It’s more than a little weird being out of school, even five months after I graduated.  I spent the better part of five years defining myself as a student who just happened to be doing other things at the same time, and for three months after graduation I was still working at the school and actively trying to get a permanent position there.

That didn’t pan out, and  now I’m doing technical support for a living again.

That’s not really a complaint, mind you.  It doesn’t pay terribly well compared to some other gigs I’ve had, but it’s a job that lasts from 8-5, 5 days a week, I’m not stressing out about hitting a release date, nobody’s expecting me to put in any unpaid OT or work the weekend and honestly it’s usually pretty fun.  I genuinely enjoy it most days and that’s a crazy thing to say about a job.

The other big thing about being out of school for five months, of course, is that my student loans are going to start coming due in a month.  Fortunately for me – less fortunately for my lenders – I was taking all my paychecks from my student job and sticking them in a checking account and generally not touching it in anticipation of this.

So I have one of my loans completely paid off – the one that didn’t get consolidated and that was still being held by one of the sleazier student loan companies – and as of tomorrow I’ll have all the interest paid on the remaining loans and I can get started chipping away at the principal.

Mind you, that’s still 35 grand worth of student loans to pay, but I did some napkin math and figure I’ve saved myself something like 12 grand over the course of a ten year student loan, but I won’t have a ten year student loan because I’ve also cut about four years total off the time it’s going to take to pay the thing off.

I am inordinately proud of this, even though it DID completely wipe out that account I’d been carefully sticking my paychecks in to AND wiped out the first three  paychecks from my new job.  I’m still looking at years of debt, but I feel like I’m actually tackling it head on.