Money Money Money

Do You Hate Me for My Student Loan Forgiveness Joy?

A year ago at this time, I owned my ranch in Garfield and an historic house in Shitville, TX. The former is affectionately known as the Meth Lab, for that is what it was prior to my purchase. The latter, no longer mine, is referred to as the Whorehouse, for that is what it was rumored to be back in the day. Yes, it tickled me to own two properties with fabulously checkered pasts.

Each property features outbuildings that are finished out. All told then, I was looking at a total of around nine-thousand square feet of livable space. Even if you factor in that I have six dogs and enough supplies to start an art school, there remained enough room to house, say, an asylum-seeking family of twelve from Afghanistan. (Which almost happened but did not.) 

One day, I was sitting on the majestic wraparound porch of the Whorehouse, entertaining a pre-teen friend. “Zoë,” I said, “You know Uncle Spike has a lot of money, right?” (The kids have been calling me Uncle Spike forever.) She nodded. I went on, “And you know Uncle Spike has worked very, very hard her whole life?” Again, she nodded.

Then I revealed a secret I wish someone had told me when I was a kid. “Well, my dear, those two things have had precisely nothing to do with each other.”

It was true. 

Someone eavesdropping on us might have misinterpreted my commentary as smug. Not at all. I just wanted to let her know that no matter how much the “experts” toil to quantify our human experiences and pinpoint every cause of every effect, randomness is going to play a factor. In this instance, I wanted to emphasize that none of what I had was the result of entitlement or even good planning. I got lucky. Period.

When I hear bellyaching about student loan forgiveness, my first impulse is to ignore the whiners. As a lifelong champion complainer, it is my belief that the majority of them are just letting off steam. For is it not as American as the proverbial apple pie to bitch and moan whenever someone else is perceived to receive something we do not? 

WAAAAAAAAA!

Spoiler alert: as with any other mind altering substance, engaging in this activity eventually gives way from the dopamine hits of self-righteousness to the exhaustion of counting everyone else’s eggs while one’s own eggs are being gravely neglected.

There are so many things I love about getting older. One is perspective. Relative to my old self, I am now chilled the fuck out. If you win the lottery, get a book contract, find the love of your life, cure cancer, have debt forgiven, or just manage to put on matching shoes in the morning (a task not in my own personal wheelhouse), I am not going to sit around bemoaning your good fortune. Unless you are a douchebag corporate meathead living high on the hog courtesy of ripping off others, if I react at all, it will be a reaction of joy for you. Mazel Tov on your good fortune!

You can tell I got loan forgiveness, can’t you? Not only that, I’m getting $20,000 because I received a Pell Grant. Do you know what that means—to receive a Pell Grant? It means you were so fucking piss poor when you threw your hat into the arena of higher education that the government recognized your poverty and tossed the occasional money bone your way. 

Oh, I was so poor growing up. Free school lunches. Scrapple for dinner. No new clothes ever. Bread bags fastened with rubber bands around hole-filled socks to keep out cold wet rain. No extra anything, ever. And growing up poor really, really fucked with my ability to understand money. 

Seven years ago, an old high school friend I’d lost touch with for thirty years reappeared in my life. He was fascinated to hear about how I had built my wedding officiant business and how I hoped to scale up by buying a chapel and a place to put it. Then he did something fucking CRAZY. He and his wife personally financed the acquisition of the Meth Lab and the tiny chapel I had moved there. 

This partnership has yielded so many wonderful things. Most importantly for me is that I have grown to understand money quite a bit better than I used to. My business partner and I grew up a few miles apart. He had more opportunities than me—his family was upper middle class and they believed in education, which my parents did not. He went on to attend a prestigious school and have a very successful Wall Street career. He talked to me about my “blue collar money mentality,”—working constantly, never getting ahead, complaining about the system while toiling to support the same.

Neither of us anticipated back then, when my money education began, that a surprise windfall would give me a game changing opportunity to better see the money world through my partner’s eyes. Understanding that my pile of gold was finite and that my blue collar spending habits were deeply embedded, I went into my surprise money experiment with advance self-forgiveness. I knew I was going to blow some of it on crap and that’s exactly what I did.

I also knew I would spend lots of my money on others, which also came to pass. I wound up having some major regrets around this, as several people came to see me as an ATM and sob storied me up one side and down the other until I caught onto their thievery. The vast majority of recipients, however, enjoyed their gifts and put them to good use. 

I paid off nearly every penny of debt, too. But I did not touch my student loan. I let it sit. My reasons were simple. First of all, rumors of student loan debt relief were flying around and I wanted to see how that would affect my loan. Secondly, best as I could tell, there was no way to make an offer in compromise, something I once did many years ago with the IRS. And finally, perhaps the greatest reason of all: I had long ago decided I would let death take care of that debt for me because it was so absurdly inflated and unconquerable that it had become abstract.

Does loan forgiveness make me a freeloader? An irresponsible citizen ruining future loan opportunities for others? If that’s how you want to see it, sure. But I see it as a form of protest. 

My original loan for four years of classes at the illustrious University of South Florida, to which I ran away at 18,  was for $12,000. You read that right. That is the total total for my four-year education. I got residency as soon as I could and qualified for in-state tuition. I completed my studies in four years. I went out into the world. I got some more shitty jobs. I paid what I could.

At 26, I had a baby. When that baby was two, his father bailed. I received no child support. I did not go on the dole though I certainly qualified for food stamps, WIC and probably Section 8 housing. I paid for daycare with credit cards that mysteriously showed up in the mail—corporate offers dangled irresistibly and purposefully before my needy hands. I did not read the terms about interest because the terms didn’t matter. I needed to put my kid in childcare so I could go to work so I could avoid going on welfare. 

At 32, a post-abortion checkup revealed I had a massive malignant ovarian tumor. At the time, I was estranged from my psychopathic (literally) then-husband. The good news—I was on his insurance. The bad news—I was on his insurance and now I had a pre-existing condition, preventing me from qualifying for my own insurance. The only way to keep coverage was to go on COBRA. The only way to pay for COBRA (around $600 per month in the 90s when I was making about $2000 per month) was, according to a lawyer friend of mine, to blow off the credit cards. Which I did because I very much feared the recurrence of cancer.

Eventually, as you might guess, these COBRA payments led to a bankruptcy. I am far from the first to have been completely wiped out due to the insanity of the healthcare system in this country. I did not cry and scream at the unfairness of it all. I did what I had to do. To stay alive. To take care of my kid. 

By the time my windfall arrived last year, that $12,000 school loan had ballooned to $34,000. Because while I made many payments on it, it just kept growing. The bigger it got, the easier it was to defer as my repayment plan is income based. Because I am self-employed and because my business is a total money pit, my net income is always very low. This does not require trickery with the IRS. It’s a flat out truth. (To be fair, on paper, if you factor in the inflated value of this Austin-adjacent ranch I bought for a song, I am indeed very well off. But dirt doesn’t pay the bills.)

In a couple of months, once loan forgiveness kicks in, my loan will drop back down to $14,000, a mere $2,000 more than what I originally borrowed close to forty years ago. Once this happens, I will immediately make a plan to pay the loan off very quickly. Because the number is manageable. Because it is not triple the original loan. Because I am completely okay with taking this “break” from a government that allowed the student loan racket to get so utterly out of hand. 

I could sit here all day and point out all the different breaks all the different people get that I do not. I have had amazingly great financial opportunities in my life and I have also gone to bed hungry as a child, way more than once, and gone to bed as a young mother literally crying because no matter how hard I worked—and I worked so hard—I was still falling short in providing my child the basics. Because I happened to be born with a vagina and not a penis, I have had to work ten times as hard to get where I am. At least. 

I don’t bitch and moan when I see people get financial breaks for which I do not qualify. I’m happy for them. Now I’m happy for me. This time around I got something maybe you did not. Maybe you paid off your loan. Maybe you didn’t go to college at all. Gentle request that you don’t begrudge me this latest random positivity in my life. I promise not to begrudge you the same when it’s your turn for something good to happen.