Edit: Sorry I just realized success stories aren't allowed. My apologies and I understand if this has to be deleted.
Hey everybody! I'm a 32-year old father of two (my newest bundle of joy was born just last month) and I just paid off the remaining $27,000 of mine and my wife's student loans, and I'm beyond excited!
I work in Finance and have seen my household income rise about 400% over the last 10 years as my wife and I have advanced through our careers. I spent a few years blogging about personal finance when I was younger, and have always been incredibly meticulous with keeping tabs on my money.
Notice I said "keeping tabs" and not necessarily budgeting. Like many people, as my income grew, so then did my lifestyle. Nothing extravagant, of course, but I was just more willing to spend money on things like new furniture, HVAC, new windows on the house, etc. Things in the past I might have just pushed off to the future or done a lot more gradually. I wish I could tell you I was 26 or 27 and paying off my student loans and the remainder of my non-mortgage debt, but that part is what it is.
So back to my story: I got a ~$12,000 bonus on my last paycheck and I decided to pay off my wife's $4,000 federal student loan disbursement. I was going to take the rest and put it in my brokerage account, but when I started putting together my net worth calculation for this month, I realized in my various accounts I actually had enough liquid cash/investments that I could probably just kill off the whole lot of our $27,000 remaining student loan balance and not put too much strain on my cash situation.
So I did it, and I can't even describe how free it makes me feel. At its height (I paid off a disbursement last year, too), I was paying about $600/month toward student loans and well over $1,000/year in interest.
I also have about $22,000 in zero interest credit card debt, stemming from a couple separate furniture purchases, my new windows in my house, and a little bit in electronics. I'm paying about $1,200/month on those which has never really bothered me because I'm not paying interest. Honestly I've had a zero interest credit card balance running probably my entire adult life. My standard plan is to make the minimum payments on those deals while separately saving money for them on the side and collecting interest... something of an interest arbitrage kind of thing.
This morning, though, I realized the amount of interest I'm collecting on this debt is honestly not worth delaying the emotional gratification of being 100% debt free aside from my mortgage. I decided to do some math, and I should be able to kill off that $22,000 in debt no later than September of this year. Probably earlier, but I wanted to account a little bit for incidentals.
I don't think I could properly put into words the mental/emotional high I am getting from this. If I can execute it, I will have paid off $49,000 in 2018 and become completely debt free (outside of my mortgage) for the first time in my entire adult life. Even though fundamentally I would be better off not going this route and keeping that money in investments, there's just no way to quantify the financial value of that against the feeling of not owing anything to anybody.
I just had to get this off my chest. I'm not really comfortable sharing these kinds of intimate details on Facebook, but I wanted to share my enthusiasm for the scope of this whole thing with somebody. Hope you enjoyed!
Submitted March 23, 2018 at 12:08PM by ZenMercenary https://ift.tt/2pC9GDD
