Paid Off
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure the collective millennial dream is to fully pay off their personal debt before they die. It’s a simple dream but is it an attainable one?
As of March 2019, the New York Federal Reserve said millennials have accumulated over one trillion dollars in debt. Mostly due to school loans since a lot of us aren’t bothering with mortgages or kids yet but there’s also credit cards and car loans that helped push our collective debt into 13 figures.
While my own debt amounts to pennies compared to this reported number, oooooh boy does it feel like a trillion to me. When income isn’t steady or even when it is, my pay rarely clears the poverty line and in that scenario, it doesn’t take much to feel like you’re drowning.
If I’m gonna be honest, this pandemic has been a mild blessing for me financially. Since we can’t go out and do much, my spending has been kept to a minimum…more or less. Between my continual, though meager, paychecks and that (laughable but helpful in the short term) one time stimulus payment, I’ve slowly put a dent into my own debt.
Thanks to that stimulus payment, I was able to totally pay off a credit card I hadn’t used in years but was still faithfully paying on each month and figured I would still be doing for months to come. This let me start putting extra money on another card payment with the ol snowball method (Thanks, Dave Ramsey) which helped me breathe a little easier knowing I was down one less monthly payment.
But the biggest win I’ve had in the category of paying things off comes at the end of this month. After six years, my 2015 Kia Rio will FINALLY be completely paid for. I’ll own it free and clear (which probably means some bullshit will start happening with it but let me enjoy this victory!) She’s not the coolest car in the world with her manual locks and windows, (yes they still make cars with manual locks and windows and I own one and I’ll remind you to lock your door every single time you get out of the car,) but she’s about to be mine and I will have paid for her myself.
I didn’t even mean to buy a car on the day we went to the dealership, I thought my mom was buying one and I’d help her pay for it since I would be the main driver but before I realized what was happening the salesperson was talking to me, I was taking a test drive, and signing the papers. I still remember bursting into tears while we waited for the loan numbers and the salesperson saying, “I hope those are happy tears!” to which I replied, “I’m not sure.”
Making a $300 monthly payment wasn’t on my list of things to do but suddenly I was stuck with it. Every month I would worry that I couldn’t make it. It was the first time I felt like I could truly face a consequence if I couldn’t pay my bills, I needed a car so I had to make it work.
Now, as I face a future where I don’t HAVE to put $300 towards a bill each month….I could cry again. It’s a thrill to know that I was able to pay off a loan that seemed so daunting and out of reach when I first took it on and I’m excited to know that this will let me pay down the rest of my debt sooner. I still have school loans that will never get paid off and more credit debt than is probably reasonable but what do you want, it’s small steps.
So is the millennial dream of being debt free an attainable one? Probably. The world sure as shit isn’t making it easy though, with the predatory school loans that just won’t seem to go away and the low paying jobs that leave us vulnerable to credit cards to pay for things. But, it’s one thing at a time, right? Now go make sure you’ve made your payments this month….late fees are not to be fucked with!
What was the first thing you were ever able to fully pay off? Was it a credit card, a car loan? Did you manage to pay your school loans off already?? How’d paying something off make you feel? Let me know in the comments below and if you have any tips or tricks that worked for you, I wanna hear them!