I Just Paid Off Our Debt. How Come I’m not Happier?
Financial wellness is a long journey.
I sign into my student loan account and pay off the last bit of money we owe to anyone. I wait for the thrill I’d envisioned three years ago, when we decided to pay off our student loans, bank loan, credit card and more. There should be exhilaration and pride — plus serious relief at not having to shell out over $1,000 per month for past decisions. But now that the moment is here…
I feel none of that.
Figuring that I should mark the occasion somehow, I take a screenshot.
Then I close the computer and head to the kitchen to make my daughter breakfast. I stir her eggs to a light sunshine yellow and muse, no debt-free shout of happiness here.
But why not?
Life happens, even when you’re debt-free.
The pandemic and everything that came with it have drawn my internal compass toward what’s really important, and money isn’t on the list.
On the day that I made our final payment, I was approaching week 7 of a sickness that could or could not have been COVID-19 (tests were limited, and we didn’t qualify then). Because both my husband and I got sick at the same time, we were forced into tough conversations. Among them: with most of our relatives compromised in some way, where could my daughter go if we landed in the hospital?
It’s hard to care about money wins against the backdrop that life sometimes throws at us. If there’s anything I’ve learned these last few years, it’s that there’s a lot more to life than money.
You reap the benefits of less debt long before it’s paid off.
When you’re working toward a big goal, it can feel like you’re so far away that you’ll never get to the end. After accomplishing several large goals, including writing a book and learning performance swing dancing, I’ve noticed something.
There’s a point in the process when you haven’t reached the goal yet, but you intrinsically know that it’s only a matter of time. You’ve formed enough good habits that you’re already experiencing most of their benefits.
We reached that point after working on our payoff plan for about a year. My husband’s good friend was involved in an accident that required weeks of bedrest. With no paychecks coming in, he fell short of the money needed to pay the bills. We were able to chip in without a second thought.
It’s never really gotten better than that.
There’s more financial work to do.
Having learned some things about finances in order to reach this point, I now know that it’s easy to fall into old patterns. Finances and food diets have a lot in common that way. Just when you think you’ve kicked the bad habits, the desire to buy some large item reappears.
If Matt lost his pay, which makes up a significant portion of our income — we’d quickly wind up back where we were three years ago. The pandemic is a sobering reminder of just how quickly things can change.
Even with debt paid off, staying healthy financially is more complex than that. Besides working towards building decent emergency and college funds, there are stocks, IRAs and more to learn about.
Like a lot of people, I’d thought that being debt-free would put an end to financial worries, but it turns out that it doesn’t work that way. It’s simply a few steps on a longer journey to financial wellness.
