So, for a blog partially about finances, I’m probably about to alienate most people interested in reading on that subject. Here goes! I reject the debt emergency mindset, at least for student loans. (I might think differently about 18% interest credit card debt.)
When I first started to face the cold reality of our student debt, I started to panic. For help figuring things out and calming the heck down, I turned to the debt gurus of the world wide web, your Dave Ramseys and the like. And you know what their sage advice was? PANIC!
So I spent the next few days doing just that. I stared at our debt summary for hours whilst crying and panicking. It is one of the least productive things I’ve ever done. It left me insanely frustrated because no matter how hard I tried, I could not think of a way to move forward (other than me going back to work, which is frankly not on the table for us).
Taking a step back, I realized we are already moving forward. We are on track with our payments, and making strategic extra payments when possible. We have frugalized our lifestyle a lot and are constantly brainstorming more ideas for saving. We are avoiding credit card debt like the plague. And we have plans to sell our car and buy a cheaper one to eliminate our car loan.
Our plan for paying off debt is about nine years. It’s a long-term plan no matter what. Even if I were working, it would probably shave off a couple years at best. I worked in higher education, so it’s not like I’d be flush with cash. Working would certainly help, but with daycare for one kid now and a second in a year or so, the extra would not be much. We cannot panic for six to ten years. It helps nothing.
Dave Ramsey would tell us we are gazelles about to be killed by a lion. But that’s kind of bullshit. There is an end to our debt, we are planning for it, and it is definitely not going to kill us. We acknowledge our debt, we manage it responsibly, we pour our energy into eliminating it. Essentially, the same things we would do in emergency mode, but without the completely unproductive panic. It’s a marathon, not crisis.
We want to get out of debt because we want our life to be about more than money, so why would we make our life all about money for the next several years to make it happen? We can’t get those years back, and we can’t short-cut through them either. What we can do is live our life accepting that debt will have a place in that life for a while (because it will whether we go into crisis mode or not). We plan for our debt, we take it seriously, and we are going to beat it. We don’t panic.
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