-
5 votes
-
Archaeologists in Norway have begun the first excavation of a Viking longship in more than a century
6 votes -
NASA expects to cover JWST launch slip with budget reserves
8 votes -
I just made my last ever student loan payment!
I'm throwing myself a little party here -- digital drinks on me! Yes, I know my loans weren't accruing interest on account of COVID-19, but long before that all started I'd been aggressively...
I'm throwing myself a little party here -- digital drinks on me!
Yes, I know my loans weren't accruing interest on account of COVID-19, but long before that all started I'd been aggressively paying them down because I wanted them GONE. And now they ARE! (Or, they will be once the payment clears, which for some unknown reason takes my loan servicer like two full weeks).
The quarantine actually helped me accelerate payments. I rolled over what I was saving in gas money and not eating out into my loan payments. Also, as a teacher I only get paid during the school year, but I have the option to reduce my regular paychecks and roll the difference into a lump sum that gets paid out at the beginning of the summer. I choose this option so that my budgeting is consistent year-round (rather than me having to squirrel away my own nest egg for the summer from my other paychecks). The payoff amount on my loan would have been done around August had I kept with my regular schedule of payments, so I went ahead and treated myself to making the final payment in full, now, as I had the money for it upfront.
I cannot tell you how good it feels to finally be free of them. I paid off my undergrad loans in under 10 years and felt super proud of myself, only to immediately have to turn around and start the process all over again for grad school. Months after I finished my undergrad loan payments I was again accepting tens of thousands of dollars in debt so that I could get a master's degree to qualify myself for a job that I'd already been doing for years. It was not a great feeling, nor something I was very happy about, but you do what you have to do, right?
BUT NOW IT'S OVER. NO MORE STUDENT LOANS. I'VE WON THAT AMERICAN MILLENNIAL BOSS FIGHT.
It honestly feels like I just got a big raise, as, come August, once my timeline for paying the loans is done, all the money that I was putting towards them is now mine to do whatever I want with. I'm not saying this to gloat (and I know that I'm financially very privileged even in light of my debt), but simply because I'm reveling in the feeling of being out from under the suffocating thumb of a difficult financial pressure, and it feels wonderful.
EDIT: If anyone's wanting to join in my festivities remotely, participating is easy! All you need to do is pour yourself a tasty drink of your choosing, grab a delicious snack you love, and throw Carly Rae Jepsen's discography on shuffle.
43 votes -
Black Sheep Brass Band - We Are Sheep (2020)
5 votes -
The Go! Team - Semicircle song (2018)
5 votes -
Sensors detect rise in nuclear particles on Baltic Sea near Stockholm, global body says
12 votes -
Minecraft update 1.16 has been released
26 votes -
Make Them Suffer - How To Survive A Funeral (2020)
Rise Records multi-link, has Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Bandcamp, and more links. Youtube Playlist. Some of the Make Them Suffer members also did an AMA on /r/metalcore a few days ago.
3 votes -
How a protest in Seattle turned from peaceful to violent in sixty seconds
9 votes -
The 2020 Steam Summer Sale is live and goes until July 9th
23 votes -
Weekly thread for news/updates/discussion of George Floyd protests - week of June 22
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most...
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.
14 votes -
Party and protest: The radical history of gay liberation, Stonewall and Pride
7 votes -
SpaceX scrubs Friday launch attempt of its tenth batch of Starlink satellites—the first launch that will see all satellites equipped with visors to reduce ground brightness
10 votes -
Duke Skellington @ Streampunk - A Multi-Continent Online Festival (June 13 2020)
5 votes -
Rainbow – An attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
14 votes -
‘The Boys’ season two gets premiere date from Amazon Prime (Sep 4th - Oct 9th)
9 votes -
Iceland heads to polls to elect next president – while the post is largely symbolic, the president has the power to appoint governments and veto laws
6 votes -
'The Simpsons' producers will 'no longer have white actors voice non-white characters'
9 votes -
California Air Resources Board passes law banning the sale of heavy diesel trucks and vans completely by 2045
11 votes -
Plastic rain: More than 1,000 tons of microplastic rain onto western US every year, study estimates
7 votes -
Views of homosexuality around the world - The global divide persists, but a survey of thirty-four countries shows increasing acceptance in most of them over the past two decades
24 votes -
Coca-Cola pauses advertising on all social media platforms globally
9 votes -
Rob Paulsen promises the new ‘Animaniacs’ episodes stay true to the original
5 votes -
Supreme Court of Canada sides with Uber drivers, opening door to $400M class-action lawsuit
9 votes -
Pictures from the history of LGBTQ protests
7 votes -
Liverpool are Premier League champions, but where does this season rank, all time?
6 votes -
Family buys all of a Chicago paletero’s ice pops on Father’s Day, collects nearly $40K for him: ‘He refuses to stop working’
4 votes -
FiveThirtyEight Debate Club: What's the correct way to organize your bookshelf?
7 votes -
Anti-Defamation League sends open letter to advertisers, urging them to boycott Facebook due to ads being placed adjacent to hateful content
16 votes -
A social network providing a "dividend" to its users based on usage, original content, and referrals
2 votes -
You want a Confederate monument? My body is a Confederate monument (sexual assault trigger warning)
20 votes -
GMT Games - The return of the tough economy special
5 votes -
London Tube map made from a working circuit board
8 votes -
How NBA JAM became a billion-dollar slam dunk
7 votes -
Hospitals in the US sued to keep prices secret. They lost
5 votes -
Amid wide unemployment during Covid-19, basic income schemes have gained fresh relevance. A successful Canadian scheme that's over four decades old could provide a road map for others
6 votes -
Classical pièce: Nikolai Kapustin — Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 54
5 votes -
Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire receives far more Facebook engagement per article than any other publisher, largely driven by a network of deceptive and toxic pages that systematically promote it
15 votes -
Create No-JavaScript friendly sites
22 votes -
Will places that depend on tourism be more open to high tech, given that remote work is more accepted?
5 votes -
Microsoft to permanently close all of its retail stores, with locations in NYC, London, Sydney, and Redmond being converted to "experience centers"
10 votes -
Lexurus - Magnify (ft. Rhode) (2020)
3 votes -
‘Disco Elysium’ TV series adaptation in the works
9 votes -
The rapid sharing of pandemic research shows there is a better way to filter good science from bad
7 votes -
Google blew a ten-year lead
27 votes -
Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, voter registration is way, way down
6 votes -
What the Dutch can teach the world about remote work
5 votes -
Introducing the extended sniff test (EST): A method for recreational hostile fact checking
11 votes -
AI robot cast in lead role of $70M sci-fi film
12 votes