I used all four years of College to ignore my debt. It was a burden I wasn’t ready to carry and also at that point I wasn’t really convinced that I would dig myself into a financial hole. If I was already conscience about how I spent my money – why would I ever wind up $30,000 in debt? It didn’t make sense, but I knew that it went hand-in-hand with my financial aid packet. So, if I wanted to go to school and graduate – I would take the financial aid packet and work whenever I had free time.

Because I was avoiding by loans, I thought I had more money than I really did. I did not pay attention to how I was budgeting, if I had cut back on a few cups of coffee here and there – I could have freed up some extra cash. And that cash could have ensured, at the least, that my interest was not growing at rapid speeds. I was convinced that I was a victim of my loans. Anytime student loans were brought up, I would zip out of that room faster than you could say “principal balance”. I was in the same situation Ariel was when she had to give her voice to Ursela in order to have a pair of legs. I had to take on these loans to get a leg up in the job market. Then I started telling myself – if everyone else had debts, what did my debt really mean? It wasn’t like I was the only one getting a ‘F’ in a class full of ‘A’s’ – I was getting a ‘F’ along side all the other ‘F’s’. So really ground zero wasn’t being free of debt – it was -$30,000.

Then I graduated, and along side the quarter life crisis, I was realizing that I needed to do something about those loans. That first month out of College, oh boy, I kept finding myself contemplating about life, death and nihilism. I wasn’t getting any answers, but the pressure was still there. This was the turning point – the very first step: Acknowledging that I had loans, and I could do something about it. Continue reading →