Worthless

Three thousand, six hundred and eight days.

That’s how long it’s been since my first medical loans were dispersed and I dipped into negative net worth for the first time. The internet tells me that that amounts to 86,592 hours or 5,195,520 minutes, or 311,731,200 seconds.

Living underwater is a strange thing. On the one hand, as long as you have an income stream and can make your payments on time, things are peachy. Your creditors even send you birthday emails! For periods of time, sometimes long stretches, you can forget about the debt almost entirely, abstract it away.

But it’s always there, hovering just behind you. The knowledge that even if you liquidated everything, sold our your retirement accounts, pilfered your savings, it still wouldn’t be enough to dig you out of your hole. Those thoughts can wear on you, and they make it hard to enjoy even a lucrative job and a healthy cash flow.

But today, I am worthless.

Getting “back to broke” has been a major goal behind this blog (after all, it’s in the tagline) and we’re finally here. Ms. PIB and I still have a long way to go to get rid of our student debt, but it feels all the more manageable now that we have a positive number to our name.

This accomplishment was delayed a bit by the initial economic fallout of COVID-19, and I suspect that there is more of that to come. It may even dip back into the negative for a while. Nevertheless, we’ve kept the inexorable march upward going so far, and I’m hopeful that we can hold on to our momentum.