Like many Americans, I've been feeling a constant sense of dread about my student loans. They've always felt like a formless dark shadow hanging over me and it used to scare me out of checking my balances or interest, or even budgeting, since it all seemed so futile.
This and being a broke brand new teacher in NYC led to me using overuse my credit. I somehow got my credit card under control (after it had hit just over $9,000) and then moved to Connecticut where my expenses are much lower. I ended up taking a pay cut since teachers in CT make less than in NYC but it still ended up being a net positive gain on my finances. Since finding more stability I have been resolving to save as much as I can while paying off larger amounts of my leftover student loans and a Best Buy credit account.
I've always giving something abstract a name or a visual helps give me power over it, so I decided to represent my debts exactly as I thought of them: monsters hanging over me. Instead of despairing, however, I wanted to think of them like video game bosses. Sure, they have a ton of HP, but like anyone who's played an RPG, you can beat even the toughest bosses by chipping away at their health over time.
So in my home office, I drew a visual representation of these 3 baddies along with their health bars, and percentages of their "health" left.
They are, in order of least scary to most: Beast Buy (Best Buy credit account), Perkins the Scourge (Perkins student loans), and Ramses the Endless Punisher (the rest of my non-Perkins loans from Fordham University).
As soon as I stepped back and saw the damage I'd already dealt each, they all felt beatable. With each payment I make, I plan on adjusting the amounts and health bars accordingly. I plan on defeating Beast Buy before the year is done, leaving me with only two more kaiju to worry about.
It may be scary to face the reality of your debts, especially if you just started the fight, but if you're a visual learner and a geek like me, this might be a good way to build some motivation to kill these things. This is also a good way to make something as nebulous as debt into something you can imagine dealing damage to.
Pics here: https://imgur.com/a/XQQkIG1
TLDR: Debts are scary. I turned them into monsters with corresponding health bars. Now they're less scary.
Submitted November 28, 2018 at 06:23PM by DonFrijote https://ift.tt/2FPDnwn
