By stevechasmar, via Flickr

The main source of my financial woes is the more than $55,000 of student-loan debt, the majority of it from grad school, that I must pay off bit by bit each month.

I finished grad school in December, and since then the loan companies have started demanding that I repay them. First the smallish private loans from undergrad, then the equally smallish private loans from grad school, and pretty soon I’ll be paying back a bunch of (much bigger) federal loans, too.

The loan companies have sent me copious amounts of mail to inform me of the terms of my loans and their repayment dates and which companies they’ve sold which loans to and what that means for me, etc., and I must admit the whole process has been a bit overwhelming and has caused me to develop habits of avoidance. Unless it is a bill, I’ll scan the form letter, head cocked, confused, then put it in a pile to deal with it later. More honestly: Unless it is a bill, I generally ignore it.

The letters have increased in frequency and volume in recent weeks, and the little voice in the back of my head has begun telling me I should probably actually read the damn things instead of scanning and stacking and filing them for later. An increase in the frequency and volume of communications from parties to which you owe large sums of cash usually bodes unwell, the little voice says. Erin, you should not ignore those ever-accumulating form letters.

So this week I decided to sift through the stack of loan-company communications gathering dust on my desk and figure out how much I will actually be paying each month once I’m repaying all the loans. That required reading about 40 documents and visiting three loan-company websites (Sallie Mae, who holds my undergrad loans, Ed Financial, who used to own all my grad loans, and the U.S. Department of Education, who bought some of my grad loans from Ed Financial). It took about 90 minutes - far less time than I’d scared myself into thinking it would take.

I also made a spreadsheet detailing each loan’s principle, interest rate and monthly payment.

Then I added the monthly payments. And that’s when life became truly scary.

Bottom line: Come October, I will be screwed.

Combined, my student loan bills will cost me… wait for it… (really, it’s awful)… (you might want to sit down for this, in case you’re one of those people who reads blogs standing up)… a whopping $687 a month once I’m repaying all of them.

Add to that my rent ($500) and my monthly credit card payment ($140), do some simple addition and subtraction and you will discover that I will have (and this is the truly disgusting/petrifying/suicide-inducing part) $229 a month for everything that is not a student loan, a credit card bill or rent.

Oh shit. Holy cow. Put a fork in me. I am done.

Not to mention being stabbed with a fork would be less painful than surviving on $229 a month. That’s groceries, laundry, electric/TV/Netflix bills, food for my cat, gas for my car, savings, my emergency fund, travel, going out, gifts for friends and family, unexpected repairs/vet bills/household needs, toilet paper, toothpaste, tampons, and bottle upon bottle of Advil to cure the acute headaches my life will cause me - all for less than rich people spend on a haircut. And I haven’t even told you about my medical bills.

My first response: I drank a beer. A strong beer. Savored it, slowly, on my couch, alone, while staring at my TV wondering how much I could sell it for on Ebay. It’s a pretty nice TV. I’d get at least a few hundred bucks. Maybe half a month’s worth of student-loan payments.

Then, it was research time. I know there are ways (other than bankruptcy) to put off your student loan payments for a bit, or to make the payments lower for a while. I am not the only person in this situation, and the federal government/student loan industry, taking pity on the overburdened, underpaid former grad students who did not take jobs in private equity, has designed some temporary outs for me and people like me.

They are:

1. Forbearance
2. Deferment
3. Consolidation
4. Alternative repayment options, including Graduated, Extended, Income-Sensitive, Income-Contingent and Income-Based

Easy, right? Umm no. Each option has its own specific parameters, many of them income-based, some based on behind-the-shade calculations made by your loan company, that could permit or prevent you from qualifying.

It’s pretty complicated, in fact. But it’s also important - your choices here could save or cost you thousands of dollars in the long run, so it’s critical to make an informed decision.

To that end, I will blog about this in a series over the next week or two. My hope: at the end of that series, I will have determined the most cost-effective way to put off my loans. Because I cannot survive on $229 a month.

Also in this series:

• Dealing with student debt: Forbearance and deferment
• Dealing with student debt: Consolidation
• Student loans, defined