Debt (of any kind) is Slavery

I'm originally from North Carolina, and so I had no idea what Juneteenth was. I'd never heard of it. It's pretty big in Texas. For those of you who don't know, Juneteenth, is derived from June 19th, and that was the day the Emancipation Proclamation was read to the slaves in Galveston, Texas, informing them that they were free.

It is one of those great coincidences that June 19th is the day that I decided that we were going to get out of debt. I didn't even realize the connection until some time later, but that is the day that I compiled for the first time a list of our debts. When we graduated from college I knew we had a lot of debt, and I had a rough idea of how much, but not an exact amount. I was actually afraid to add it all up. On June 19th last year, when I added up all of our debts, and saw the huge number on the screen in front of me, I cried. I knew it was bad, but seeing the number, and making it therefore real, hit me like a ton of bricks.

Now, we're not quite one year out and we have paid off our car and two of our small student loans. Small student loans that I once told my mother-in-law that I would just keep paying on because there was no way we could ever pay it all off. Now, I'm looking at having everything paid off in two years. There's more than one type of slavery. There is the obvious physical slavery, but there is another kind of slavery, one that is possibly worse than the physical kind, and that is slavery of the mind. If you believe that you will never get ahead, that the deck is stacked against you, that there's no use in trying, then you might as well consider yourself a slave. In that case, you are a slave to your mind.

 Yes, we may have limitations. Maybe the deck is stacked against us. Maybe we have to work within the framework of what we've been given, but to just give up? To accept that there are no possibilities? That's not an acceptable option. Not to me anyway. And maybe that's why I am where I am.

"If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything." -Marty McFly, Back to the Future (my favorite movie of all time)

Debt is good... o rly?

I had meant to write about this the other night, but wound up ranting about something else instead. As I was leaving the classroom on Thursday evening, some students and I were talking about student loans, and I said that I wanted mine paid off, and that I never wanted any more debt ever again, not even a mortgage.

One of the students, who is not my student by the way, but one who had stopped by with friends who were my former students, said to me something to the effect, "Well, having debt is good because it makes your credit better, so that then the bank will give you a loan that you can maybe pay back eventually."

That caused me to blink a couple of times, and I couldn't address what they had said because we were half way out the door, but I wanted to say, 'do you hear what just came out of your mouth?' People, people, people. You've been sold a bill of goods. Quit buying crap you can't afford with money you don't have so that you wind up giving all of your disposable income to the bank in the form of interest payments! I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Add up what you're paying in interest on your debt, and put that into an IRA calculator with a 8% return over forty years (the market has averaged 12%, but we can be conservative on the matter). Don't try to cry too much. It will just make your allergies worse.