Oh happy day! Today is a day to celebrate, one that I've been working towards for a long  time. Almost two decades, 19 years of doing and undoing, to be exact. From the moment I started college, this cycle began and viciously continued until now.

Debt = Paid-in-full!

Though I may not have any financial assets, like a home or a car or a 401k, I like to think I have other assets ;) Admittedly, I fantasize frequently about buying a home, but let's stay here for a little while before starting the whole thing up again.

It's hard to say how much there ever was total because it was always a moving target. I was paying off my undergraduate debt at the same time as accumulating graduate school debt. Of course the interest makes the total cost ultimately much higher than if I'd just paid of the principle. With the interest rate what it was back then, and given the length of time that I needed, the real cost of a $15,000 loan was more like $22,000. In any case, for whatever it's worth, here's how it all happened....

Exiting college, I had a bunch of student loans. Though it felt huge (and confusing) to me at the time, and took me over ten years to pay off, it was amazingly low considering the cost of college and my parents' single income (my mom's) while juggling a mortgage, another child, and elder care for my grandmother. I don't know how they did it, really.

Then I got my first and only car, which my parents generously paid half of, leaving me with a modest $5,000 car loan that got paid off relatively quickly. That car and I stuck together for 15 years!

Graduate school #1. An investment I question, after reading this book, and because it led to so much debt and a profession that has entailed so much unhappiness. In any case, $16,000 Stafford loans, $5,000 Perkins, and $5,000 private loan (because I had to pay my rent somehow). Private (MEFA) loan got paid off first, then the Perkins loan thankfully got canceled (!) over the course of 5 years of paperwork through their loan cancellation program. But that Stafford loan is another story altogether....

Based on my profession - teaching a high needs subject area in a low income school - I qualified for the (Stafford) teacher loan forgiveness program, an incentive program to motivate people to go into teaching. Except I didn't technically qualify because I had outstanding undergraduate loans. That's right. How can I even do justice to explaining this injustice? In short, if you had unpaid student loans in 1998 (for example, like me, you were in college and hadn't begun to repay them), then you are ineligible for this program. Someone who had no outstanding loans at that time (either because they didn't need loans in the first place, managed to pay them off, or weren't yet in college) would qualify to have their graduate loans forgiven. It felt like a sick twist of logic to me, over which I expended an intense amount of frustration and time calling and researching and disputing the matter. In the end, the program had to start at some point, and that inception point happened to be while I was in college. If you're clear that year -1998- you can reap further financial assistance and cruise to financial freedom. If you're in debt that year, you can go into further debt. Even if both parties perform the exact same job (one that is already underpaid and  critical to society). Now teachers aren't exactly getting rich (in that  economy) but is anyone still wondering why the rich get richer while...?!?

Graduate school #2. A massive gift from God that righted all wrongs. Free. Actually, they gave me a little surplus one year to cover the cost of books, which canceled out the adorable $360 loan I had another year.

Then came an intensely frustrating financial snafu. The school system didn't take out my teacher's pension for 3 years (teacher's don't pay social security and pay instead into a pension). So that's like not having your Social Security taken out, and then owing it all back, except instead of the 6.5% taken out for social security, teachers get 11% taken out. And normally that's all taken out pre-tax and then starts earning interest somewhere, but I was paying this back with my post-tax earnings from my little checking account. Financially bad news, filled with frustrations (like why can't they set up a system to make pre-tax deductions over time, since it was an administrative error on their part and I'm required to contribute, just like social security). Emotionally, it reinforced my feelings that teaching was just not working out for me, that not even the retirement benefit was worth it, and that basically everything was going wrong. I became somewhat obsessed with how many years I've earned towards retirement which can't be a good sign. In the end, I essentially owed $14,000 back to myself.

How could I not have noticed has multiple answers, one of them being: I didn't understand the difference between social security vs. pension vs. the retirement system vs. 401k vs. 403b vs. 457b vs. voluntary vs. involuntary deductions vs. the payroll office vs. that man in the suit who just came around and signed me up for what? Now I know better.

It's a waste of money. Let it go. But I killed myself to earn it (driving around the city to 2 schools per day, 3 on Fridays, teaching upwards of 200 kids = part-time job + tutoring + summer job). Let it go. But this is just plain stupid. Let it go. But it's not fair. Let it go. (This was incredibly hard.) The frustration of it ate away at me but I had to just pay it off and not spend any more energy at it. Ultimately, I was hurting myself more with my anger than with any loss of money. And the money was actually circling back to me anyway, so it wasn't really lost (except for the interest un-earned and the pre-tax benefit), whereas the loss of time and energy were causing a far more costly deficit.

Last, we can't forget about the credit card. That's how I got by when I lived abroad (yes, I'll take the train across Europe to visit you; yes, let's go skiing, when else will I get invited to a chalet in the Alps?!), when I was in graduate school (yes, I'll go out in hopes of networking into a job), and everything in between (yes, I'd love to come to your wedding...in a new dress, of course ;).

Long story short, something in the ballpark of $77,000, it's all paid off! THANK GOD.