Tuesday, December 15, 2020

just three more steps, and I'm free of scholastic debt

I get paid tomorrow, so I'll be sending home $2500 via international wire transfer.  About $1200 of that will go toward zeroing out my scholastic debt; about $500 will sit in my bank account to take care of automatic debits, e.g., for the public storage I've been renting out for several years.  The remainder—about $800—will go toward paying down my poor, overloaded credit card, which is the next (very minor) debt that I need to tame.  Taking care of the credit card will be easy compared to spending twenty years chipping away at my scholastic debt.  

But first things first.  I have three steps to get through:

1.  Get paid and send $2500 to my PNC Bank account.

2.  After verification that my wire transfer has gone through, send final payment to Navient.

3.  Await confirmation from Navient that my debt is now zero.  Celebrate!

That last act—awaiting confirmation of zero debt—probably won't be very dramatic.  If it's anything like when I paid down my OneMain Financial loan years ago, I'll simply log on to my account, check my outstanding balance, see a big, fat zero, and that'll be that.  I'm not sure whether Navient will then close out the account or just leave it hanging in space.  I suppose I could call a Navient rep and find out.

Laid out as a timeline, the three steps look like this:

1.  12/16/20 (W):  wire $2500 to US acct

2.  12/17/20 (R):  schedule final Navient payment

3.  12/21/20 (M):  confirm Navient debt = $0.00

I say "12/21/20" above because I'm brushing up against a weekend, and if Navient takes, say, three business days to handle my final payment, I don't think that that payment will show up as processed until the following Monday, or possibly even the following Tuesday (12/22).  I do realize that I don't actually have to wait until the 17th to schedule my Navient payment:  I could schedule it now on the assumption that money will be in my US bank account on the day my final payment is debited.  (I could also, in theory, do the same for the $800 I plan to send to Chase to start paying down my credit card.)

Normally, Navient automatically sends a "thank you for your payment" email.  I wonder whether the company will send a "Congratulations!  You're zeroed out!" email once I make my last payment.  I'd like to think so, but as I noted above, I don't think there'll be any fanfare.  That said, I can't officially start celebrating until I see that "$0.00" on my Navient account, so it'll be a few days before I go nucking futs.



1 comment:

John Mac said...

Congrats in advance! Good thing you paid off those student loans before the Dems transfer that burden to the working class in the USA.