A belated father’s day post

Growing up, I was lucky enough to have parents who valued higher education, and saved a good chunk of change for me and my two sisters. In 1999, when I chose to attend the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, its tuition matched up nearly perfectly with what was saved for me. I could have gone to a in-state school in Ohio, and saved that extra money, but I found UMass to be my perfect school. I feel very lucky that I was able to attend the school of my choice.

Unfortunately, when I prepared to go to school in fall 2000 and my father started withdrawing my college funds to pay for tuition, the market had already been declining for nine months. And each semester, when the tuition bill would come in, my father would again have to withdraw more money from a floundering stock market. The last of my money was withdrawn in early 2003 - at the lowest point the stock market had been since 2000.

In the end, I came away with about $30,000 in loans from college. Yet they weren’t owed to FAFSA, or Sallie Mae, or any of the other student loan programs. My father was instead able to secure the lowest rate loan through his house mortgage. Hence, in the end, I owed this money to my father.

Being someone who always puts his family before him, he would hear nothing of me paying interest on the loan. Nor would he even tell me what he wanted me to pay each month. Instead, he just asked me to pay what I could.

The problem was that right after finishing undergraduate school I decided to go to graduate school for a master’s degree. The good news is that after a initial $4000 loan to pay my first tuition bill, my wife and I were able to pay the tuition without taking out any additional loans. The bad news is that I didn’t have much money left over after that, and could only scrape together $100 per month to send him. Again, he told me even the fact that I was able to send $100 while paying graduate school tuition meant a lot.

So, by now you might see the problem. I had a near $30,000 loan owed to a generous parent who only asked me to pay what I could afford. As my financial situation has changed over the years, I have always tried to adjust the amount I send him to be fair. Right now, my loan is down to about $22,500.

My goal is to have this paid off in two years, meaning I’ll have to average about $825 in payments every month - no small feat (you can check on my progress under my goals section on the right sidebar). However, I have to say that this is no check I look forward to writing more every month.