The Fear of Paying More than the Minimum
I just paid our off our last Student Loan. Just now. Tuesday, April 2, 2024 at 8:33 am.
You’d think it would feel amazing - It’s actually a nerve wracking thing to make the last payment!
Especially since the plan was to pay this off by December, and last night, I threw caution to the wind and said, “What if we paid it off tomorrow? It will be especially tight this month, but I think we can do it!”
It FEELS SO much safer to pay little bits each month, not feeling the pain, pinch, or fear of making a giant payment.
I think this is why we stay in our “minimum-payment-forever” mindset. $100 or 200 per month seems so reasonable. “I can do that!” we think. And it won’t mess with the way I live life!
What we’re really doing when we pay off big chunks of debt is ‘stealing’ from areas of life that we *want* to have: Eating out. Good cuts of meat at the grocery. A little treat (Starbucks at Target, with a cake pop). Being generous with our time, money, resources. We WANT to be generous to others, we want to treat ourselves. We want to shake off the nebulous anxiety that hovers over us like a specter.
But we don’t always realize that anxiety is created by the debt that we know we need to pay. That we’re chipping away at, but never attacking. Never feeling like we’re really making true progress.
And can I also admit: Attacking it? I’m not that kind of budgeter by nature! I’m a “count every cost, think ahead, put away” kind of budgeter. Not the ‘I don’t have any money for next month because I threw everything at debt” kind of budgeter.
(Now I realize that there are some of you who don’t have money to budget next month because you’ve spent it last month and this month! That’s a different kind of problem!)
This reminds me of something I tell my students (and family, and friends) all the time:
Feelings don’t reflect Reality.
Feelings tell you what is important or meaningful to you. But not what actually IS.
What is reality is that for the next few months, all the money we will earn will all be free for us to use how we want. To give each dollar a job that *we* want it to have, not that we’re beholden to another person or agency to give it.
Was the loan worth it? Yes: my husband would not have been offered his current job without his degree. But paying it off did require us to do some significant tightening of our budget. We kept our grocery bill shockingly low. Our kids couldn’t believe we weren’t going out to eat anymore. We stopped buying them things every time we left the house.
We stopped the little money leaks and tightened up.
And now we’re debt free.
Debt free sound good? Please, Get in touch!
