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Incredibly Proud of My Family This Christmas Season

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This year for Christmas, my family made one of the best decisions that I think we’ve ever made as a family. While we were sitting around for my Mom’s birthday celebration in late October, we began talking about what everyone wanted for Christmas this year. I’m sure that you have a similar conversation in your family so that everyone knows which presents to buy. It’s a fairly common occurrence, I think.

While we were beginning the conversation, I said to my Mom, “You know, I don’t really want anything. You don’t have to get anything for me.” And then my older brother jumped in right away and said, “Yeah, me neither. I don’t want anything.” And after that an entire conversation ensued about not purchasing gifts for anyone this year. Our rationale was that we each had different financial goals that we were reaching towards so spending a few hundred bucks (or, very likely, much more) on Christmas gifts that no one was really looking for would be a waste of otherwise scarce financial resources.

Frequent readers of this blog know what I was saving up for this fall/early winter. My older brother is in the process of saving money to buy a house with his fiancée, my younger brother is in the process of paying off a new truck that he bought, and my Mother is in the process of paying off her mortgage and some consumer debt. After having this conversation, we all decided that the best thing to do was to celebrate Christmas with family and friends and leave out the excessive spending on superfluous gifts.

So last Friday night, my Mom hosted our family and extended family for her annual Christmas party and it was a great time as always. Then on Saturday morning my older brother made breakfast and we enjoyed not spending a ton of money on otherwise unlooked for presents. Except for my younger brother, that is, who swore up and down that we left that conversation back in late October with the idea that we might not buy presents. Oh well – not a problem at all!

Leaving my Mom’s house with only a few items marked one of the better Christmases that I think I’ve had in a long time. 🙂

Feeling Financially Content After the Big Push to Repay the Student Loan

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Things certainly have changed since I repaid my New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority (NJHESAA) NJCLASS loan earlier this month. For example, I’ve spent the last twelve months checking, rechecking, assessing, and reassessing my personal finance spreadsheets two or three times each day. However, since I repaid that NJCLASS loan I’ve probably checked my spreadsheets once or twice every other day. Sure, that’s still more than the vast majority of Americans and yes, I have a tighter control of my finances than other folks in my position – but it still feels weird.

It feels weird not having to decide whether or not I should drop my checking account down to $20, $30, or $50 so I can make that much bigger of a payment to NJHESAA. It feels weird checking my personal financial spreadsheets and seeing that I have a few thousand dollars sitting there instead of less than $100. It feels weird to think about reaching other financial goals that involve me paying myself first before paying some outside loan company (i.e. saving money instead of paying down high interest debt).

It all just feels weird.

None of these feels unknown, though, and that’s a strong distinction to make. You see, I’ve lived life as someone who didn’t worry about the money he was spending. When I was in college I had a troubling mixture of credit cards and semesterly student loan surplus payments that I used to wreak havoc on my personal financial situation. Hey – young people do stupid things, right?

But the big difference this time around is that while I am a little taken aback at the financial freedom that I’m now able to work within, I’m not overwhelmed by it. In other words, I’m not spending my money like a drunken sailor on shore leave. Instead, I’m eagerly awaiting this Saturday to get here so we’re officially in 2011 and I can start attacking my new financial goals. Some of you might ask, “Why not start hitting those financial goals now, Joe?” And I would respond by saying that there is a clear method to my madness.

Each year I set out some 15 or so financial goals. These goals include how much I want to donate to certain charities (and, specifically, to which funds within those charities), how much money I want to save, how much money I want to invest, how much of each of my debts I want to repay, etc. Well, I never actually hit all of those goals each year… until 2010. Not only did I hit all of my financial goals in the past year, but I shattered them good.

So I’ve opted to let the few dollars that have come in from my various paychecks over the last two weeks just sit in my checking account so that on January 1, 2011 I can start aggressively pursuing my 2011 financial goals. Hey, maybe I’ll post those goals on here for you folks to read – that might make an interesting entry!

More Data on Student Loan Debt – Now Bigger Than Credit Card Debt!

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When I’m bored I tend to troll around the internet looking for the latest data points with respect to student loans. In my most recent trolling I came across the image below on Mint.com. When you look at this information, it really is eye-opening. It just makes me glad that I’m well on my way on my own path to getting rid of student loan debt and moving on.

Amazing, right?

Some Broad Goals for 2010…

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At JerseySmarts.com, I try to avoid adding conventionally-themed content to the blog in matters that most people deal with in their daily lives. With that in mind, I really don’t want to sound like every other blogger out there who is jumping on the bandwagon of not making New Year’s resolutions. In years past, some of you may remember that I posted New Year’s resolutions on this blog and the truth is that I met many of those goals. However, this year I want to do something different and instead of making a series of resolutions, I thought that I would just briefly comment on some broad goals that I have for myself in 2010. Much of the information included below is a whittled down version of more in-depth goals that I am mentally keeping for myself. You’ll notice that my goals fit into three broad categories: health, finances, and professional achievement. Overarching those three categories is a larger goal – the idea of fitness (discussed at the end of this entry).

Health. The biggest health issue that I have to tackle in 2010 is getting firm control over my Type 2 Diabetes. In reality, I think that the cocktail of oral medications that I’ve been taking since my August 2009 diagnosis has the situation under control, but I want to begin reducing the amount of medications that I’m taking sooner rather than later. To do that, I really only have one choice – lose a bunch of weight.

In 2010, I have a broad goal to lose some weight. I’m not talking about a gigantic weight loss where I’m losing over 100 pounds in a few months – I’ve done that before when I was a graduate student and it’s not feasible to accomplish that type of goal when I have a great deal of real world responsibilities to attend to these days. However, I’d like to lose between 5 and 7 pounds per month for the next year. I’m starting out 2010 weighing in at 340 pounds, so if I was to lose an average of 6 pounds each month, I could start 2011 weighing in at 268 pounds. Even if I was able to lose just 60 pounds in the next year, I’d be pleased. All I know is that with the onset of Type 2 Diabetes, the need to lose weight becomes very real.

Finances. Some of you might sense the gravity of my health in the words that I used above. Well, to me, it is equally important that I payoff a tremendous amount of my student loan debt in 2010. In total, I’m starting 2010 with $96,680 in student loan debt. That $96 thousand breaks down as $55,129 owed to the United States Department of Education and $41,551 owed to the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority (NJHESAA). Yes, I know that owing $96 thousand is disgusting for a guy in his late 20’s, but if you can believe it I actually started repaying my student loans in June 2006 when the total amount that I owed was $120,720. Pretty gross, right?

Some people get busy starting their lives after they graduate college or graduate school. Not me. I graduated from graduate school and started getting busy repaying my student loans. And I’ve actually been pretty successful. I’ve repaid $24,040 in principal since I began repaying these student loans. I don’t have an exact breakout of how much interest I’ve paid since June 2006, but I intend to get that number once I finally pay these damn things off.

But I digress…

In November 2009, I created a financial plan that allows me to make large payments towards the NJHESAA student loan. If I can stick to this plan, I’ll end 2010 owing about $19,000 on the NJHESAA loan. That figure doesn’t account for interest to be paid in the coming year, but it also doesn’t account for any payments over and above the ones I have laid out in my plan. Oh, and to get a head start on the 2010 goals, I began my plan for repaying this loan in early December 2009 and even devoted a large portion of my December 31, 2009 paycheck towards maintaining the head start that I have on my 2010 goal.

The NJHESAA loan is in my crosshairs…

Professional Achievement. After paying so much to get my current Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees (see above), I decided to put my plans to get a Doctorate on hold until a later time. However, I want to mentally stay in “game shape” so that when I decide to get a Doctorate I am prepared for the rigors of doctoral study from the first class through the final thesis defense. In order to keep myself thinking as an advanced degree student might think, I enrolled in a Graduate Certificate program at the local college where I teach. Why enroll in this college? That’s easy – I get to take the courses for free! Again, see above if you want to know why this might be appealing to me…

I also wrote out an entire list of goals for 2010 for my small website company – Usable Web Solutions, LLC. And as far as being an adjunct professor in the coming year, I hope to continually improve upon the classes that I teach via integrating relevant student feedback into the design of these courses and continuing to refine my course materials (PowerPoint presentations, handouts, and YouTube videos) to better teach my students.

The Overarching Goal: The Idea of Fitness
I specifically chose to write “the idea of fitness” because I want to break everyone’s idea that being “fit” only applies to one’s health. I think that the goals listed above make it very clear that I am striving towards achieving a greater level of efficiency and achievement in these three areas of my life. By doing so, I will have to train myself in certain skills and unlearn some existing habits. The end result of these efforts will be that I am in a better position come 2011 than I am at the beginning of 2010; essentially, I will be more physically, economically, and professional “fit.” And that’s why I chose “the idea of fitness” as the overarching goal for 2010 – because if I can make great strides towards achieving and hopefully achieve the three broader goals that I have listed above, then I’ll be a more “fit” person for the efforts.

We’ll be sure to check back in 2011 to see how far along I’ve come on meeting these goals! I’ve got a good feeling about 2010…

Slow and Steady – Another “G” Down…

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Slowly (almost excruciatingly so), I’m reducing my student loan debt. It was just in October that I announced how my student loan debt was down to $98 thousand and change. Well, today I can announce that it is down to $97 thousand and change. Sure, that might not seem like a big accomplishment, but when you’re in my position and you’re writing $1,000+ checks every month in an effort to speed up the repayment process, that’s big news.

It would be great if these damn loans were out of the way and I didn’t have to worry about them. The more that I repay and the more that I learn about student loans, the more I wish that I had started to pay them back when I was in school. Out of control student loan debt can really stifle a person’s ability to move to the “next step” in life. For example, I was talking with one of my coworkers the other day about our 401k plan and how we all lost a large percentage of money last year, but we’re making it back this year. Well, I found out that she’s contributing 10% of each paycheck to the 401k. Ten percent! That’s pretty significant. The truth is that I spent the last year contributing 0% of each paycheck into the 401k plan – I just couldn’t afford to do it (and I make good money). I opted to take the money that wasn’t going into the 401k and, instead, put it against my student loans. I’m not sure if it helped at all (especially with the NJHESAA loan accruing interest at an outrageous 7.33% rate), but it’s what I had to do.

Extreme student loan debt is stifling – even for a guy like me who works a day job and teaches at night. In the coming year, I’m going to have my day job and I’ll be teaching at night during both the spring and fall semester as well as teaching online for the first time; I’ll also have my website company, which is growing a little bit bigger each month. My hope is that with all of these irons in the fire that enough income comes in where I can make a larger dent in at least one of my student loans (the NJHESAA one so I can be done with that organization once and for all). In the mean time, though, I’m wearing myself thin by working seemingly around the clock and not accumulating savings at the same rate that I could be accumulating them. Just think about it – since 2006 I’ve repaid about $25,000 in student loan debt and that’s just the principal. When you tack on interest, I’ve written student loan checks for over $35,000 in the last three years!

Pretty disgusting, huh?

I’m not overly bothered by it because I know that I have a plan to repay this debt quickly and efficiently. I am, however, annoyed that it seems more and more that I won’t be able to take advantage of the current housing slump due to the student loan debt. It’s not that I wouldn’t get approved for a mortgage by a bank (I think that I would be approved), rather it’s that the $35,000+ that I could have used as a down payment is gone. Yeah, I have some money sitting in the bank and I’m actually doing very well with my personal investments in the market and in my savings account, but $35,000+ is a lot of money!

Oh well. I leave those thoughts for another day. Today, though, I celebrate knowing that the student loan debt is down to $97 thousand and change. And I also “celebrate” knowing that an additional $1,300 payment is already in the mail – so I should have another post announcing how the debt is down to $96,000 very soon!