"AS OF TODAY YOU ARE COMPLETELY AND ABSOLUTELY IN THE BLACK." - My journal, which I used for finance in college, December 7 1995 "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA" - My journal, same page, February 16 1996 My parents didn't really pay for college. Discover, Visa and Mastercard did. Then my grandparents died sophomore year and I got just enough to knock that shit flat. It didn't stay flat, though; 7-11 swing shift and an engineering education at an out of state school don't balance. About a year later I started dating a rich girl. There were perqs; I still have the Brooks Brothers leather peacoat; I still have the bespoke suit (it still fits). It went to shit about the time she decided to be "financially independent", though… right about the time she started cashing those $17 an hour checks for her social work job at a hospital. Up climbed the debt. I paid it all off on February 12, 2007. On February 13, 2007, my employer laid me off (3 weeks after naming me "Employee of the Quarter" and giving me a $1000 bonus). Between the diminished payments and unemployment, the total net impact on my finances was about $15 a week. It gave me a good 6 months to figure out what the fuck to do next. On July 1 2007 I started mixing national television in Los Angeles. I had 36 hours to relocate a thousand miles while maintaining my abruptly-fiancee in her home while she continued medical school. I was staring down the abyss of yet another raft of Ikea; I was staring squarely into the maws of another shit 800sqft apartment in a bad part of town. Up went the debt again. I'm in a peculiar place now. Between my wife and I we have four bank accounts, each with enough balance to kill the credit card. Three of them with enough balance to kill the credit card several times over. Yet I let it linger. She's got six figures of student loans, the majority of which will never be paid off. Some of it is in a private loan that drifts around about the same place as the credit card.
Every now and then I throw a thousand, or two thousand, or three thousand at one or the other. With the card, every now and then there's auto repairs. Or emergency bereavement tickets. Or upgrading from an '89 Kawasaki to an '08 Benelli. But I'd be lying if having that controllable little pocket of debt didn't make me feel better. It's weird, but grasping it in my metaphorical hand and not killing it makes that student loan more manageable. Having the cash on hand to kill it any minute makes it matter less. They tell freelancers that the sensible policy is six months of living expenses on hand. We got that. Yet we both lived through the recession and remember the lean times. Having a baby took $70,000 out of one account, just in lost wages. The cash feels better than the lack-of-debt. Have some cake. You've earned it. I think I've just ended up accepting that good debt is leverage and bad debt isn't the end of the world. Shit. Maybe I oughtta pay off that credit card.
