The Middle

After graduating, the student loan came in. Since I went to a for-profit accelerated nursing program, my loan was $40,000. For some, that's not a lot. For others, it is a substantial amount of student loans. By this time in my life, the credit cards were paid off (minus one in which I have 0% interest for the life of the card). Even though I was more responsible (so I thought), I only paid the minimum for about a year and ignored the private loan portion of the loan which was $10,000. After a few months of no payments to the school, I received a letter stating that if I paid half the amount by a certain day (I think it was about 30 days from the date of the letter), they would forgive the other half! So I pulled out that credit card and put $5,000 on it that very day.


$30,000 left. I am a bit of a workaholic, so I worked about 50-80 hours a week, and paid $1,000 a month on my student loan. After almost one year of doing that, I was tired of paying it off so slowly. I pulled what I had left in savings and made my final payment. $19,000.00. My student loan debt was gone!!!


I know I was fortunate to have that in savings, but if you remember, it was from working all that overtime to save for my program so I wouldn't have to work. I had saved my paid time off from work for that entire year as well, so I had saved 106 hours of PTO. Due to that, my checks weren't as little as I expected them to be, therefore I had a lot of savings left over.


Over the last few years, I didn't have a car payment. I acted like I still did, putting a certain amount into a savings account dedicated to my car, just like I had a payment. My goal was to save for a few more years, then buy a car outright. But then life happens and my car died. So I took the $5,800 I had saved over the years and got a new car. I then put all of my extra income I had towards that car payment. I bought the car 10 months ago, and it's already a little over half paid off. I bought it for $23,000, I owe almost $11,000.

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