Six Years and $85,000 in Debt

Today I posted on FB about finally paying off the last of my undergraduate student loans. I called it an adult achievement. And it is. And I am really proud of finally getting those student loans gone, especially when I graduated from undergrad 15 years and 5 months ago. It is, in fact, a big deal.

But the truth is, for me, this is about more than student loans. It is not actually about the last 15 years, but about the last 6 years. In 2009, C lost his job. At the time, we had over $70,000 in non-house debt, everything from credit cards and car loans to student loans.

I had finished my graduate degree only a year before and was still searching for my first post-MBA job. I made more than at the time, but not a substantial amount. His paycheck still accounted for roughly $40% of our income. And suddenly, it was gone.

We were lucky in that it was when the entire economy was falling apart, and therefore C ended up getting close to two years’ worth of unemployment. In 2010, I did get a new job, one that came with a 33% raise. And all throughout that time, we worked on paying down our debt.

In December 2009, I joined an internet message board that focused on money, and started taking part in a thread that was specifically about tracking and paying down debt. I added up every single penny we owed and started keeping track. I had a 5 year plan to get us out of consumer (non-house) debt. But in 2011, we chose to add another $5 to that debt, in order to prevent another winter of flooding in our basement. And in 2013, we added another $10k when we replaced all the windows in our house due to finding some mold around the casings.

Today, when I made that final payment on my student loans, I completed the race I began 5 years and 10 months ago. In less than 6 years, C and I have paid off over $85k in debt.

I cannot claim that we did this “all on our own”. With C’s mother’s passing, we got some life insurance money and threw that at my graduate student loans. We also inherited a condo in another state, and it was selling that this spring that allowed us to buy our new house this summer (without selling our old house), and the sale of the old house this month that gave us the money to make the final payment on the student loans. The inheritance was not substantial, but it was enough.

Honestly we are not quite consumer debt free because when we bought our new house, we bought an awesome new TV, and bought it on a one year same as cash plan. So technically, I am paying on that. It is on Ron Popeil mode – set it and forget it – with automatic payments, so I have chosen not to track it closely. We also still use our credit cards, but pay them off every month. Still after almost 6 years of trying to find enough pennies to make the minimum payments and then every extra penny possible to throw at debt, we are done.

Done.

In the last 6 years, our lives have changed in ways we never imagined. Since C lost his job, we have lost 3 dogs. We lost C’s mother, a cousin, and a dear friend. We lost my grandparents and a great aunt. I spent 11 months unemployed over the course of 2 years.

But we have also brought 3 amazing dogs into our lives. C went back to college, which we were able to cash flow, and earned his combined BA/BS. We adopted Pop Tart (and fostered two other children).

6 years. $85,000+ in debt, gone. I am happy to be done with my student loans, but this is what I am most proud of. 6 years ago, we realized we were living an unsustainable life. We made a plan to fix that, and we have.

Now we have 6 years until Pop Tart graduates from high school.