest rates are likely to be much higher, around 48%. Federal loans also give you options like requesting forbearance (延期还贷) ff you're out of work or if your income is too low-handy for the times when you're down on your luck.
Start seeing your debt in new ways
[H] The websites of lenders are often limited and only have basic information. To really tackle your student loans, it can often be useful to visualize how much progress you're making. There are several ways to do that.
[I] One really useful new free site is Tuition. io, which gathers information for all your loans in one place. You can see your debt in colorful charts, play around with repayment plans, and, once you start paying your loans, you can see the numbers start to fall. That can be very motivating.
[J] For the same effect that you can customize yourself, try a Google Docs spreadsheet. There's a template that already exists for paying down loans; it has the unpromising title of "Loan amortization schedule by Vertex42. corn" but it has very handy calculators built in so that you can tweak your monthly payments to see how much progress you can make if you increase or decrease your payments in any given month. If you don't like that template, just create a Google Docs spreadsheet with the categories you need: date; loan name/number; loan interest rate; starting loan amount ( including how much you owe on that date) ; payment amount you made on that date; ending loan amount after that payment. After you have enough entries, you can start creating graphs; there are few things more satisfying than seeing that graph move downward as you pay off your debt.