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How should I pay off my private student loans that have a lot of restrictions?
Not that I doubted everyone's assumption but I wanted to see the math so I did some spreadsheet hacking. I assumed a monthly payments for 30 years which left us with total payments of 483.89.  I then assumed we'd pay an extra $200/month in one of two scenarios.  Scenario 1 we just paid that $200 directly to the lender.  In scenario 2 we set the extra $200 aside every month until we were able to pay off the $10k at 7%.  I assumed that the minimum payments were allocated proportionately and the overpayments were allocated evenly.  That meant we paid off loan 5 at about month 77, loan 4 in month 88, loan 3 in month 120, loan 2 in month 165, and loan 1 in month 170. Getting over to scenario 2 where we pay $483.89 to lender and save $200 separately.  In month 48 we've saved $9600 relative to the principle remaining in loan 3 of $9547.  We pay that off and we're left with loan 1,2,4,5 with a combined principle of about $60930.  At this point we are now going to make payments of 683.89 instead of saving towards principle.  Now our weighted average interest rate is 6.800% instead of 6.824%.  We can calculate the number of payments left given a principle of 60930, interest of 6.8%, and payment of 683.89 to be 124.4 months left for a total of 172.4 months Conclusion: Scenario 1 pays off the debt 3 months sooner with the same monthly expenditure as scenario 2.