Success Warrior: Alan B. Rowley II - Beachbody.com, P90X, Voluntaryism, Voluntarism

Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead!

Ding Dong! The Witch is dead. Which old Witch?

Sallie Mae, that's which Wicked Witch.

The Wicked Witch!
Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.

It would take more than a land full of little people to sing loud enough for this news.  Maybe if they all had blogs.

Wake up - sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed.

Get of bed with one less debt!

Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead. She's gone where the goblins go,
Below - below - below. Yo-ho, let's open up and sing and ring the bells out.

And blog our hearts out!

Ding Dong' the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.
Let them know

I'm letting you know.

The Wicked Witch is dead!

Can you believe it?  The day has finally arrived.  Sallie Mae is paid off.  All the work, all the planning, all the frugality, all of it has paid off in that I am free of the Student Loan Mafia. 

Not only that but they owe me $.08.  I wonder if they'll send me a check for 8 cents.  Probably.  I'd be content to just let it sit there for 30 years and then send them a bill for $5,982.67.  Compound interest is a powerful thing.  There would of course be penalty fees involved with that.

Tia and I talked for hours last night about our future because things will probably be changing rather rapidly from here on out.

Wanna Know Where My Wife I Will Be At 6:05pm Today?

Wendover Nevada

Right here, in front of the computer.  Both of us.  Together.

We'll probably be here at 6:00pm actually.  Hitting the refresh button every 30 seconds or so.

We sent the pay off amount to Sallie Mae electronically last Thursday.  The money left our bank on Friday.  It will be posted today.  It usually posts around 6:05pm. 

We'll be refreshing the website watching for the balance to be zero.

It's a dream come true.

As long as the mafia Sallie Mae hasn't figured out some new mystery charge to keep it from going to zero, we'll be doing the Happy Happy, Joy Joy dance tonight.  I'm not going to say that I don't trust them but . . . no, I'll just say it.  I don't trust them.  We'll be watching.

Come back tomorrow to see if I'm elated or if they found some catch to try to screw me over one last time. 

What A Nice Deal They Offered Me

I told you that Sallie Mae deferred my loan for me when I decided to go to college.  Instead of accepting that nice offer that would have added close to $10,000 more on the loan, we decided to try and pay it off.  I decided not to go to college this semester because I'm doing some writing on a project for myself.  The loan came out of deferment and I would be obligated to make payments again.

Before the deferment, my monthly payment was close to $300.  We have paid it down as fast as we can for nearly a year now and they recalculated the monthly payment on what was currently owed.  Our monthly payment is $65.  We are still trying to pay it off as quickly as possible so this amount doesn't really matter to us other than to make the news on this blog.

Here's the reason.  When they recalculated the monthly bill, I owed about $8,000.  For that amount, less than most new cars, you would think it would be paid off in about 5 years or less, right?  Not if you are Sallie Mae.  They figured it up on a 20 year loan. 

You know me, I went to the calculator.  If I made the monthly payment for 20 years, I would end up paying a smidge over $8,000 in interest.  More than the loan amount.  Not to mention that it gives them 20 years to hope that something bad happens to me and I default or ask for a deferment so they can add more interest on while they "help" me with my situation.

I think that's one thing that people overlook when they are trying to get the low, low monthly payment.  They are gambling that nothing in their life will change for the worse in that time period.  It's a gamble right?  On a five year car loan, there's probably a good chance that everything will go okay.  On a 20 year credit card or 30 year mortgage, what are the odds that your income will never be interupted?  A lay off, an accident, a serious illness, and a host of other things could crop up.  People just assume when they are signing the contract that their life will always be like it is today but that's seldom the truth.

Can We Do It?

Let me tell you a little bit about my student loan.  I'm not going to fill you in on all the gory details of how I ended up owing Sallie Mae 30k because it involves a person that I never talk about.  Speak the devil's name and you may conjure her to appear.  It might seem a little superstitious but you'll have to deal with it.

Anyway, my wife and I had been making payments on this loan for a couple years and magically, the balance never, ever went down.  No matter what happened, there was also some surprise fee that took up every bit of our payment and nothing was applied to principle.  We weren't aware of this until later when we starting checking our account online regularly.

Last year, I decided to go back to college.  Sallie Mae was notified somehow, not by me, and sent me a letter.  Since I was in college, they were going to defer my payments for 3 years.  During this 3 years, the interest would continue to accumulate at over $2,000 a year.  When the deferment ended, I would owe them over $36,000.  What a deal!

My wife and I talked about it and we decided that we would do the opposite.  We would pay the loan off in those three years.  It didn't seem possible but after finding out that we had sent them several thousand dollars without touching the principle, we knew that we had to get out of this deal.

We jumped into it with both feet and soon realized that we could probably pay it off in 2 years.  A few months later and we were thinking that we could have it paid off in 1 year.  A 20 year loan paid off in 1 year?  It doesn't sound possible.  It is possible (almost) when you start actually paying the principle down.

It doesn't look like we are going to be able to pay it off in 1 year.  It looks like it's going to take 13 months instead and might stretch into the 14th month.  My wife has vowed that it won't go into that 14th month and so we are going to be doing everything we can to cut costs or make more money in the next 2 months.

The end of this month marks the 11th month of our quest.

Tomorrow, let me tell you about coming out of deferment and their nice offer.  Ha!