Hello FIRE flowers! I’m excited to be back to writing you again today!

The topics I am going to write about today are:

•  The Tale of my Spouse’s Student Loan Payoff
• Travel Updates!
• 2023 Goal Check-in

The Tale of my Spouse’s Student Loan Payoff:

Disclaimer: This is going to be like one of those true crime podcasts where you [hopefully] get fully engulfed in the story, and then at the end it was never solved and you leave without full resolution. Admittedly, I wrote this filled with a misplaced hope that the supreme court would wrap this tale up in a bow the day before publishing. LOL did I single-handedly jinx us?

And so the story begins….

My spouse graduated college with just over $25,000 in student loans broken out over 7 different loans. They were as follows:

One year he received a tax refund of $1,500 and used it to directly wipe out one of the loans.

He celebrated, but since we typically do not receive lumps of money like that, it was years before he would be able to abolish another one from the list.

For my partner’s birthday, one of the gifts he usually asks for is a book on personal finance. I had given him The Millionaire Next Door in 2018. And in 2019, I decided to give him Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover. He read it in a matter of weeks. And in October of that year, he began Dave Ramsey’s Debt Snowball technique with the intent of eliminating his student loan debt!

The Debt Snowball is an accelerated debt payment plan wrapped inside a positive behavior psychology. It works by lining up your debts in order from the smallest balance to the largest, and making minimum payments on all them except for the smallest balance. For that balance, you put every extra dollar you have in your budget each month toward the payment until it is paid off. Then next month, you take everything you were paying against the smallest now fully paid loan, and apply it to the next-smallest loan (so the payment will include whatever was the minimum payment for the smallest loan + the minimum payment for the current loan + any surplus money). This strategy sets you up to tackle your debts one at a time, rolling up the minimum balance payments so that by the time you are paying off the last one, the monthly payment will be at the sum of all of the minimum balances plus any extra dollars for the month. Phew! I hope that made sense.

If you recall from this post we run individual budgets (this is where my partner includes his student loan payments) and a joint budget. To prepare for the snowball, we reviewed the joint budget and SLICED IT TO THE BONE so that we could keep as much money flowing to his individual budget as possible. We took date nights out, vacation savings out, we trimmed back the grocery and started shopping at Aldi, and we stopped spending money on projects around the house.

Here is the table updated for the starting point for 2019:

My partner also decided to get a second job in the evenings with the intent of directing the full extra income to his loans.

And his direct, intentional effort paid off! My spouse quickly paid off the remaining balances of loans 1-5. After that, we decided to go against Mr. Ramsey’s instruction of always focusing on the next smallest balance, and he attacked the big state loan balance instead. It was around this time that our political environment had started the rumblings of student debt forgiveness.

All in all, it took him one year to pay off $16,000 in student debt. During this year, he had a salary of $60k, and his part-time job brought in about $300/week.

He kept loans 06 & 07 active with a combined balance of $9,998. Perfectly poised for a dose of forgiveness.

With COVID-19, required minimum payments were frozen. And then we wait with bated breath for the supreme court decision! Fingers and toes crossed!!

Unfortunately for my spouses net worth, the supreme court decided yesterday to block student loan forgiveness. I’m not going to lose hope just yet though. Call me an optimist, but perhaps there is still a chance. Or fine, maybe call me delusional.

To end this in proper True Crime Podcast fashion…the open questions still linger. What will happen to these balances? Will they be paid off my by spouse after all? The federal government? Or a mysterious benefactor? We just do not know.

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After regaling this whole tale to you, I realized that some of you may have had a wandering thought regarding my student loans. Well, I’ve never had any! My parents informed me when my brother left for college three years before me, that they had spent the money they had saved for our college education on his freshman year tuition. With that advance warning, I buckled down and graduated high school with a 3 page activities list and a 4.13 GPA. I applied to every scholarship application that I could get my hands on. Every j-term break during college, I treated applications like a part-time job and as a result, I received ~$47,000 in awards across about 14 different scholarships. I attended a state school to keep costs low, and even tried my hand at being a Resident Assistant for a year so that I could get free room and board (I did not find that job agreeable to my personality; one year was enough). Most years there was a deficit between my scholarships and tuition costs, and I worked summer and part-time jobs to cover those gaps.

Travel Updates:

You may have thought that slow-traveling up the east coast last year for 5 month was going to satisfy my travel thirst. But nay! This year I have a boat-load of travel on the docket, and I promise to keep you abreast of my adventures!

My partner and I took the Amtrak train to Chicago in May.

We had two motivations: The 2023 Chicago Fountain Pen Show and weed dispensaries.

2023 Goal Check-in

First up, le financials:

BOOM! Not too shabby! Everything is coming in strong, well above the 50% I would have expected to see half way through the year. Hoorah for us.

Next up, la personals:

Hehehe yeah, I am better at managing my money that my personal growth. Fine ha. That’s why I have it here. For accountability!

Read 50 Books: I feel like I am keeping a good pace on these; it feels like my nose is always in a book! But alas, I am technically behind schedule… when books are really capturing my attention, I tend to drag my feet on finishing them, because I don’t want them to end. I feel like I am going to blame that phenomenon here.

Take a trip by myself: This one is going to do nothing all year, and then BOOP in December it will be completed. Why?? Because I booked it!! Well, I booked the hotel. A spa in Phoenix ooolala.

Free Writing Notebook: I would think I have more than enough thoughts bumbling around in my head for this to be an easy layup to fill. I don’t even have excuses. I need to write more!

Lose 35lbs: I am not disappointed on a 46% complete for this one! Especially when the real motivator here was the 20lbs I gained over COVID. I am so close to back to baseline! I’ve never had much success losing weight. I’m the classic lose 5lbs, gain 5lbs story. So losing SEVENTEEN is awesome-sauce. And I am going to continue to keep at it and strive for that 35!

See you all back here in September!