The amount of people that pay off their student loans is around 59 percent .
Around 59 percent of people that have taken out student loans have completely paid off their student loans.
And roughly 43 million American people still have over $1.6 trillion dollars in federal and student loan debt, with many people taking as long as 20 years or sometimes longer to repay their student loans back fully.
33 percent of people have outstanding student loan debt and are current on their student loan payments and 8 percent of people are behind on their student loan payments.
It takes the average person with student loan debt around 20 years to pay off their student loan debt fully.
If you don't pay your student loans, you will get late fees and interest added to the student loans, damage to your credit score and loss of benefits.
Failure to pay your student loans can cause you to lose access to flexible repayment options or deferment/forbearance benefits.
Failure to pay your student loans and even just missed student loan payments are also reported to the major credit bureaus, which lowers your credit score and affects your future ability to get another loan or other loans.
And your student loan becomes delinquent the day after a missed payment, which often results in fees and for private student loans a loss of interest rate reductions.
Eventually if you fail to pay the student loans they can garnish your wages, withhold tax refunds even sue you, which can also ruin your credit for 7 years.
For federal student loans they often go into default status after 270 days without payment or shorter for some private student loans.
Failure to pay your student loans can also cause the entire balance of the student loan to become due immediately.
Student loans are reported as installment debt to the major credit bureaus which include TransUnion, Experian and Equifax.
Making consistent and on time payments to your student loans will boost your credit score overtime, and making late or missed payments to your student loan will negatively impact and lower your credit score.
Student loans also influence your credit mix, total debt and the average age of your accounts.
Federal student loans and private student loans can also be paid off early without prepayment or early pay off penalties.
Paying off your student loans early saves you money on interest and shortens the term of the student loan.
To pay off your student loan early and effectively, you should ensure that your extra student loan payments are applied directly to the principal balance of the student loan, instead of future payments.
Make extra payments to your student loans and pay more than the minimum monthly amount to your student loans, and specifically target the principal of the student loans.
You can also biweekly payments on the student loan, by making half payments on the student loan every 2 weeks, which results in you making 13 full payments on the student loan per year instead of just 12 payments on the student loan in the year.
Or use bonuses, tax refunds or unexpected cash to make large one time payments on the student loan to help pay the student loan off faster.
You can also consider refinancing your student loan to get a lower interest rate, which can also help pay off the student loan faster, although you may lose your federal benefits.
When paying off your student loan early, you should also explicitly instruct the student loan servicer to apply any extra payments to the principal and not future payments.
And while rare, some older private student loans may have prepayment penalties.
And you should also consider if you have high interest debt or lack an emergency fund before you aggressively pay off the lower interest student loans.
You can also get a payoff quote for your student loans by requesting a formal pay off quote from the student loan lender for the exact amount needed to pay off the student loan and close your account.