+1000
It's really important to figure it out in the beginning which route you're going to take. Aggressively pay down to zero, or do an income contingent plan and pay the minimum every month and set aside some sort of savings/investment account for the tax at the end. Use the VIN Foundation calculator to figure out which works for you. Even if you're banking on PSLF, still save for the tax at 20-25yrs just in case, given that 99% of applications for PSLF submitted thus far after what people thought were 120 qualifying payments have been denied. If it works out for you, great you now have a huge chunk of cash you can put in retirement or to upgrade a house or to pay for your kids to become vets too. But if it doesn't, you won't be SOL. If you go with plan A, the more you pay every month, the more you save. If you go with plan B, any extra amount you pay towards your loans goes down the drain so you should invest your money wisely and don't even think about your loans outside of making sure you are on top of getting your annual paperwork in on time, following up to make sure you're all set, and making sure your autopay is set up.
Based on my debt load ~$140k principal and my personal income averaging $90-100k since graduation, I would have paid less on a standard 10 year plan than I would have on any of the income contingent plans. So we decided to pay extra aggressively to save even more money. I also had my husband's income of initially $45k as a postdoc for the first 2 years, then $75k as a grown up scientist to live on as well as his sizeable savings. I still enrolled in PAYE so that my minimal payments were 0 for the first year, minimal the second year, and less than $700 thereafter. That allowed me to make minimal payments on all of my individual loans, and put an additional $2000-3500 per month specifically on my highest interest loan so that virtually all of that additional amount was going towards principal and not interest. We also opted not to throw a $30k wedding, and put the money for that and what would have been an engagement ring and wedding bands into our loans (neither of us cared). Any wedding gifts from family went straight into my loans. We also waited 3 years after graduation to buy a house to concentrate on my loans, which was totally fine. I knocked out each of the 6 loans one by one. Once I got to the last big one with the lowest interest rate 3 years in, I got kicked off of PAYE, since my payment on a 10 yr plan was less than that calculated for PAYE. In the end I only paid $170k total on a $140k loan in 4.5 years. A part of the reason my interest amount is so low is because during my 4th year I took out $35k at a lower interest rate to pay off $15k in interest and $20k of the higher interest loan. Not taking that into account, I paid $190k total to pay off $160k principal. And now onto paying off our mortgage, and pooping out babies!
Couldn't have done it without hubby's savings/income and living like a student for 3 years after graduation. But even without that, I could easily have achieved paying on the 10 year plan without hardship while living comfortably. That first year of paying aggressively made a huge difference (paying off principal instead of accruing interest such that I wouldn't be able to touch my principal for a while), so I'm eternally grateful for not having done an internship.
