Student Loans

I was just looking over my expenses and realized that my student loan payments went through at the end of last month. That means I now have zero personal debt. I haven't used my credit cards for a good month or so, since I'm trying to simplify my accounting in preparation for my mission. My car was paid off years ago--just a few months after I bought it, in fact. And now I just payed off over $10,000 in student loans. I took the loans in case I needed to use the money, but I kept as much of the money as I could saved up in a special account where I didn't touch it. Due to the nature of the loans, the government was willing to pay interest on them up until 6 months after I graduated. I figured I'd get it taken care of early, though. Boy, does it feel good!

Now I just need to keep saving for my mission. I just called the registrar's office at school to find out whether they'd got me officially graduated yet. It takes a couple of months for them to sort through all the paperwork and such, but I need to get evidence that I graduated in order to qualify for my Extended Good Student Discount on car insurance, which is due this month. I also need to take care of my car's annual registration, but I'm going to wait until later on in the month to do that. Liz is buying my car when I go on my mission, and apparently she can just transfer my registration if she buys it within two months of my registering it. It may be a bit of a hassle, but it saves money, and right now that's important.

Speaking of money, the folks at GE OEC Medical Systems, where I worked last summer and last school year, are trying to get special permission for me to come back temporarily and work on a couple of projects for them. While I was working for them I automated some processes for them using some VBA programming. Now they're making some procedural changes and want to update the programs I made, but since I'm the only person they know of that knows how to do it, they're pretty eager to get me back for a little while. Job security is a funny thing.