Student Loan Payment Has Us Cash Poor!
Kristyn Meyer is on a journey to make herself the best human that she can be. These posts are a reflection of that. She welcomes your support via reading and through commissioned affiliate links within her posts! To stay up to date on all of her shenanigans, please subscribe to her email list! (psst…there’s a free gift involved)
Due to the fact that we got ourselves an ice storm yesterday and overnight, the husband and I both worked from home today. Which means that at the time of writing (6:27pm) I am still in my pajamas.
We did have a productive day even with the pajama-ing. I am for sure much better at working from home than my husband is though. First thing, I got up and made the kids breakfast, turned on cartoons and got to work. I have little tricks that I can turn to when they start to get whiny or annoying (one time I brought a bucket of snow INTO the house for Parker to play with in the kitchen so I could do a conference call lol). This morning, I was trying to listen for the kids in the living room while I was working in the dining room because I thought that Jacob was hard at work on something in his recliner.
No, he was not.
I found this out when he started spouting off random housing ideas for when our house sells. He doesn’t work in housing, he works in IT nerdery.
But I did want to talk about our house. Just not with him, right then.
I had mentioned previously that we were selling it. Lady Stager came over and told us what we were doing wrong, we pre-packed/pre-donated a bunch of stuff in our house and the realtor put a sign in our yard.
The realtor’s name is Christopher, he says that I am the only person who actually calls him Christopher, everyone else calls him Chris. That’s how I roll. He’s a fellow ginger, and gingers support gingers, so it’s a good match.
See Christopher Here For All Your Home Needs
Every time we talk about our house being on the market or point someone to the listing, we get the same response every.single.time. “Why are you selling???” Let me tell you why we are, for those who care.
Student Loans.
Student loan poor is a very real thing.
Our high student loan payment has us cash poor!
You know those pesky little things that are almost a necessity unless you are a trust fund baby? You know how you pretty much have to get a college degree to make anything of yourself? Know how when you continue on with your education, you accrue more debt, thinking that it’ll pay off, but it really doesn’t all that much?
Well, that’s where we are.
Student loan payment sucks.
Between the two of us, we have five degrees. They don’t come cheap. We both have good jobs, but when you are paying more in student loan re-payment than you are for your house payment, you feel like you have just failed somewhere.
But you haven’t failed, because you accomplished the “American Dream”! You went to college, you bought a house, you brought children into the world and you drive a Toyota Camry!
We are not in any way house poor. We aren’t even technically poor, per our paycheck stubs. But we are student loan poor. It sucks up so much of our income every month.
We were only half looking for a house when it popped up on Zillow a few years back. Jacob told me that I had to look at this house he just found, and as I flipped through the pictures, I just said: “Yup. we need to have this.” And it happened. Everything fell in place and we were the owners of the house that we lovingly refer to as Meyer Castle.
We fell in love with the town and really didn’t think we would ever leave our dwelling.
But then we saw the Zesstimate of our home. For those who aren’t Zillow freaks, the Zesstimate is what Zillow assesses as the value of your home. Ours is currently $100,000.00 more than what we bought it for 2.5 years ago. We most definitely didn’t expect that, we kind of live in the middle of nowhere. But after some digging, we found out that our township in particular is in high demand, and values all over it have gone up quickly. For once in our lives, we did something cool before it was actually cool. Go us.
We had some difficult conversations. I pretty much told Jacob not to even talk to me about it, because I was not leaving my home.
This was our home. It wasn’t to belong to anyone but us.
But then I really had to sit and reflect and think about what was going to be best for my family. If we were able to sell the house for its new value (which was confirmed by the real estate agent – Ginger Christopher), we would be able to pay off almost all of our student loans. Paying off those annoying obligations would free up so much income for other things, namely travel.
What it really boiled down to was: do we want to focus our life on material things (our gorgeous house) or memories and experiences?
I’m sure that if I were to find myself on my death bed in the future, I would be grateful for all of the memories created in our family home. But would those memories only be there if our house looked like this? No. Those memories will be there regardless of where our mail is delivered to.
Now don’t go thinking I just came to terms with that and moved on with our plans.
No. Just two days ago I had a meltdown over the thought of leaving this house and having some other place to live that didn’t have deer in the yard haha. But I keep reminding myself of our end goal – memories over materials.
I’m also trying to extend this to things that aren’t even about the house. I’m a chronic over-thinker, it’s a curse, and I realized that there were so many other ways that I could practice this. As part of our pre-packing, a big chunk of my clothing went into storage. I now only have a fraction of my wardrobe to choose from.
And you know what? I’m kinda loving it.
I find myself taking care of my items better, being more creative with the things I pair it with, and enjoying the mental space that is cleared in my head from having less stuff.
Same with my kid’s toys. I had to pack away a lot of things that they had out. In addition to having less of a mess to clean up every night, they actually play better having less. They are more imaginative, they play more independently than they did, and they have been more creative as well – having fewer toys has reminded them of all of their art supplies, and we currently have tons of hand-drawn party decorations in the playroom from a snow party that Parker threw in our honor the other night.
These kids are going to be so much happier in life having memories made, and are going to benefit from their imagination utilization so much more than what would have happened. I no longer feel a need to clean all the time, because there’s nothing to clean! Seriously, the house takes about 10 minutes to clean up every night. It’s amazing. I’ve been able to binge watch so many Dateline episodes, you would probably be concerned if I disclosed the actual amount.
For that reason, I won’t state specific numbers.
I do think that our future includes another house in this area. I don’t know if that will be one that we purchase or build. But we love this town and don’t want to separate ourselves from it. But our immediate future? I truly have no idea where we will be. I found a really nice Airbnb that would work for a period of time, so there’s always that!
What I do know is that as soon as we are able to put enough money in our travel budget fund, the Meyer clan is off on a memory-making adventure. I’m so excited that I can’t even stick to one idea that has come into my mind. Will it be Ireland? Could we hit up Montreal? What if we did a New England road trip? I really do not want to go to Disney, but Jacob is pushing for it and I feel like I’m losing the battle. Maybe Disneyland in Japan….think he’ll go for that?
Meyer’s Making Memories – Minus Materials!
Our new 2019 logo. I just made it up. Copyright: Me.
