I Want My Loans Gone, But It’s Not a Money Thing
Even when you’re doing well, debt can overwhelm you.
Today is one of those days where I’m obsessively logging into My Great Lakes to stare aimlessly at the massive balance still due. Like somehow, if I log in enough times, it will magically go away. And I won’t be in debt anymore.
Over the last year, my husband and I have increased our net worth by twenty grand, y’all. TWENTY GRAND! That’s huge, when we got married, I had around $32,000 of debt to my name, and we had about four grand sitting in a low-interest savings account. We’d just shelled out $1,000 for our wedding and our honeymoon, respectively, and The Toaster was sitting safely in the driveway to replace my old Buick. We were pretty broke, and I didn’t have a full-time job yet. Thankfully, some very generous people gave us cash gifts, and so when the whole ordeal was said and done, we had a net worth of -$26,000. Now, almost a year later, We’re at a net worth of -$6,000. I as thrilled as I am with this number, I’m still sitting refreshing all my accounts, hoping something has changed, hoping we’ll be further ahead, have less debt, be more, well, put together. Perfect.
We’ve paid off more than 10 grand in debt, we’ve increased our cash and our investments. We’ve crushed the year. $20,000 net worth increase in a year is huge, ginormous, astronomical, and yet, it still feels so small when I look at where we have to go. The weight of debt is overwhelming. Most of the time, I let it sit in the corner of my mind, gnawing on a rawhide, constant but unobtrusive. Other days, the enormity of $22,500 left to pay off hits me in the face. And I’m not sure we’ll be able to do it after all. It’s so much. The number glares me straight in the face, and I stare back but it doesn’t blink. All of the what-ifs creep in. “What if I lose my job?”, “What if he loses his job?”, “What if we can’t get a job when we move?”, “What if the car breaks again?”, “What if the doggo needs emergency care?”. and on the worst days, the days I barely admit to myself, “What if he dies, and I have to do it alone?”
The pressure of life and to perform and to have all my little boxes squared away is one that I am intimately familiar with. You cannot grow up military connected and not expect the best from yourself, constantly. It’s an external pressure that I’ve never bucked off. I want to. The idea of freedom is a siren and I am lulled by its song. And yet, I’m tied to a mast, and I can hear, but not escape.
Life and striving towards perfection has long been overwhelming and exhausting. And as a kid, I could never get there quickly enough. I was asked to apply for one more scholarship, one more grant in a push to get more money for college. One more A for the transcript to get that full ride, one more extracurricular to get another scholarship.
At the end of it all, my loans are a constant reminder that I did not push enough, try enough. That I could have been better, could have been more. So I hate them. I gave it my all, and still, my all wasn’t enough. I hate their reminder that there was more I should have done, that I was pushed to do more and be more, and yet, I’m still paying them off. To me, they scream failure. They echo all the “you should have done this” lectures that my childhood was filled with. All the reminders that my 93% could have been 97% if I had fixed a simple math error and a 19-second run could have been a 17-second run if I’d tightened my turn. It doesn’t matter that I was in Honors Chem and Algebra II as a freshman, on track to graduate high school at 16; it didn’t matter that I won the entire Gymkhana series off of those 19-second runs. It only mattered that they could have been better, that I could have been more.
So when I look at my loans, I don’t see the degree they gave me. I don’t see the four years of rewarding educational endeavors I embarked upon. Oxford and Israel and Mathematics are secondary to intense, searing pain. So we pay them off, and quickly. Ignoring the math that says investing would yield better returns. Because somehow, if I pay them off, the money that I didn’t earn for college, the grades that I didn’t make, the times that I didn’t run, it will slip away into nothingness, somehow, I won’t flinch anymore when those memories resurface.
I see the money we have left to pay off as a nightmare, and I refresh the page one more time, hoping for it to go away, and it doesn’t. We must make it. We must push and shove and pinch and hustle. It’s a terrifying, steady grind, and there is no magic solution.
The beginning, when you’re struggling to set everything up, but you don’t know where the money is coming from or if you can afford rent because jobs are scarce and the one you have isn’t paying well, is hard. The end, where you see the light at the end of the tunnel and hustle every last bit of you to get to that moment, is hard. But the middle? The day-to-day transactions of automated money, of fine-tooth combing your budget just to realize, yes, we’re still on track. That is not hard. It is monotonous, laborious, overwhelming, but the actions themselves are not hard. They are repetitive. They are routine. And I sit with this, wanting to do more, yearning to do more, but unable to.
The middle slog stretches you to your max, and in that, you find a happy medium of surviving and thriving. The hard questions, “How much is enough?”, “How much is too much?”, pound in your ears. And I want to scream and say screw it all. Throw every cent to that debt until it’s eviscerated, bottom out our bank accounts. But that leaves us vulnerable and struggling, it leaves little peace of mind and no security. So I ask myself those questions over and over and over, trying to find a middle ground in which I’m able to breathe. Mostly, we’ve found it. Mostly, we live our life and enjoy it, we save and invest and pay off debt. But I still choose “student loans” over “emergency fund” 75% of the time when we have extra cash. And I still impulsively schedule an extra two (or seven) student loan payments if we have the money.
I’m working to untangle my relationship with money and my highly traumatizing past. I’m living in a constant limbo between the two. It’s taken me this long to recognize the emotional grip my loans have on me, and why I want them gone, need them gone. The satisfaction of no student loans, I imagine, will also come with a tinge of regret, and I’m stealing myself away for that moment, to be able to say, no. You did well. You took what you had and maximized it, and look what you have to show for it.
Separating hard work from perfection is integral to my financial journey. Learning to celebrate the wins and the milestones on the journey is necessary. It is not a language I am familiar with, this up and down landscape of longterm goals. Embracing it does not come easily when perfection was required, “Do it quickly and do it correctly” was our family’s motto, and second chances were not allowed.
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I totally understand where you are coming from. Being perfect is expected on my side as well.
That’s why it’s so important to acknowledge everything we have done (even if it feels mediocre).
You’ll get to being debt free. Promise!!! ????
Thanks. Learning to celebrate the small milestones is huge for me. Because perfection was all or nothing, and debt repayment is more of a journey.
We’re so close to debt free… I’m super excited!! Just two more years to go. Wheee!!!
Yeah!!! Two years until the big trip!!! 😀
I could have written this at twenty two. The good news is, you’ll look back a decade from now, and while you’ll remember, it won’t always feel like this.
❤️❤️❤️
I remember being in school and being happy with my A.. Until I saw that someone got a higher A. Then my A was meaningless and yet somehow also proof that I was undeserving and also not trying hard enough. It took me a long time (read: a lot of therapy) to stop being so hard on myself.
I also remember the middle of the slog. Where you’ve cut everything that you can and now just have to wait for the progress to be made. It’s maddening, and you feel sure there’s something you’ve been missing. But often there isn’t, and patience is all you can practice. Try to celebrate the small milestones along the way. It’s the only way I made it through ours while remaining sane (or my version anyway).
Good luck!
I think that I wouldn’t have naturally been so hard on myself, except that I grew up thinking that was what was expected of me. I’m pretty laid back, but it’s still taken a lot of work to be able to breathe in moments where I didn’t do my job well, or to take criticism gracefully. I still have that voice in my head yelling at me for perfection.
Celebrating the little moments is something that’s really helped me reframe those loans as something more positive, and it’ll help me to set up a better, long-term financial relationship with my funds. But they’re still hard, and I still hate them. But the slog is still so frustrating. And I want to scream some days!
It took years for me to see how damaging perfectionism is – I always thought I was the failure and defective for NOT feeling the siren call of perfectionism that drove my friends to the heights of achievement they reached. All I saw were their stellar results next to my subpar results, I didn’t see the pain it caused them for a long time. Instead of being driven by Mom’s “Why only 1450, why not 1600?”, I just resented the implications that I didn’t do my best and that my best wasn’t good enough. (I mean, maybe I didn’t and maybe it wasn’t but I maybe wasn’t built to care that deeply about any one thing either.)
I’m sorry that you experienced that same childhood and pain, and I hope that you’re not just on the path to being debt-free but also on the path to being perfectionism and guilt-free. The latter will be so freeing (no pun intended!) for you.
I still worry about the future a lot and we have this massive mortgage loan looming over our heads that I have many feelings about as well – here’s to being all kinds of free in ten years or less!
Thanks! It’s comforting (but also really sad) to know that others have had similar experiences. Perfectionism isn’t something I would have adopted naturally, and I’m not even sure I actually ever did. And working through that, and learning that I am enough, something that I’m still exploring, has been huge.
I’m finally able to even revisit that part of my life, and untangle the mottos that I’ve repeated for so long–even when they weren’t helpful, and I never really bought into them. I’ve always been a hard worker, but I also felt like I wasn’t good enough for not wanting to be perfect. I was proud of my As in high school, and my Bs and Cs in college, because I earned them–not because they were a marker of how intrinsically valuable I was. But it felt horrible when my dad wasn’t proud, and didn’t see the work, only the result.
There was HUGE external pressure on me, especially because I was “the smart one”.”You’re so smart, how can you not understand this?” or “You’re so smart, why didn’t you do better?” Untangling that complex emotional relationship and figuring out where my voice ends and my dad’s voice begins and separating the two is hard work.
But I think I’m finding a safe space to do this. And having power over my loans to kick them to the curb has been empowering for me to dig into this. I’m sure that it’ll be something I struggle with for awhile, but progress is progress.
Here’s to being debt free!!
What a post! It sounds like you are doing wonderfully to me. You are still early in your journey.
I was 40 before I had positive net worth and deep in debt (until a year ago). I just paid off my college loans this past Feb after more than 10 years of struggling to pay them. I think the experience of striving to pay off debt early prepares people better for saving once debt is gone. You have already established a lifestyle to live on less, just keep doing it.
You will have lots of life changes coming. You will have pay increases and opportunities that you will look back on in 10 years and say, “PAI was so right about everything, always. I should have taken more of his advice, listened more…(you get the gist, lol).”
Worrying about the future is normal when it comes to thinking about losing a partner. Make sure to purchase term life insurance to handle that unlikely event.
This is a very powerful post and I only wish I was where you are when I was your age. You are doing great and I look forward to seeing all of the good things to come to you! Cheers
Pai, you crack me up. “PAI was so right about everything”, totally gonna be my last words ????????????.
I definitely intend to keep saving once my loans are gone. Maybe we won’t have AS STRICT a budget, because we’re really putting as much extra as we can towards the loans, but even if we have slightly bigger spending categories after loan repayment, we’re definitely going to keep putting away money for retirement and other more short-term goals, too.
Thanks for your encouraging words. I think, as far as the spouse goes, we’re in the process of putting together end of life documents/insurances (will, life insurance, this other thing my mom said we needed, etc.) and once I have that squared away, and feel more prepared, hopefully some of the panic will subside.
MoJo—- I have always been soooo proud of you. My philosophy has always been that if someone puts forth their best effort, then that is all one should ask for. If the best is a C or B, that is ok as that was one’s best. I was thankful for the two C’s I got in college because that was the best I could do in those classes. There is so much more to life than always striving to be perfect—one has to live and enjoy the day. Life is too short not to. I know you are young but tomorrow is not promised for any of us—no matter the age. There is a balance between preparing for the future and living in the day—sadly many do not find that balance. I admire you and Rolf for your diligence in addressing your financial issues. You all have done great and have just been married a year!!!! Look at where you were a year ago and where you are now. Be proud of the two of you. Continue to reach for your goals—-I have no doubts that you all will reach them. Love you both.
Aunt Helen
Yup, I have a few Bs and Cs on my transcripts, too. And I’m proud of them because they were hard classes, and I did well, and learned lots, even if it was rough on my GPA… California’s next frontier in fighting climate change: your kitchen stove
Love you too!
Oh my gosh. This was so heartfelt. And the writing is so good.
I’ll be rooting for you as you crush those loans so you can have some closure on this part of your life.
Awww, such kind words.
Thanks for being in my corner! <3 <3 <3
They’re SO CLOSE to being gone (well, as long as we accept that close is a relative thing that spans years, not months…). UGH!!!!