I can pay 40% of my student loan, and it sucks!

So, after our long hiatus I have come back to say this: I can pay 40% of my loans, and it sucks!

Don’t get me wrong. The fact that I have enough money saved due to various factors (sudden financial windfall, student loans being on pause, not going anywhere due to the pandemic) is a really great, marvelous thing. I’m looking at my high yield savings account (HYSA), admiring money I never thought I’d see there. The figures shimmer and shake as if enchanted by a money fairy, who I imagine looks like a smaller version of Suze Orman and wears white pantsuits and says things like, “Abundance mindset, baby!”

My problematic fave, Suze Orman.

Buuuuuut what sucks is the knowledge that I could in theory pay off one of my two remaining federal loans that make up my six figure debt. That money has sat there long enough to build its own set of dreams: a house, adopting a changeling child under a full moon, several hundred cats, endless kayaks. To separate the dream from reality is hard, feels like a tooth extraction.

Cat Source.

So with gauze stuffed in my mouth I’m here to say: I am going to very likely take this money and place it directly on the consolidated unsubsidized federal loan. I am likely going to do this because to do so would lower my overall cost of payment over the long term, which if we know anything about student loan debt it’s that interest rates keep people indebted far longer than they should. Making payments that hit the principal is key to making progress (short of cancellation). According to a very optimistic student loan calculator I could even pay the remainder of my student loans off five years later, which I’m deeply suspicious of but which I welcome as I map out a future trajectory towards hope.

What’s stopping me from paying my loan right right now?

1. While I have emergency funds outside of the money in my HYSA I would like to ensure that my HYSA is stable once I deplete it of so much money.
2. I access my loans through FedLoan Servicing, which if you haven’t heard is going away (though they’ve been extended for another year to service loans). I don’t yet know which entity will replace them, and I don’t want to! But from a logistical perspective I’m going to wait it out.
3. I’m a silly goose who thinks maybe Joe Biden might cancel some debt. Even if it doesn’t happen it’s still important to put pressure on him since he does, in fact, have executive power to cancel debt and allow those funds to redistribute back into our economy.
4. Emotions. Give me some time to process this. Our relationship to money is emotional (for many of us, maybe not for an ascetic living in a cave or someone who’s had so much money they don’t think of it). To pretend otherwise for me would mean to deny myself a really human set of feelings, and I ain’t doing it. It’s my student loan debt, and I’ll cry if I want to.

That last point there? It feels nauseating sometimes to always be so vulnerable, writing in a public space about debt so that friends, family, colleagues, frenemies, nemeses, and my cat can see. But the reason we’re back here at [shameless] is because that while we know we can’t force the President’s hand with debt cancellation, we can be honest about the ups and downs of navigating a system no one taught us to navigate, about the emotional highs and lows of getting to the other side.

Not to mention, it’s fun writing about these dark, horrible things!

I was interviewed on the podcast Matter of Life and Debt (Episode 29: Financial Transparency) where I talked about crushed career dreams and financial transparency. And every time I talk about this stuff I think, this is hard. This is hard to be vulnerable and messy and transparent. But then I remember that 1 in 8 Americans has student loan debt. Now what would happen if 1 in 8 of us spoke up?

So I am speaking just to say, I’m lucky enough to pay 40% of my federal loan debt, and it is extremely hard and makes me sad. But I am happy to talk about it with you, if no one else does.

Anyway, here’s a cat tax for making it this far:

Please, she just learned the art of sitting on couch cushions without falling over. Please clap.