I was really hoping for a more dramatic picture.

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.