The Debt-inator

In my last net worth update, I mentioned that my debt was completely wiped out. So how does one kill nearly $4000 worth of student loan debt in one fell swoop? The answer my friends is punctuality and the Canadian Millenium Scholarship Foundation.

During my tenure as a substitute teacher between January-June 2007, I was made aware of the scholarship by two pre-service teachers that were on their practicum at Kinkora Regional High School. They told me that you have to submit the application with some other information on the first day of your classes and that it was basically first come, first serve.

That day came and I marched myself to Student Financial Services located in the Sullivan building in downtown Charlottetown. I dropped off the submission form and proceeded to forget about the entire thing for seven months.

Therefore it was a complete surprise when I opened the mailbox to see that I was the recipient of a $4000 scholarship that would be applied to my student loan! How awesome is that?

I'm not trying to toot my own horn on this, but it was very comforting to know that I would essentially only be paying about one and a bit years worth of tuition for my education degree. This makes my repayment of the remaining debt (to be accrued in September 2008 and January 2009) a much easier task.

Speaking of which, I still plan on continuing to put $100 away each month as a bit of a head start to repaying the loan. I have all my remaining student loan money in the intrest-plus savings account through PC Financial and although I could likely make more money faster by investing that $100, I'm still not at an investing stage yet. As well, this method is very low risk and will give me the peace of mind of being able to pay off the debt in a reasonable time-frame.

Thus, my net worth updates might look a bit weird in the upcoming months since I now have negative debt. I'll figure out a way to meaningfully represent this somehow and discuss it more in the next update.