SoFi Blog

Tips and news—
for your financial moves.

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4 Summer Splurges that May Not Be Worth It

Summer is almost here and the long, lazy days are in full swing. The hazy heat and extra sunlight are cause for celebration. Days spent cooling off at the beach or pool and summer nights spent enjoying time with friends and family—is there anything better?

All of the summer fun can lead to some serious spending, though. It can be easy for summer to feel like the season of perpetual vacation, treating yourself to iced lattes and trips to the local ice cream stand.

When your friends are frequenting rooftop happy hour and splurging on tickets to outdoor concerts, it can be difficult to reign in your spending. The fear of missing out can make it easier for people to spend money on things they don’t actually want or need. One recent study found that of the 1,045 participants aged 18 to 34, nearly 40% said they had gone into debt to keep up with their friend’s lifestyles.

Especially in today’s social media obsessed world, it can be easy to feel left out when you’re sitting at your desk envious of a Facebook friend’s trip to Fiji. One of the biggest drivers of consumer behavior is social comparison.

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Importance of Celebrating Paying Off Your Student Loans

Seeing your final student loan payment post might elicit cheers of joy, sighs of relief, or both. Your epic, years-long journey to be free of student loan debt can only be capped off by an equally epic celebration, whether you want to simply treat yourself to dinner, or host a massive payoff party.

But, the huge sense of accomplishment you feel can often lead to overspending once you are finally free from student loan debt, so make sure to acknowledge the investment you’ve made in yourself and celebrate paying off your student loans smartly.

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What Makes a Good Investor?

In a 2011 interview about what makes a good investor, Warren Buffett said, “The good news I can tell you is that to be a great investor you don’t have to have a terrific IQ. If you’ve got 160 IQ, sell 30 points to somebody else because you won’t need it in investing. What you do need is the right temperament.”

So what exactly is the right temperament? What are the shared characteristics of the most successful investors?

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How Much Your Student Debt Can Grow While in Forbearance

If you’re unable to make payments on your student loans, you might be considering some extreme options, like leaving the country, going underground, or building a time machine. But there are other, more practical options out there, such as forbearance. What is forbearance, you ask? It’s a federal program that can help postpone payments for qualified applicants.

Sounds like a perfect solution, right? Not so fast—it’s a little more complicated than that.

While you’ll temporarily be able to stop making payments, interest will continue to accumulate on your loan. This interest gets added to your balance when the loan switches out of forbearance and back to your payment plan.

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