Takeaways #4
On refinancing my loans and product crush of the week: shopstyle collective
Celebrating and sharing the things I learned this week
It’s sort of a mental attitude about critical thinking and curiosity. It’s about mindset of looking at the world in a playful and curious and creative way. — Adam Savage
Refinancing my loans
I graduated from college 2 years ago and managed to get an amazing job at an enterprise company. Graduating comes with the biggest caveat which is paying loans every month. It poopin sucks. If you are like me and have a decent job, you just gotta do it. After conversing with a colleague of mine at work, I discovered that my company has a partnership with Sofi, a financial loaning service company. I was able to get $300 paid by my company for my first month paying my student loans through Sofi. Refinancing my loans in Sofi was so simple, it literally only took me about 10 minutes.
What does refinancing mean?
Refinancing loans essentially means the replacement of an existing loan obligation, in this case, my student loans, with another obligation under different terms. The biggest reason why I wanted to refinance my student loans is to take advantage of an even lower interest rate. SoFi was able to help me save around $20,000 because my interest rate was dramatically reduced in all my loans. I also liked that upon applying, Sofi provided me with a visual trajectory of when I will be able to completely pay out all my student loans, which was encouraging yet disappointing at the same time…Shoutout to Chelsea Baltierra for letting me know about our company benefits :)
Takeaways
- Before refinancing, make sure that your previous billing documents reflect that you do not have any over due payments. I don’t know if other people have had this issue, but my recent loan service FedLoan, was not letting me set up an auto payment with my bank…So I had to manually go into the site every month to make a payment. Well, some months I would forget so my billing information would reflect that I had late payments due…It’s a little annoying since I have to wait for the next billing info to reflect that I don’t have any late payments.
Product Crush of the Week: ShopStyle Collective
ShopStyle Collective is a global monetization and media platform for fashion content creators. It’s a way for fashion bloggers to monetize by getting commission through user clicks and final transactions. I love that ShopStyle Collective has millions of clothing items available and thousands of retail brand partnerships so I don’t have to create affiliate market accounts for multiple brands. I also love that it includes a plugin called LinkIt so when you are browsing through a specific fashion brand site, you can click LinkIt, and save that specific item!
My favorite feature is the the LinkIt feature where bloggers can create looks by uploading the photo they shared and tag the appropriate clothing pieces so that readers can see where they bought their clothes from the picture. This is pure genius! Also, embedding the code into your website is so easy!
Here is an example of how I use the Looks and Collection feature in my site:
My 10 cents on what can be improved (ahem, PopSugar)
- Let users upload and create looks using photos directly from my Instagram.
Right now, I have to manually upload the photo from my Instagram by saving it in my computer and then uploading the photo. The work flow is just not as seamless compared to being able to upload Instagram photos directly. It looks like it wouldn’t be too terrible since Instagram’s API provides GET request of users photos.
2. The LinkIt plugin is pretty rad but it would be more rad if it includes a save copy button for the links
Shopstyle collective doesn’t have a way for me to collect all my url links…so I have to manually save it elsewhere or click the specific item again to get my unique url…Which is pretty annoying.
