Over eight months ago, I started this blog when I was realizing that my student loan payments would be starting in a few months. I searched the Web for info and ended up discovering a thriving community of personal finance blogs. I got hooked immediately. I literally couldn’t stop reading them. It was great learning about all of the different ways people manage their money and reading their stories. However, what grabbed my attention the most at the time was the variety of opportunities there were to make money online.
Knowing that I would have to start paying back my student loans soon, it didn’t take long before I decided to join the community. Writing has always been a hobby of mine, so starting a blog seemed simple enough. So I created Broke Grad Student to share my story and in hopes that I’d earn some extra money to pay back my student loans. (It was also a great way to put off my thesis.)
Here I am now, still going strong. Broke Grad Student has slowly, but surely, continued to grow. It has definitely been just as challenging, if not more, than I expected. There have been times I have felt like quitting, but I kept going. I’m glad I did, because I had no idea that anything written by me, much less an article about why I hate cash, would ever be read by tens of thousands of people over a span of two days.
As if blogging weren’t hard enough, making money online through blogging is even harder. Who knows how many hours I have put in, but I’m finally glad to see the effort paying off. In fact, it’s starting to pay off nicely enough that I’m setting a new goal for myself. My new goal is to pay off my student loans with money that I make online.
I’ve run some numbers to determine how feasible this is, and it looks like I’m already already on track to achieving my goal. At the moment, my monthly student loan payment is around $150. My monthly earnings from this blog have been pretty erratic, but when I compute the average, it comes out to about $155 per month. That means if I can continue this rate of earnings, I’ll be able to pay back the remainder of my student loans entirely with money made online.
Of course, at that rate I won’t finish paying off my loans until a decade or so from now, which isn’t cool. That’s why I plan to continue growing my blog, producing great content, and increasing the amount of money I make online. Then I’ll be able to increase my student loan payments and get them paid off sooner, so I don’t turn into Broke Middle-Aged Man.
For those that are curious, here are my current sources of making money online in no particular order.
- CashCrate
- ING Direct $25 Bonus Referrals
- Affiliate programs
- Various forms of advertising
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Like you brokegradstudent, I have student a loan. My loan thou is about 4 times greater than yours. I congratulate you for your determination, and creating a repayment plan. I recently started a blog (between the words) focusing on preparation for retirement, health care, and savings. One trend in today’s college education is higher tuition cost–two schools in Michigan recently announced tuition hikes (9%-13% )for next year. As an alumni of a private school the cost of my education at times took away my breath. What is unbelievable is that students today are paying similar rates to attend public institutions, as I paid to attend a private school.
The second trend I have noticed is that some parents are taking loans (or even cashing in retirement savings ) to assist their child! I notice this because I have paid (and continue to pay, for my education by-myself!
Again congratulations on your blog success, including your post “Why I hate Cash” . I personally have a distaste for the use of checks in public places.
Good luck!
I hope that you’re able to knock out your student loans with income from this blog is a few years! As a future graduate student (one more month), I will have to reread various posts and pay more attention…
Pyrblue: I have seen the same trends that you have noticed. I know a few people who are in even more debt than both of us, and I also know some friends whose parents took out loans to help them pay for college. Whether or not parents should help pay for their parents education is a topic that deserves its own post, so I’ll leave it at that for now. Best of luck on your blog.
SavingDiva: Thanks, I hope I’ll be able to knock out my student loans in a few years too. Good luck in grad school (soon)!
Broke – I’ve got $34,000 in student loans, but it only costs 2.6%. You think I should pay it off if I have much more than that in cash?