Cari Swanger’s Paid-in-Full photo, which she shared with the SoFi community after paying down her debt (Courtesy Cari Swanger)

Cari Swanger took on her debt and came away with a better understanding of herself

Showing that you, too, can overcome your debt

Among the Class of 2019, 69% of college students took out student loans, and they graduated with an average debt of $29,900, including both private and federal debt. Meanwhile, 14% of their parents took out an average of $37,200 in federal parent PLUS loans. Americans owe over $1.71 trillion in student loan debt, spread out among about 44.7 million borrowers. That’s about $739 billion more than the total U.S. credit card debt.

Cari Swanger is a clinical pharmacist in Seattle. She and her husband, Tom, recently celebrated paying off her $180,000 in student loans in three years utilizing tools she accessed through online finance company SoFi.
“I started taking out student loans and just continued through the end of pharmacy school. That was about four years, but the total, $180,000, ended up being a lot more with the interest rate from when I took them out, which was about 6.5% to 7%.”

“Once I started pharmacy school, the tuition was expensive — $26,000 a year. The reason why I took out student debt was that I was living in a townhouse and sharing rent with my brother in Seattle. The rent wasn’t high, but I felt like I wouldn’t be able to pay it with just my part-time job or just from working as a pharmacy intern. I needed to have some leverage and have some money to spend on groceries and rent. I felt like I would be able to pay this off in the future, so I took out a 10-year loan.”

“I took out more loans than I needed because a lot of my friends’ parents paid for their tuition or they had a nice scholarship. I wanted to be able to have fun with them and go do fun things on the weekends, like go to a concert or go buy that nice purse, so I took out more money than I should have.”

“After graduating from pharmacy school, I deferred throughout my whole year and didn’t pay off any loans, but interest was still racking up. I saw that my principal and interest after I finished residency was $162,000. I looked at my billing statement each month and the interest alone was $900. I felt like my minimum monthly payment, which was only a little bit over $900, was just going nowhere. My debt was staying stagnant.”

“I felt like there was a ton of weight on my shoulders. I felt so stressed all the time. I didn’t really talk to many people about it just because talking about finances seemed scary. That is something that I regret. I feel like there are other people out there that you can share your experience with and that would have helped me in the long run.”

“I researched SoFi and found that a lot of people had refinanced with them, as well got a lower interest rate, and decreased their total loan payments. I refinanced and consolidated two loans and lowered my interest rate from about 6% to 4%, which dramatically reduced my total amount of loan spending. I refinanced about six or seven times, which might seem crazy, but it did really help in the long run. I think my last few months of paying, it was down to about 1% interest.”

“Since I had student loan debt coming into the relationship with my husband, we discussed how we would prioritize finances to make sure we were both on the same page. At first, I was a little hesitant to discuss the total amount of pharmacy school debt that I had, but the only way to tackle student debt was to communicate with each other as early as possible. We sat down and looked at each of my student loans, and decided to consolidate them through SoFi, and we constantly had conversations about the best way we could help each other pay off the debt.”

“After all of these efforts, I made the last payment after 33 months, I posted on the SoFi Facebook group just because that’s my community. This was in the middle of the pandemic, so we can’t go out to a nice restaurant or anything, but we ended up buying a tomahawk steak, grilled that, and had a nice dinner and kind of put our feet on up and just celebrated.”

“The biggest advice I can provide to others is to think of loans as a sprint and not a marathon. And reward yourself when you reach milestones, like going out to a movie or making a nice dinner — just little things to celebrate these small achievements because it is amazing to be able to pay off when it might seem overwhelming.”

“I would also suggest using the financial tools that are out there, like SoFi or anything finance-related, and cutting some of the monthly subscriptions out to save a little bit more money — things like that just to get you closer to financial independence.”

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