Without getting too personal, my loan servicer deferred my loans twice against my will. They were sued by the government for this practice.
We both work full time. We made a nice middle class income last year. If we paid the full cost of our loans, it would cost us over $1,000 a month. We are paying my wives off more quickly, over the last year, wirh my REPAY, I was spending $160/month. Rounding interest rates, that's about $1600/year in interest. So maybe I'm paying it off slowly, and if I wasn't wrongly deferred I'd be in a slightly better position. However, as you can see, at my current payoff, I'll never have them paid off. My wife should have hers paid off in 10-15 years.
Could we afford to pay more? Yes. However, the idea of home ownership is out the window right now (we will both be entering out 30s in 18 months). The idea of children scares the shit out of me. I'm thankful we have good jobs and are at least saving for retirement. But, even with our current payments, money is tight enough to make saving for a house and children nearly impossible.
And let me add this, over the course of 13 months, I incurred over $10k in car related issues. We had to put nearly all of that on credit because we didn't have the kind of money to absorb all of that. So we are putting every penny we have to paying that off. Getting married isn't cheap (although we did it cheaply), rent isn't cheap, owning a car isn't cheap, etc.
I get that it doesn't make much sense. Trust me it's the biggest sense of insecurity in our lives. It's a huge amount not debt that we didn't really grasp when taking it on. I didn't understand interest rates, or how much it would limit my future buying power. I didn't realize how long it would take to pay off. I don't regret my education, I have a stable job, make a good living, have benefits, etc. Still, it's clear something has gone terribly wrong with the education system in this country. It's far to expensive and crippling to so many people.
So maybe if things worked out a bit differently over the past 2 years we'd be in a better position, but it's crazy to me that a middle class family can't afford to own a house because they went to college and their car broke down.