Small Wins Matter: Take Them When You Can
Friday I was skimming through my finances and decided to check on my student loans to look at my accumulated interest. Normally, I just set these on auto-pay and try to ignore them. I learned a while back that I have the tendency to obsessed over things (surprise, surprise… not.), and after a few months of compulsively checking them every few days, I made it a rule that I wouldn’t look at them. It’s a great rule.
I know that every month, $500 goes towards them, and I don’t have to worry about checking on payments unless I get an email saying I need to update my Excess Payment Preference. Then I do a happy dance because another small loan is paid off.
I’m still in my grace period (at least until the end of this month), and so the money goes mostly to principle. However, occasionally that little “What do I owe in interest?” bug bites, and Friday, I decided to check in. This was also in conjunction with reviewing our new budget and looking through my PersonalCapital statements to check up on budget health, so the timeline made sense. I am also contemplating just paying off all the interest at once, and starting fresh when my grace period is close to over, but after looking at the numbers, that didn’t seem feasible.
What did though, was adding an extra $50 towards loans this month and paying off one of my student loans! That extra $50 also meant that we’re up to $6,000 towards student loans in a year, or 18% down from what I owed at the beginning of the year.
Our original goal had been to put $10,000 towards loans, and since it’s November, I’m finally admitting to myself that this goal, however noble, is NOT going to happen. The most we can put towards loans next month is probably $1000, which is double what we’ve put towards loans in the previous several months (shout out to my new job!). And that leaves us $3000 short.
It’s frustrating. I’m not used to failing to achieve goals I set out for myself, and I was really upset until I looked back at the past year.
I was in school from January – April. I didn’t have a full-time job and had to split focus between homework and my job. April 28th, the day I graduated from college, I also got married! While super exciting and a great life choice (eventually I’ll do a personal post on the decisions leading up to that event), it was also costly. A lot of the money we had went towards the wedding and honeymoon, even with our parents’ help (shout out to super cool parents everywhere!).
During my last semester, my Buick decided to give up the ghost, and we had to buy another car. Now, I have The Toaster, a 2009 Smart car, that we bought used for $4,400. A great investment, and I love her. But then again, nothing says true love like 40 mpg, especially when you’re commuting an hour each way! And yet, that was money we might have designated towards loans. So were the $2,000 we put towards car repairs during October. Nothing like shredded struts to throw the budget off kilter while we pay back the E-Fund.
Also, for the first six months out of college, I didn’t have a steady job. I really enjoyed working at my tutoring company, but the hours were inconsistent, and I was an independent contractor, so I was putting away about 30% of my salary for taxes. Neither of those things lent themselves to high student loan payments, and my husband works in a social services field, so high student loan payments were not on the radar for us.
So there are a lot of reasons that we won’t be hitting my goal, and contextualizing failure matters. We didn’t fail because we didn’t try. We failed because more pressing financial issues came up, and that’s okay.
This month, we were able to shoot an extra $50 towards loans and pay another small one off! And that is enough for me. This first year of debt repayment, with its ups and downs, has taught me a lot. We’ve sacrificed to make payments some months, and others, we’ve been able to add a couple payments here and there.
At the end of the day, ~$7,000 is more than nothing, and certainly more than if we had started paying off my loans once they hit the grace period. And, I got to pay off a loan today; some days that’s all you need for the feeling of failure to melt away.
Look back at where you’ve come from before you look ahead to where you’re going, and see what a difference it can make.
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[…] that I’d originally set my goals on before I sent my life spiraling sideways, but definitely nothing to sneeze at. And that’s assuming that I don’t invest anything in 2022, which is obviously not the […]
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[…] thanks to the wedding gifts, we were able to do that) and put ten grand towards my student loans. That didn’t happen, and we ended the year with $7,252 towards my loans down, still a very respectable amount, […]
You are making great progress! Sometimes to need to take a step back and look at the big picture =) x
Yes, looking at the big picture really helped me be less disappointed that we “failed” our goal. It also helped fuel me to make the 10k this year!
Congrats on the great progress! Another way of putting a positive spin on “failure” is to remember that if you set BIG goals, you’re more likely not to achieve them. So rather than setting puny goals just to say you accomplished them, you set big goals and just didn’t quite make it. And you had very good reasons for it, anyway. Keep rockin’ the debt repayment; that’s awesome!
Yes!! 10,000 straight out of school in a job when I was making ~16k a year was an astronomical goal! And in the grand scheme of things, we were soooo close! And I’m so proud of us.
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I love your contextualizing here – you’ve rocked this year even if it wasn’t exactly as you’d hoped from the very beginning. I also drove an old Buick for 7.5 years and that thing was a BEAST.
Thanks! 😀 And yes, they are!!
My son drives a smart car!
They’re not very common here in Australia.
Congrats on the year you’ve had. You sure had a lot going on!
I really love the little car! They’re very popular where we live, but a lot of people commute 2-3hr for work, so it makes sense they’d be popular. Haha. And thanks, it’s been a whirlwind of a year, that’s for sure!
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