Last week something happened that should have been a momentous, once-in-a-lifetime experience. It should have led to endless celebrations and singing from rooftops and cavorting drunkenly naked through the streets in ecstatic glee at this thing I’d been looking forward to for well over a decade and a half.
I am now completely debt free.
Paying off that final loan should have caused me to get really excited, but it didn’t—it just felt like making a regular bank transfer. Maybe the anticlimax was partly because I won’t get to mark the big zero down on my net worth spreadsheet until next month, or maybe it was because I made the payment at the end of the day when I still had other things to do.
Either way, making that final payment felt like nothing special. That’s when I realized that my way of thinking about money has changed a lot since I got out of debt for real.
The Nitty Gritty of My Recent Debt
For those of you who missed it, last December I paid off my final student loan, which was costing me 16 bucks a month in interest ($3,400 borrowed at 5.8%, if you’re doing the math). The trick, though, was that to pay down the principal on that loan I’d been keeping money on 0% credit cards and transferring balances for the better part of three years, which cost me a little in transfer fees but saved me a LOT in interest.
Last December’s student loan was the last piece of debt I had that was actually costing me interest, but I held on to the 0% credit card balances until this month when the last of them ran out. Those balances weren’t costing me anything, and I had the cash to pay them off stashed in a savings account bringing in a trickle of interest, so I was in no hurry to make that final payment.
That’s why making that final transfer didn’t feel like a big deal—it was just moving money from one account to another. The real change has been happening for the past year as I adjusted to life without real, interest-accumulating debt weighing me down.
Debt Doesn’t Control My Life Anymore
When I look back on every major life decision I’ve made since age 18, each time I’ve had to consider a really important question: Is the path I choose going to help me pay off my student loans?
Sometimes the answer to that question was Yes. The drive to pay back $65,000 in student loan debt has pushed me to keep working for a long time, from taking work-study jobs in college to going to Japan to picking up weekend handyman jobs in grad school. If I had an opportunity to do something that would make money, even if it was a weekend gig, an hour of overtime, or a medical study, I found myself almost without exception saying Yes.
In a lot of ways this was good because it pushed me to do new things, focus my energy, and gain new skills by engaging with the world around me. The downsides were that it caused a LOT of burnout, some periods of massive stress, and led me to miss out on social interactions, cultural stimulation, and personal growth that I couldn’t make time for because I was always working.
I also said No to paths that would have made paying off my loans more difficult. After finishing college I felt afraid to move somewhere new without a reliable source of income, and after coming back from Japan I spent over a year living at home because I didn’t quite have the income stream to get back out on my own. Both experiences felt like taking a big step backward, and kept me feeling frustrated and stunted.
There have also been many, many times when I wanted to take time off and just write—or to work on personal projects, develop this blog, or put more of my work out there as a writer. It boggles my mind to think about how many creative work days were lost because I needed to bring in Day Job income—I could have finished my novel faster, queried more agents, built this blog sooner, written more short fiction, and other things that would move me in the directions I wanted to go. Whether for a day, or a year, that Day Job worktime was time I could have been using in other ways.
And that kind of sucks.
How About Now?
Now, however, that question of how I’m going to pay my loans is just…not there. It’s not a factor in the decisions I make now, or in planning for the future.
Now I feel more inclined to consider other factors, like whether a particular choice is something I actually want to be doing or how a certain job would affect my ability to do creative work. Obviously these were factors I considered before, but with the issue of paying off debt gone, I’m able to give them the full priority they deserve.
In other words, when I think about my future plans, I feel freer to make decisions based on what I really want to do rather than how they’ll affect my ability to pay, which means a lot.
This feeling also manifests itself in smaller ways: if I want to buy a new shirt, take a trip, or even buy a nice salad dressing at the grocery store, I feel freer to do these things because I don’t have to balance them against my ability to pay student loans. I still find myself living pretty frugally the way I’ve always done, but the difference is that when I do spend money now, I don’t worry like I used to.
In other words, my financial stress levels have basically gone down to zero.
Any Downsides to This Great New Life of Yours?
Glad you asked—because there kind of are.
Securing the money to pay the last of these student loans has also meant taking a job in a new country, meaning that my apartment, visa, and residency are all tied to my Day Job with the JET Program. So I’m not entirely free to just up and quit, since that would involve a costly and cumbersome move back to the States, plus a lot of hurt feelings at work. If I want to leave this job, I have to decide eight months ahead of time once contract renewal time rolls around—which means I have to do a LOT of planning and make another major life change.
Then there’s a more existential problem. As I talked about in the post about my student loan payoff, having a reason to bring in money—and find Day Job or other work to raise that money—has been a BIG motivator for the last, oh, fifteen or so years of my life. Though having debt has limited my decisionmaking, it’s also pushed me to make those decisions and to carry them to fruition once I’ve made them.
In other words, having debt has pushed me forward almost as much as it’s cut me off.
Now, though, more and more I find myself scouring for new motivations, mostly those related to writing and creative work. Pushing myself in my creative work is a great motivator for sure…but even I get discouraged sometimes, and it’s not always easy to sit down and write. Saving Day Job money toward a loan payoff wasn’t the most exciting goal in the world, but moving toward it was straightforward and made me feel good.
I’ve been trying to make the adjustment from Student Loan Motivation to Creative Work Motivation, but some days the focus isn’t there the way I’d like it to be. Moving yourself into that pure state of self-motivation where you can pursue your own projects is a really, really difficult thing to do if you’re not used to it, and mastering this skill is a major existential hurdle I have to climb over.
In this new stage, the drive to move forward has to come from me, and me alone.
Oh, and One More Thing
I know a lot of you out there are still neck-deep in debt and struggling pretty hard to pay it off—I get that, and I was in that boat for a long-ass time. I also don’t want to seem like I’m whining about my problem of being debt-free—that’s not my intention at all. Rather, I wrote this post both for self-reflection, and in hope that it might resonate with some of you who are struggling with the same motivation problem I am.
If you’re drowning in debt and find that it’s sucking away the majority of your energy, then you should keep fighting the good fight—there’s always an end in sight, and you can always move forward toward your goal.
For the time being, though, I’ve got new battles to wage.
Oh yeah, before you go…
But I Also Have a Day Job on Facebook
My Instagram where I post cool pics from Japan