I have managed to set it up so that I have no lesson planning to do this week, and no photocopying to do in the morning, which means I came home and died on the couch, and now I want to go die on the couch some more. Go hug somebody.
Sometime in February of 2020– I could have sworn I posted about it, but hell if I can find it– I applied for a $30,000, six-year personal loan through Discover. I used the funds to pay off about 90% or so of my credit cards– so, to be clear, someone handed me thirty grand and that wasn’t enough money to pay off all of my credit cards. The payments on the loan were considerably less than the combined payments on the cards, by around $300 a month, if I remember correctly.
In September of 2021, I got that last piece of credit card debt paid off, giving me a $0 credit card balance for the first time since my freshman year of college. It probably put around $150-200 a month back into my pocket.
Two years later, aided by that extra $300 and a few stimulus payments from the government that I didn’t need because I’d been able to keep my job and work from home, I paid off my car, a full year early. Another $237 a month went back into my pocket.
On May 9th, 2022, my student loans– nearly $70,000 worth– were forgiven through the Biden administration’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Another $545 a month went back into my pocket. I started paying a thousand dollars a month, sometimes more if I could afford it, on the personal loan, which had a monthly payment of $607. The entire time I was paying off the loan, I never made a single payment for just the amount that was due.
I have been watching a little bar crawl across the screen of my phone over the last four years as that personal loan got slowly whittled down. Last Saturday, I made my final payment of $756, and then reloaded the app about a dozen times an hour for the next few days, waiting for it to update and show me that the loan was 100% paid off. I was looking forward to the screenshot.
Turns out when you pay off a personal loan, which I did almost two full years early, they just … close the account, which feels kind of anticlimactic.
Other than a small installment loan through Apple that I will pay off on the paycheck after next, my mortgage, and a home equity loan that we used to remodel the bathroom– and to be honest, for some reason I don’t even feel like the home loans count, I am now completely debt-free.
No student loans.
No credit cards.
No personal loans.
No car payment.
A thousand bucks a month now back in my pocket.
If I was a Republican, I’d already be writing my personal finance book, talking about how my good financial decisions and iron self-control led me to shake off a lifetime of bad habits and Get Out of Debt.
That is not what happened.
The fact is I’ve been incredibly lucky.
I was lucky enough to be back in education when Covid hit. If I’d still been a furniture salesman, I’d have been fucked.
I was lucky enough to be married to someone who both handles her money better and makes more than me, so I wasn’t trying to pay for my entire household on my salary and could devote large chunks of it to debt relief.
I was lucky enough that the government sent me Covid relief checks that I didn’t really need and could devote to debt relief.
I was lucky enough to qualify for President Biden’s improvements to the PSLF program, which I had tried to take advantage of several times before and hadn’t been able to for one reason or another.
I was lucky enough to have a good-paying union job that provided me with a steady paycheck and yearly raises that, for the most part, I also didn’t really need, and lucky enough to get hired by a higher-paying district when I left South Bend schools. Most of that extra money went to debt relief.
I was lucky enough that my family has largely avoided any sort of financial crises over the past four years– no sudden illnesses or injuries, no major accidents, no natural disasters, fires, thefts, or anything else that could have suddenly laid claim to who knows how much of my money. One bad car accident and I could be millions of dollars deep into medical debt instead of being practically free of it.
I have been very, very lucky. And while I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m never using a credit card again– they’re fucking useful, that’s why they exist– I’m hoping to never have to dig myself out of that hole again.
But one way or another, this week, I’m celebrating. Celebrating, and trying my damnedest to not run out like an idiot and spend myself right back into a hole again. I’m not buying a car until the boy turns 16 and gets his license, and provided that nothing stupid has happened in the meantime, he’ll inherit my current car at that time. So I’ve got four years– three and a half, really– to take that surplus and invest the shit out of it. If I stay lucky, the market will continue on its current trajectory, and maybe I’ll get to retire before I die.
Jonesy got out of the house this morning, and it was completely my fault, although in my defense I was unaware that the fat bastard had recently developed the ability to not only move at something just shy of the speed of Goddamned light but also the ability to turn invisible at will. Five or so hours of searching ensued, and said fat bastard was eventually discovered underneath a neighbor’s porch and (also eventually) coaxed out from underneath it and, after a few secondary escapes, returned home.
So the story has a happy ending, other than the fact that my planned eight-week no-absences stand at work lasted two days, and everyone in the house including the Goddamned cat is still stressed out and exhausted. So you’ll forgive me if this is a short post.
I have spent most of the weekend watching college basketball, somehow, and my brother’s family was in town today, and I swear if you had asked me what time it was before I looked outside and realized it was dark I probably would have been off by at least three hours.
Lots to do tomorrow, on my last day of Spring Break. Hopefully I can get through Sunday without losing my shit too hard.
Literally every single thing I have done or tried to do today has been frustrating, and I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow and it is not going to go well, because basically every single bad number that exists is going to be higher than it has ever been before, and if I had a window big enough to throw the entire fucking planet through I’d do it. I’ve been on vacation, supposedly, all week, and I’m still exhausted.
One week until Spring Break. And really the last day before the break doesn’t count, so only four teaching days until Spring Break. I can do this. And apparently ILEARN starts a week after we get back? I had no idea. I thought we had at least a couple of weeks, or maybe the last week of April. One way or another, I don’t even look at the results any longer.
We’re taking a road trip tomorrow for an academic competition for the boy, and we have to be up at like 5:30 in the fucking morning for it. I am complaining here because the boy does not read the blog– I’m pretty sure as of right now he is still unaware that it exists– and I will not complain about it around him, because I’m not going to be that kind of dad. It can be taken as read that the entire thing makes me want to die, though.
Pearl Jam has a new album coming out on April 19th. If you’ve been around a while you probably already know they’ve been my favorite band for basically my entire adult life. They just released a new single off of the album today, and along the way announced that they’re doing what they’re calling a “Dark Matter Global Experience” on the 16th at 500 theaters around the world. One of the 500 happens to be nearby, so I snagged tickets for my wife and I since they were basically the cost of a movie. They’re going to play the new album twice, once in darkness and once with “mesmerizing visuals.” I gotta be honest: even as a huge fan, huge enough that I just bought tickets to this thing, I have no idea if I think this is a good idea or not, but I’m willing to burn $24 on it, and I can’t wait to get home and wash the weed stink out of my clothes so that I can go to work tomorrow without raising eyebrows. If nothing else, this will be a unique experience, I imagine.
Speaking of new music, Fletcher, the other woman in the Miley Cyrus video that turned every woman on TikTok into a lesbian for a few days,(*) released her sophomore album this week. I’m four songs and– sigh– ten minutes into it and so far I’m liking it quite a bit except for the way streaming has fucking ruined music, because I should never be four songs into an album if only ten minutes have gone by. There is one song at 4:09, one at 3:05 and one at 3:02, and every other Goddamn song on the album is less than three minutes long.
I need the whole world to get off my damn lawn.
Every morning, I wake up, roll over, pick up my phone, and say a little prayer that I’m about to discover the shitgibbon died while I was asleep. I am going to add more Republican resignations to the prayer, because that shit is getting more hilarious by the Goddamn day and it’s not like God is listening anyway so I can ask for whatever I want.
I note that Jimmy Carter is still hanging on, though, despite all odds. He’ll outlive that fat bastard yet.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 