9 million won ahead

Last week—and after two or three years of not doing so—I finally peeked in online at Major Debt #3—the one I owe to Wells Fargo for a $15,000 "eMax" tuition loan I had taken out in 1999. In the unsinkable budget I'd made, I had been assuming that that debt, once you added the interest, was still somewhere in the neighborhood of $17,000. What a delight, then, to discover the debt was only $7,800, which means I won't have to make two 9-million-won payments in 2017, as I'd thought I would: I'll be making only one.

With great joy, I went back to my budget spreadsheet and lopped off one of the two payments. The rest of my budget automatically readjusted, and the numbers now look even better than they had before. I've been paying everything down steadily for years; as a result, my credit rating, while not topping off at 850 (the maximum), is nevertheless super-healthy. In 2019, I'll be a very happy fifty-year-old. Meanwhile, I turn 47 at the end of this month, and I'll have paid off Major Debt #2 by then. That's certainly cause for celebration.