How a Personal Loan Can Help You Beat the Post-Grad Plateau

The “post-grad plateau”: It’s those first few years after graduate or professional school when the future looks bright but you haven’t yet hit your financial stride.  You’ve secured higher income potential thanks to your advanced degree, but student loans and other debt from school have come due – and those payments can swallow a paycheck whole.

Most grads accept the post-grad plateau as part of the deal, because if all goes according to plan, things will get better within a few years as your income increases and you begin to make a dent in your debt.  Unfortunately, life doesn’t slow down while you’re getting your financial footing – which is why a lot of grads use credit cards to pay for big life expenses the first few years after school.

It may seem harmless to use credit cards to beat the post-grad plateau – after all, you’ve just taken on six figures of debt to finance your education and living expenses, so a few thousand more feels like a drop in the bucket.  But with average credit card APRs currently at 13%, the cost of carrying a balance adds up quickly, even if you’re only doing it for a short amount of time.

Related: Use our Credit Card Interest Calculator to see how much extra you could be expected to pay in interest.

There may be a better solution: a low interest rate personal loan.  Surprised to hear it?  The term “personal loan” might bring to mind a predatory, high-interest rate scheme that targets borrowers with poor credit, but the truth is personal loans are often used by borrowers with great credit for a variety of commonplace reasons.  In fact, at SoFi we recently expanded our product suite to include personal loans after repeatedly hearing from our borrowers that they wanted to avoid the credit card trap that often happens after graduation.

Compared to the average credit card APR of 13%, SoFi offers q much better rate for qualified borrowers including introductory rates as low as 0.99% and fixed rates as low as 5.63% (with AutoPay).*  With an easy application process, no prepayment penalties and the abiity to borrow up to $35,000, the SoFi Personal Loan is solving a very common problem for our borrowers by allowing them to cover big life expenses after school at a lower cost of borrowing.

How can a SoFi Personal Loan benefit you?  Here are a few of the ways we see borrowers using it:

• Wedding expenses
• Additional education/classes
• Paying off high-interest rate credit card debt
• Anything else (that’s legal, of course)

Bottom line?  Life doesn’t stop during the post-grad plateau, so if you must take on more debt in order to finance those important life expenses, your best bet is to find the best deal that you can qualify for.  For some borrowers, a SoFi Personal Loan is exactly what they need to power through this time and come out the other side in a better financial position.

 *SoFi Personal Loan interest rates are fixed for first 12 months at either 0.99% or 3.99%.  After initial 12 month period, fixed rates range from 5.63% to 9.63% (with AutoPay).  APR ranges from 4.27% to 7.47%.  At the lowest rate and 5 year term, borrower would make 12 monthly payments of $179.90 and 48 monthly payments of $197.51.