I’m back with a quick update on my student loans. As some of you may know, I started this journey back in August of last year (2018) when I landed my first job out of college. It’s now April of 2019 and I’m happy to say that I now only owe $3,000 of student loans. This means that there is only one more month left until the Kubo is debt free. In all, I will be paying off about $35,000 of student debt in 9 months. It’s kind of crazy to think about…
**WARNING: Plenty of food pictures at the bottom of the page. Don’t look unless you want to get hungry.**
I was roughly 8 years old when I finally made my dad teach me how to cook. Before then, I spent a lot of time in our kitchen watching him as he prepared our meals. In fact, most of the time, I stood right by him beside our gas powered stove as he mixed the pot or the pan full of ingredients. The whole process was incredible. He took these things called vegetables that were largely grown from the Earth’s nutritious soil and from the free energy of the Sun. He took some piece of meat that was raised by the people at the province and butchered by some butcher at the butcher shop. He would combine them in a pot or in a pan (depending on what dish he was making) with some spices and other natural flavorings. He would put them over the hot stove, mix them every once in a while, taste them so that the flavoring could be corrected, and after an hour or so of tending them the result was always this delicious home cooked meal for our family to enjoy. It was magic.
When I was in my early 20s I believed in many things that were not true. I thought the amount of money someone earned was in proportion to how hard they worked. And since earning a good income is associated with having a pretty comfortable life, I thought the people who were struggling just weren’t working hard enough. I also believed, at the time, that we reward the most money to people in careers that gave back to society the most. It seemed that the engineering and the medical fields gave the highest salaries to people. Thus any other endeavor (like the arts, the pure sciences, or the public services) was ipso facto suspect, unless it had just enough graphs or maths that the average person found difficult to comprehend, like statistics or physics. I also thought we all had the same opportunities in life. So if you were not making at least $50,000 a year past your 20s then it must have been your fault. You simply did something wrong. The result was that I believed the good comfortable life I had achieved thus far was simply due to my own actions. But I realized that this is simply not true.
I have not posted an article in a while. The reason is that our life here in the Kubo is quite busy. In fact, I was overwhelmed during the past few weeks. Fortunately, Kubo Queen and I were able to work out a new system so that things are more efficient. And also, I decided to cut back on some activities to be able to have more energy for things that truly matter. Anyway, I am back with another student debt progress report.
