I recently paid off my student loans. That’s more than $40k in debt. It took about 12 years. I should be proud of this accomplishment, and I am, but it feels weird. I’d love to attribute it to fiscal restraint and “responsibility.” But the truth is a lot more simple: I got lucky.
I entered a field that doesn’t have any — much less any advanced — degree requirements. I found mentorship in that field. I had people who gave me jobs and assignments that paid. I took unpaid internships while living rent-free in my mom’s rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco, which she moved into in 1981, when “respectable” people didn’t live in the city, and certainly not in the Western Addition, or NOPA, or whatever people call it now. I paid $375 per month to live in Oakland for four years before it became home to the monstrosity that is “Silicon Valley East.”
Shortly after I moved to Brooklyn, my father died, and I got a small but incredibly helpful sum of money that effectively helped subsidize the next four years of my life in New York. It also allowed me to pay for a broker, who found me a rent stabilized apartment in Crown Heights, which is “affordable” enough for me to pay for on my own, even though I don’t save much of anything.
There’s a lot that I don’t know about money. I’m still trying to learn how not to overdraft before the 1st and the 15th. But I am the most financially stable person in my immediate family. I send money to people I love every month. Sometimes they use it to pay bills. Sometimes they use it to buy Hennessy. We do what we can to survive.
I wish we talked about money more often. The way it dictates our decisions and social networks. The way it keeps us up at night. The way it gets us up in the morning. The way it becomes a weapon that we use against the people we love and against ourselves.
I’m grateful, and I’m scared, and I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. I may not have grown up in a family that talked to me about investing and high-yield savings accounts, but I did have a mama and aunties and a granny and a guncle who taught me that I deserve nice things, that it’s okay to treat myself, and that no one else can dictate my worth.
