Feeling pretty badass today.
As of this morning, my student loan balance is $0.
When DH and I got together, we had A LOT of debt combined, the bulk of which was mine from 11 years of university.
It would have been fine, I could have paid it all off within 4 years while also saving substantially in tax deferred accounts, as we both had 6 figure incomes, mine more than double his.
Then quickly, my career fell apart.
Actually, that's a lie, my career was rockin', but I fell apart...literally.
I know now that I have a rare genetic disease that makes my career a TERRIBLE IDEA that literally rips my body apart from the inside.
Fuuuuuck
This means I urgently had to downshift and take a huge pay cut if I wanted to be able to continue working...or, y'know, regain the ability to lift my right arm, no big deal.
[Truthfully, at the time I had no idea how serious the damage was, medical professionals are amazing at ignoring pain. I honestly saw the downshift as temporary...Ugh...so dumb]
I've now smartened up a little bit and turned the Titanic of my career around by focusing on a sub-specialty that I actually enjoy more, by treating severe pain patients...Hmm..wonder why I like that so much?
Since our monthly debt payments always eclipsed our life spending, this means that our overall expenses have immediately been cut in less than half.
A side benefit of all of this FUCKING DEBT is that it forced us into a frugal life, which we eventually learned to really enjoy. 5-6 years ago we would daydream about all of the lifestyle inflation we could afford once the debt was gone and our hundreds and hundreds of thousands in income were at our disposal...now we live in a 1 bedroom apartment, which is the "dream home" we just moved to from a 3 story town house.
The FUCKING DEBT may have felt like a god damn albatross, but that shit has taught me more about myself, my life, my health, and my happiness than I could have learned in a lifetime of having a normal career like a damn normal person.
DH asked me this morning how my first day of freedom felt, and I replied: "I'm really looking forward to getting to know who I am without constantly being concerned about cash flow"
I left home as a teenager. I was a student for my entire 20s. My career has been chaos. Worrying about cash flow has been sewn into the very fabric of my being.
I look very forward to growing into the kind of person that I can be now without that ever present pressure eating up so much of my psychic energy.
420K dragon slayed. It's a good day.