Debt, debt, debt

As a mental exercise, I know the best use of any money right now is to pay off debt.  But it’s hard to remember that.  There is always a part of the brain that tells you to go invest or play around with this or that.  Your brain forgets the risk, and often forgets the plan you planned out.  Sure, the student loan I’m paying on has only 3% interest, but that’s not the point.  The point is that student loan is currently the lowest debt I have, and is near the end of repayment.  Only $300 to go until I can free myself from that thing. 

But my brain is saying “Go buy mutual funds.  You can probably get 10% on those”.  And sometimes, I also listen.  The math tells me I’m paying out 3% and getting 10%, so I’m gaining 7%.  I’m beating the system.  But then I remember there is an unwritten amount of risk in getting that 10%.  And very easily, my 10% could go to 2%.  It’s all based on the stock market, right?  So that risk is inherent. 

And I also know that no matter what, that 3% will run through to perpetuity.  Or at least until I’ve paid it off.  And once I’ve paid it off, then the entire problem goes away.  That becomes another $12 a month that I don’t have to pay on.  It becomes money that I can do things with, and the debt burden is lessened.

But I don’t want the burden to be lessened.  I want to be free from it.  And the only way to be free from the burden of debt is to pay it off as rapidly as possible.

I guess life covers just a bit of chaos theory.  Chaos theory, in general, states that the inputs of A and B aren’t necessarily additive.  Meaning, it’s not always A+B.  It might be A*B.  Or A^B power.  So the reliability of the measurement can cause drastically different changes.  Sometimes, we hope we could predict the outcome of our actions and our lives, but for the most part we just have to operate with faith and grace and move in the direction we want to go, with the assumption that we will eventually get where we want to go.  You may have to go sideways for a bit, but eventually you get there.   It’s all about behavior and action.  

And this blog ended up somewhere without really going anywhere.  And is brought to you by the word “burden”, which I have successfully misspelled four times before my spell check fixed the problem.