How I will Pay My Student Loans

Student loans are a pretty hot issue these days. On the one hand, many people believe that those of us who borrowed the money and went to school with it should be held responsible for its repayment. At the same time, many people with large student loan debts feel they have been given a bad deal. When they took out the original loans (at 18 years old) they didn't know that the job market was going to be horrible when they graduated, or that they'd be stuck working at a fast food restaurant to dedicate their entire checks to loan payments. They feel they've been preyed upon by lenders and that their lives are a modern form of indentured servitude.

I used to be in the camp that thought that student loans were a scam and that there should be some sort of forgiveness. I graduated with about $75,000 worth of loan debt, and was lucky to find a job right away. Unfortunately, that job paid about $30,000 a year... not exactly making it easy to meet my monthly payments.

What changed my mind was when I realized that a particular hobby I had picked up could help me pay my student loan bills each month.

I'd had a kindling interest in web design for a few years, but just never found the time to pursue it. After I finished school and was working regular hours, though, I began to pick up on it more and more.

And I realized how absolutely SIMPLE it really could be. After studying a little, I found that putting up a basic site could be done in just an hour or so. And then, that basic site template could be reused over and over to make as many sites as I wanted.

The real breakthrough came when I found out that Google and Amazon would actually PAY me to put their ads on my site. I knew I had struck gold, and I haven't looked back since.

Since I started making these sites I haven't made a single loan payment out of my paycheck. Every dollar that goes to student loans comes from the sites I make.

My hope is that being able to pay student loan bills is just the beginning of my journey into making money on the internet. The long term goal I have set for myself is to quit my job by March 8, 2013 and dedicate myself full time to my internet business.

Responsibility is a value that is particularly important to me. Although I still feel like student loan companies are predatorily lending to nave kids, I do think that it is my responsibility to pay off the debt I have amassed. And now I feel like I am meeting that responsibility. By spending less than 2 hours every day this project is yielding over $500 per month.

In the end, no matter what your opinion of the student loan industry may be, there are ways for those of us in this contemporary servitude to break free from the financial chains and live lives we're proud of.