August & September 2024: The Boring Middle

Main goals

We're more than halfway through 2024, folks! And as I say that, I feel increasingly baffled about where the time has gone. I literally feel like we just finished 2022 and COVID, but we're 2 years past that and steadily charging ahead to 2025.

Because the SAVE injunction is still stuck in the courts, SO's student loans have been in forced forbearance. This helped us for the past 2 months as we've just been socking away money in our HYSA to repay the loans when the courts finally decide what to do with it.

I'm projecting that we'll be done by next month, which is wild!! I had a moment of immense relief and almost cried when I was updating our budget for next month and realized we're almost done, after 4 years of worrying about student loans. It's been amazing.

Major developments

One thing I've been debating is should I pay off the student loans during the forbearance, or should I keep the money in a HYSA until the forbearance ends? Obviously, logically and financially, the latter option makes more sense because I could earn some interest at least until the election, or at most until next year, when the courts decide what to do with SAVE.

However, the emotional payoff of not having to track or think at all about the loans after so many years is veeeery tempting...

After a couple of days thinking about it, I'm leaning more towards paying everything off once I have the full amount and forfeit the couple of dollars of interest I could earn in several months. But we'll see!

My SO and I have also still been working 2 jobs, but we've already started cutting back on our hours. I've been scheduled down to one day per week, reducing my hours by a LOT. He's down to 3 days maximum per week, which should also free up his time to rest and do other things besides just work. I already feel the benefits of being able to concentrate more and give more energy to my primary job, as well as not being fatigued almost every day. So I think we'll keep this going until fall ends, and the shop should close by winter, which should help us build our emergency fund faster once the loans are paid off. Yay!

Right now, we're shifting our sights to the next goal, which is to build up our emergency fund to 6 months. But honestly, everything is pretty much in autopilot and we're in the Boring Middle for now, so I need to occupy myself with other things than strategizing our loan payoff plan. Not a bad place to be!

The numbers