When we got married in 2005, both of us had a little bit of college done, but no real progress had been made toward a degree. At the time, I wanted to do something in photography and my husband wanted to follow his father’s footsteps into some sort of medical field. Our plan was to finish school and get good jobs before we started out family. But, as we all know, sometimes life happens a little differently than we envisioned for ourselves.
About six weeks after our honeymoon, I found out that I was pregnant with our first baby. We were surprised, but thrilled, even though this changed our plans a bit. Okay, a lot. I worked full-time throughout my pregnancy, but we did very little planning or saving. And I knew that I would do whatever it took to stay home with my babies. So continuing with school or work for me didn’t seem necessary. My husband wanted to get a better job, so decided to go to a tech school to get his pharmacy tech license, thinking that it would do nothing but benefit him as he continued on with his future medical degree.
Well, a very long story short, after he finished his year of school, graduated from the program with honors, and started his internship at a pharmacy, he quickly learned that he HATED it. He was miserable and realized that he hadn’t put any real thought into why he had chosen his career goals. He just figured he would do what his dad did and hopefully make a lot of money. So basically, that year of school was for nothing. But I’m glad he realized it then, instead of after ten more years. (He went on to get a degree in his current field and is very happy he made the decisions he did.)
So, here we were with a student loan to this tech school, that we didn’t even want or use. It was a huge bummer, but nothing could be done about it. We made very little money at the time, so we decided to put everything into furthering his schooling (with some help from parents) and defer the student loan payments as long as possible. As long as he was enrolled in school, it was possible to do that. Lucky for us, he was only going to school part-time, since he worked full-time and had a family, so we didn’t actually make any payments on this loan until just a few years ago, which was about ten years after the original loan date.
I literally cannot wait to get this dang monkey off our back. Interest rates for student loans are lower than the average loans, but still. I’m so sick of seeing this on our credit report. It has been around as long as our marriage. This isn’t the first balance that we will pay off to reach our debt-free goal (because of the higher balance and low interest rate), but we will get to it one day.
In the meantime, I decided to go to http://www.debtfreecharts.com and download this free chart to help me see our progress so far. I’m so glad that we are 30% done with this loan. And it will feel SO GOOD to see it cross the finish line!
If I had any advice to offer, I would recommend that young adults really take some time to consider all their options before deciding to take out any sort of loan. SAVE YOUR MONEY and maybe… use birth control on your honeymoon.
