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The article title sounds pretty serious, so I tried to lighten it with a Batman cover pic! Also it’s appropriate – every superhero has an origin story. I’m no Batman, but here’s mine.

It was June 2017, and I was on a project with 2 other team members – a veteran superintendent and a young project engineer. The three of us spent a LOT of long hours together. The young engineer had been with the company about 2 years, and I had just celebrated my 10th anniversary working there. Aka a decade of bi-weekly paychecks.

Somehow he and I had struck up a conversation about money, I think it started with me commenting on his car – an early 90’s Pontiac Bonneville “Bonnie” as he called it.

Green paint peeling off, cracks in the windshield, rearview mirror hanging by a thread, a real character piece. A couple times it had broken down on him and he’d arrive at work via Uber, or he would leave work early to drop it at the shop for repairs. Some inconveniences, but month after month, it still got him A to B. He loved that car, and told me that keeping his car expenses down is part of what had allowed him to pay off so much of his student loans already. My paycheck-collecting, uninformed self gave a reply somewhere along the lines of “oh yeah student loans, what a pain, I’ve been paying $500-$600 a month for those since I started working…”

And then he gave me the look. It came along with words, but it was the look I remember most. His words were: “Oh…I thought you would have paid those off by now.” But the LOOK! The look said: “man…. You’ve been working here what seems to me a MILLENNIUM, and you still are carrying around student loans? ….Why?”

I was embarrassed. Not embarrassed that I took out loans for school, not embarrassed like I was too proud to talk about money at work, but embarrassed that 10 years had passed – a decade – and I had not even awoken to my debt – let alone have a plan to pay it off. Seeing what he saw, someone 10 years into their professional career, still with that anchor around his neck, made me feel the anchor for what it was for the first time. The round number 10 really emphasized the duration and I wondered – how many more is it going to take? Where will I be in 20 years in? Still paying these college loans off?

Here’s the rough figures I started running through my head:

10 years = 120 months

120 months x $600/mo = $72,600. It dawned on me that I had paid at least that much, and I still had a ways to go when this origin story began. (silent cry)

This single interaction with my co-worker was momentous – that feeling I got after receiving “that look” led to my personal finance journey, led to a quest of educating myself on my money situation for the first time. Everything else I decided to look into, the books, the spreadsheets, the podcasts, this website, everything.

I hope you enjoy reading the upcoming posts as I endeavor to share more facts and figures about what I learned, how I applied it, and as a result what position my wife and I have been able to put ourselves in for the future.

What about you? Can you attribute an impactful chapter of your life to a particular “moment?” What was it?