Ants on the Melon
• • • • •

So today was the day that I have been waiting for.

On the day I graduated college in May 2001 I had between $70k-$75k of combined debt, including student loans (private and Sallie Mae), credit card debt, and several thousand that I owed my dad for a truck I bought from him.

Today, about 4.5 years later, I am happy to say that I am completely debt free.

I’ve basically lived off of 1 paycheck per month for the last couple years, and I have put all of my extra income that I’ve earned coding on nights and weekends towards my debt. In the past 15 months I have paid off more debt than I earned in my first year of employment after college. Even during college my loan payments reached $300 a month, and I had to work 3 jobs* on campus to be able to pay them.

And to make it even sweeter, I paid off the main loan over 3.5 years early, thus saving several thousand in interest.

In case you are wondering, I went to a very expensive college and made poor grades, thus qualifying for pretty much nothing in the way of financial aid. If there was one lesson I learned out of this whole thing, it was that you should really try to make good grades in college, especially when the classes are so expensive. Its a shame that I’ll probably never have the chance to apply this wisdom again.

But I am equally excited about the opportunity that I will now have to invest and begin saving. I’ve neglected that while I focused on eliminating the debt.

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.

---

* I worked as a human SMTP server (in the campus post office), a human firewall (in the college admissions office), and a Perl coder (in the webmaster’s office), so that kept me pretty busy.