This has nothing to do with reading, but last night I celebrated a huge milestone. My student loans are….no more! Vanquished!
Signing my master promissory note in summer 2007,Ā preparing to go to college:
Making the final-final payment of $0.16 cents, because my final payment of $1,004 seconds prior hadn’t taken into account all of the interest, last night.
Reading Freely 
…and whilst listening to Sammy Davis Jr….. Congratulations!
Well, I was listening to him when I signed the note, so I figured I might as well bring it full circle. š (I also made sure my same buddy was online so we were chatting at the same…although this time we were on Steam rather than AIM!)
Thank you!
That’s a fantastic accomplishment, well done!! š
On a trivial note… it’s fun to see how far web design has come. (Although I do have a soft spot for Netscape Navigator and early Firefox.)
Indeed! I’m a bit of a digital hoarder and love looking through my old screenshots for little artifacts like AIM, and XP’s alternate color scheme that looks more like Win95/98 (the one being used above).
Congratulations! That’s wonderful.
Thank you! Now to breath and save for a bit. š
it’s great to lose weight like that!!
It is! For years this has been like some distant threat that’s gotten a little smaller in recent years, and this year has been finished of all together. 6 years early! š
I am happy for you and not at all jealous. Maybe 90% happy, 10% jealous. Or closer to 60-40. But seriously, congrats, that is a huge relief. I owe about 150K for two degrees. I am in the loan forgiveness program but who knows if it will actually be honored. Things have changed quite a bit since Devos took over and people are not getting their loans forgiven. So much of mine is interest, because I had to put them into a forbearance when I was pregnant with Eleanor, and then keep them there due to her surgeries and medical needs as a baby/toddler with her kidney.
150….. Thousand….. *Dollars*????? Can I SWEAR on this Blog???????????
Perhaps if you use one of those classy British ones we Americans don’t quite follow? :p
Yikes! Mine was a tenth of that to start — I did a four year degree in five years, working as I could in the summers to save money and doing my first two as a community college. I have a friend who says she’ll NEVER stop paying on her student loans. It’s one of the reasons, over the least decade, I’ve grown somewhat hostile toward the world of higher education. Many of the costs are incurred because students have no real choices: any degree requires loads of BS courses, and many degree plans are full of filler as far as I can tell. I’ve looked into various grad programs for various things I might be interested in, and I just don’t see a point in it.
With yours, the current administration won’t be there forever. The student loan bubble has to pop sometime…I REALLY hope that malicious industry — and I’m talking about the universities, too — gets hit with SOMETHING. Maybe things like Khan academy and these mass online classes with help. A lot of those private e-colleges seem like nothing more than way of siphoning aid money from hopeful students to the e-college’s investors, frankly..