Crawling

I guess the first step is figuring out where we are. So I'm going
through all of our outstanding student loans and am trying to write down in
one place, how much we owe, what the interest rates are, what the
monthly payment is, and, if possible, break down the payment into principal
and interest. I noticed on the sallie mae website that they tell you
how much interest you pay every day. Seems my champagne grad school is
now costing me about $7.00 per day. So I go to work and every day I
buy Sallie Mae lunch. That's depressing. But also empowering. Now I
know that every day, even though I'm not writing a specific check to
them, I buy them lunch. It would be nice if we didn't have to do that.

That argument doesn't get me very far in my house, though. The
response, which I think makes sense practically and emotionally is, "yeah, but
if you didn't go to that school and earn the opportunities you now have
before you, you wouldn't have choices like you do now. So the debt was
necessary at the time and necessary for everything that has happened
since." (That's my wife talking, in case you couldn't tell.) And she's
right -- those decisions I made then: where to go to grad school, how
to pay for it, when to go, how hard to study, etc. all put us here
today. So I agree that student loan debt is good debt - my earning power
increased exponetially with the education, but still, it's debt. And I'm
starting to really hate it. I mean I'm declaring war on it. All out
war on it.

In case you're curious, preliminary estimates are that we have about
$170,000 in student loan debt. I know, it's unbelievable. Every time I
see that I think there must be some mistake. But there it is.

I'm collecting data - I'll soon (how soon, I'm not sure) have all of
our long term debts, income, assets, and spending habits all together and
then we'll decide how to attack and how to win this war in the shortest
amount of time. We're talking about it and have a few ideas, but let's
not get ahead of ourselves...