Debt Freedom
In a pattern most people that have been through college would recognize, I busted onto the scene of “real life” in roughly May of 2000 with very close to $100,000 in debt. According to my loan granting institution, I had a full twenty years of paying on those loans lined up ahead of me. To most people in this situation it is “just the way it is” and the twenty year plan tends to make the payments every month a little more manageable. In reality however, you get done being a student and instantly acquire a mortgage backed by your soul.
If that weren’t bad enough, a lot of us, myself included, were driving around the old car we were given near the end of high school by our parents. I am not referring to a silver spoon “congrats on your graduation or sweet 16 here is your brand new Lexus” but rather the “here is the car that we’ve been driving into the ground for the last decade that may or may not run properly, has well over 100,000 miles on it and may or may not burn slightly more oil than gas and we know selling it would be a waste of effort so you can just have it” type of car. So aside from a mortgage on your soul, most former students immediately find themselves with a car loan for some slightly less used car because their’s died.
Now imagine that twenty year time window for a moment. A huge list of things will likely happen in that time frame. A lot of people will need at least one more car, sometimes two. Many will purchase some form of real estate. This time the mortgage is backed by your house instead of your soul at least. Most will be married, many will have at least one kid, and so on. Thanks to economic forces beyond our control, most will also spend frantic periods of time unemployed and trying to figure out how to survive on credit cards or money from family or both. In other words, this twenty years of college debt is never the only debt in your life largely thanks to the fact that it is over such a large time frame.
I often referred to myself as “the best paid poor guy I know” to my friends. I will not lie, I am well paid for what I do and fortunately to support that, I’m also very good at what I do so I don’t have to feel guilty or anything. Dispite my status of being well paid, I had the eight college loans, the three cars, the real estate, the wedding, the unemployment, and the credit card debt over the years. That produced a strange pattern of literally living paycheck to paycheck as I funneled as much money as I possibly could toward debt every month. My goal was to beat the odds, and pay off not only my college loans, but all of my debt in any form, and to do so before twenty years had elapsed on my college loans.
Several months ago I paid off the last of my college loans, putting me almost eleven years ahead of schedule, but I wasn’t done. My credit cards are all at zero as well, but I had a mortgage on my house and a loan on my car so I wasn’t quite there.
When I met my wife we both owned houses and that put us in a somewhat unique situation. We had an extra house. Honestly not a terrible situation to be in if you can each pay for your own place the same way you obviously could before you met. Based on location we decided to move into her house instead of mine. After a long process lasting roughly a year, my house has been repaired and sold. This brought about an awesome debt tour de force.
The only two debts I had left were my house and my car. I had just sold my house making it go away, and with the profit from the house in my pocket and no need to move it into another house thanks to having a second one already, I had the unique opportunity to pay off my car at the same time. I did exactly that this morning. So from May of 2000 to August of 2009, a total of nine years and three months, I have scraped my way entirely into the black. I am now completely debt free.
Having worked at it so hard for so long I think I may still be in a little shock about it. It doesn’t yet feel real. The sudden drop in my monthly expenses will probably make it feel very real indeed very soon I suspect.