Grace Periods

(or, "Why I need to get married and live in a dual-income home right fucking now.")

This morning I completed my "exit counseling" on the studentloans.gov website.

Oh my, my friends, it is fucking grim.

I have $42k in student loans. I feel comfortable saying that; I don't really care who knows, to be honest with you, and with interest on the two unsubsidized ones I had to take (they got rid of the subsidized ones after 2011 for graduate students), my total is $44,816 as of right now.


My first thought: Okay, that's not *incredibly* bad.

My second thought: Maybe all of those Publisher's Clearing House forms I've meticulously filled out over the past six months will miraculously pay off.

My third thought: Daisy is going to have to plan one hell of a cheap wedding.

My fourth thought: I need a good job, and I need to get married to this woman, move in together, and start sharing expenses ASAFP. 

There are a number of handy "calculators" on the student loans website, allowing you to estimate payments based on income and monthly expenses and the like. It will make you use these calculators to estimate things to prove that you're not blindly clicking "continue" over and over just to be done with the exit counseling session. As an example, I was realistic and put into the calculator that I'd probably get a $25k a year job, as most teaching positions won't pay much more than that unless you're tenure-track or a full professor. After estimated monthly expenses and student loan payments, I'm only actually keeping about $7,500 of that $25k per year. Again, estimation, but it's a sobering perspective on things. And, again, that's based on me as a single guy, unmarried, without a spouse helping to cover the household bills and other expenses. It still tells me that without a super high-paying position, I'll now never be able to make it on my own. This, of course, I already knew. However, as I'll be marrying Daisy, I won't be on my own -- and neither will she, obviously. Part of getting married is being there for one another. So, already, those estimations are a bit off. Once we're married, of course, it's not like only one of us is going to be paying every household bill individually, obviously. We've already had some preliminary discussions about how we'll split up the finances, checking accounts, and the like.

This student loan stuff is nothing new to Daisy; she has loans of her own that she makes payments on, so she knows the drill already. I, however, have never had loans before. I got through undergrad on scholarships and grants, and only took loans in graduate school so I could eat and keep the lights on, since our GTA pay was laughably low (and I do mean laughably low).

At the end of the exit counseling, they make you pick a repayment plan before you finish. The standard plan is ten years, and it splits up to a little over $500 a month or something like that. I picked that one for the moment, though I can change it later if necessary. Even with a fairly shitty job, with Daisy and I paying bills and expenses together, that should be do-able. No, we won't have the newest electronics or the most expensive car, obviously, but we should be able to live with modesty without having to worry about starving or paying bills.

My loans entered their "grace period" the weekend after graduation, when I was up in Omaha. I got an email about it while I was there. They've been in that period for a little less than a month now. They're in grace for six months before I have to start paying them back. This means that yes, I have some time to find something to do, win the lottery, win the Publisher's Clearing House prize, or fake my death and disappear.

Daisy would, of course, tell me the latter three options probably aren't the best, dependable ideas. And she would be correct. Like it or not, whatever I end up doing, the clock is ticking -- I've got about another month at most to search for/apply for teaching jobs, and if I don't find something in that time, I must immediately expand my searching for anything and everything I could do, all over this country, which would allow me to start banking some money and taking care of my expenses before that time runs out.

Daisy and I are also planning the wedding. Well, sort of. She's doing a lot of the planning and scouting for locations, trying to figure out the right flavor of cake, etc. She asked me last night to put together a draft of the guest list for my side of the invites.

Uhhhh...

This is really difficult for me, honestly. There's about forty people I want to invite to the wedding who I know will, if they can, actually show up to it -- even in Omaha. There's roughly double that who I would love to have attend the wedding, but who I know will not, under any circumstances, be there or be able to attend. So, really, I need two sets of invitations/announcements/what-have-you for my side of things, and each one will be slightly different; the ones for people who will attend will more than likely contain all of the pertinent information, scheduling, times, etc, yes. Of course, obviously. The other one, for those who won't/can't attend, will basically contain the date and location and the information for our wedding registry, making it little more than a "Save the Date!" sort of card. That may make me sound a bit petty or something similar, but just like everything else, wedding invitations cost money, not only to make but to send, and while yes, it is a formality to send them to people who won't come, it's more along the lines of the graduation announcements I sent out last month -- basically a card that says hey, this is an important event, and although I know you can't/won't attend and probably couldn't care less, at least acknowledge that it's happening.

I do have many friends and family members who do care, but it would be too much of a hassle or would be near-impossible for them to be able to do so. This includes close friends like Wayne and Jane (in Pittsburgh) and April and Damon (in Portland), as well as most of my close friends from high school/college and basically all of my family back home. I've already told Daisy that the only family members I actually expect to be at my wedding are my parents and maybe my brother and sister-in-law -- I very, very seriously doubt any of the rest of them will be there or will want to make the trip. Daisy, meanwhile, has a lot of her extended family expected to be coming, including family from Canada, but has about half the amount of friends to invite that I do.

"I want to keep the guest list to a maximum of 200," she told me earlier.

The first time I heard that, my eyes bugged out of my head for a brief moment. Then I thought about it a bit -- yeah, that's probably going to be decently accurate for a maximum. Of the forty or so people I will invite who can go and who want to go, I'm guessing only about 25-30 of them will actually show up -- most of them being friends from the department who could carpool up there together in a few vehicles. She's got a good forty or so who are locked in and will absolutely be there, so she's expecting a real attendance figure of about 150 or less. This is still huge, but knowing Daisy's flair for the extravagant, it's probably not inaccurate.

"Do you know who you're going to pick to be your best man yet?" she asked me tonight.

"...Fuuuuck no I don't," I said.

This is true. I don't. It's different for me; I don't live within a ten-minute distance of my close friends. Most of my few close friends in the Wichita area either graduated with me and left, or they'll only be around town for another semester or so. Daisy has many friends and family in the Omaha area or close enough to where finding people for her bridal party isn't hard for her (she's already done so). As for my groomsmen? Well, I have some ideas, but are any of them really a lock, so to speak? Nope. Most of my closest friends are women anyhow, really. So this is going to be a bit more difficult for me...yet I have to ask these questions soon, otherwise I will have no one. I don't even know how many groomsmen I'm supposed to have, really, or if there's even a generally agreed-upon number. This is because, ahem, I've never been married before, nor have I been in a wedding since 1989. When I was seven. I haven't been to a wedding since my brother's wedding...in 1997 or so. I have absolutely no clue how any of this shit works.

Daisy is researching places for the wedding that are not only relatively inexpensive, but can serve both as the wedding location and the location for the reception. There also has to be the ability to bring outside food and outside caterers, as most of the food prep will either be done by us or by a local place in Omaha (she has three possible caterers on her list, all of them vegan or mostly vegan). The most inexpensive place she's found thus far is a VFW hall for something like $600 for the day.

"That's a really good price, babe," I said. "Book it."

She's calling tomorrow. Most places she's been looking at are not only incredibly expensive, but they've already been booked for our chosen date.

"If we can't find someplace for that day," she asked, "would you like to move it back a day?"

"Absolutely not," I replied. "That day has significance. You know that."

It does, of course, and I'll probably explain it eventually here, but right now there's no reason to go into detail until plans are set. Again, I'm letting her wedding-plan until her heart's content; I have no real desires or wishes about what it's supposed to do and/or have included as long as it's completely non-religious and isn't too expensive.

In other news, Daisy and I both applied for more jobs tonight -- she wants to get a second job, as well as wants to get away from the one she has now, which she is slowly growing to dislike for myriad reasons. As I glanced through the teaching job listings last night, there are a lot more being posted as the window for filling said positions for fall starts to draw to a close, so I've got my work cut out for me over the weekend: apply for as many as possible, and see what happens. I haven't gotten any calls or emails about the ones I've applied for as of yet, and haven't heard anything about anything going on in the English department, either.

"Keep in mind, honey," I said earlier, "that it is a very real possibility that I may not find something this summer -- and I may end up adjuncting for the fall semester."

Of course, the worst-case scenario would be that I can't find anything and I wouldn't get to adjunct, obviously.

"So? That just means that our timeframe for finding a place and other jobs will just be set back by a few months," Daisy said. "You'll find something by August, love."

Maybe. Maybe not. If I don't, even if I do adjunct in the fall, that's going to be a relatively large setback for a multitude of reasons. Again why I'm trying to find something now. Obviously.

So that's all that's really going on right now, I suppose. It's been really hot the past two days (over 100 yesterday), and I've been trying to spend the hottest hours of the day asleep downstairs with the fan blowing on me. Because of the heat being so oppressive, the spiders are coming indoors more at night to get away from it. I've killed three recluses in the house in the past 24 hours, and have caught a few more in the traps I have scattered about the house, prompting me to set out three more new ones in new places. There's not a whole lot else I can do; brown recluse are heavily resistant against poisons and sprays, and I can't really use those anyway with the cats around. Let them fill the traps so that they don't reproduce -- die, die, die, spiders.