greyduck.net

I looked in the site archives for March of 2012 only to discover that I didn’t write anything on or about my 40th birthday, which means I lack the nearest comparison to turning 50 in terms of “birthdays ending in zero.” (A few days after my birthday I wrote about some of the damage to my psyche from losing the Entercom job, though.)

A decade prior I wrote a quick post for turning 30, nestled in between various memes and microblogging entries. It doesn’t give me much to go on either.

And I didn’t have a website in 1992, so I’ve got nothing to work with for turning 20.

50, though. The road from 40 to 50 was a heck of a thing. Between moving out of NE PDX to the suburban blah that is the Hillsboro/Beaverton border, the advent of the pandemic, and getting diagnosed as type-2 diabetic (with all the life changes and side-effects that entails)… yeah, I feel different this time around. Some things improved (I lost weight, I’m eating better), others definitely deteriorated (my social circle is a pinpoint, my faith in humanity nearly nonexistent, diabetic neuropathy reduced my quality of life).

I honestly don’t know what I’m even trying to do next, let alone what will happen. I just hope I’m here to write about how different 60 is from 50…

It’s been a few days, hasn’t it? Well, this was a busy week on several levels. Here’s the biggest bit, though: Yesterday, I told the loan servicing company to finish off the Parent Plus Loan balance remaining. All of it. The final lump sum.

The first disbursement was in 2010, and my loan payments hit their “normal” level a couple years later. At the $900+/month rate I was going, the math said I’d be making my final payment just after my 51st birthday.

Then… COVID-19 hit. And student loans (which the Parent Plus system falls under) were put into forbearance for a time. The government extended this time a couple of, um, times, and repayments were set to resume after May of this year. But I’d been paying all along as if things were “normal.” I could afford to, so why not get out ahead of the principal balance while not accumulating interest?

Something else happened along the way, though: The kids dropped off of my insurance (saving me money monthly) and work gave out actual year-end bonuses the last two Decembers instead of throwing us superspreader events holiday parties. I was able to sink a fair bit of this windfall into savings.

When I realized that I was getting close to being able to pay off the loan this year and I had the means to avoid giving the loan servicing company one more red cent of interest, I knew what I had to do. I sank a rather large percentage of my savings into the project but getting the loan gone is, I hope, worth it.

The end of an era, in its own way. A big load off my mind, not to mention my finances.

It’s my 50th birthday present to myself. And it feels good.

I know I’m being unnecessarily greedy here, not to mention unrealistic, but if we could just avoid kicking off World War 3, that’d be all I really need for my 50th birthday that’s coming up here really soon.

Thanks everyone, I’m glad we got that settled. Nice talk.