Flashes of Panic

It’s tempting to read too much in to this, but I’m spending part of this evening shredding a lot of student loan documents.

I’m purging my file cabinets as an effort of mercy for the poor movers, so over the past week or so I’ve been shredding like an Enron executive. Anything with a Pennsylvania mailing address is ribbons, and much with previous addresses here (depending on what it is.) I’ve got enough shredded paper for a small victory parade.

I’m keeping a few sheets. The scary one I first got, while in the internship-that-wasn’t-yet-a-job, telling me what I owed and how I would be expected to pay it off. And the last statement before I did pay it off, probably four and a half years ago, telling me that I was paid up three years into the future.

I had a love-hate relationship with that debt. I hated sending money, and I hated having a future of debt. I felt harnessed by it, and though I don’t expect I would have made many different decisions, it definitely colored the way I looked at my world for a few years. On the other hand, I would definitely be in a different place had I opted not to incur the debt. And once I finally had a handle on it, I began to enjoy sending in the checks early and trimming the interest charges. One of the wonders of compound interest is that once you start getting ahead of it, it gets easier to get even farther ahead, and by the end, sending in the checks was like running up the score against the Yankees.

There’s a discussion about college choices going on at Stay of Execution, where I put my oar in (of course.) A lot of the comments put heavy weight on the expected graduating debt as a factor in the decision, and they cite many of my “hate” aspects. But none of them bring up what was positive about the debt: I wrestled with it, and I won. In fact, after a close early round, I wiped the mats with it. I’m coming in to another spell of tuition-finding in the next few years, and though I’m fortunate not to be incurring debt (at least this year,) having shredded my first round of student debt does good things for my confidence if I happen to need a second round.

Now Playing: Don’t Pass Me By from Open All Night by The Georgia Satellites