Dilemma

I paid off four months of my student loan the other day, which leaves me roughly two hundred and forty more months to go. My debt is pretty serious, by Kiwi (and, coincidentally, my own!) standards, and paying American loans with New Zealand money is not for the faint of heart, nor for those who might like to own a second-hand car or even live alone in a modest one-bedroom apartment before they turn forty in just six short years. I deferred those loans for a year and a half, which is why I was able to save enough to travel and be unemployed for months and months and months last year, but the good times have come to an end and my staus is again In Repayment.

So I was musing sadly to myself that I will likely be paying off my dubiously-valued higher education for decades to come, and I started thinking of ways I could make a little more money to just make it all go away. I considered and quickly discarded:, marrying for money, running away to join the circus (they make bank, right?), becoming a Nigerian email scam artist, and writing a best-selling book based on this blog that would catapult me to fame and fortune, which left me only with the option of winning the Lotto.

I worked this out, you see. I figured that since I have residency here I’d better buy a New Zealand Lotto ticket because there could be complications if I had someone in the States buy me one, like, would they want a commission if I won? Or maybe would they lie about my ticket being the winning one when they scratched it off (do you scratch off Lotto tickets? I might need to do a bit more research) and I would never know that I had won but then the next time I visited them in the States they would give me directions to their beach-front mansion and ask if I wanted to go for a ride on their yacht and I would probably always be a little suspicious about that Lotto ticket I asked them to get on my behalf and that would ruin the friendship and at this point in my life my friends are really important to me and I wouldn’t want to jeopardize anything with anyone, you know?

So I calculated how much I’d need to win to pay off the loan and then rounded it up to a nice biggish (but not greedy!) number, reasoning that the exchange rate could do anything at any time and it’s always best to be cautious. I thought that when I won I would invest the extra, depending again on the exchange rate that day. Well, I would invest the extra but first I would probably take a little trip somewhere nice, you know, just to celebrate. I have a friend living in Cambodia at the moment and I’ve been wanting to go on a dive trip in Malaysia so maybe it would be nice to do a whole Asian trip—but then of course I have a lot of friends in Australia I’d like to see, too, so there’s that. And I haven’t been to most of Europe, and never to anywhere in Africa, and I would also love to go to Tahiti and Vanuatu and Tonga and Tokelau because I work with a lady from Tokelau and she’s teaching me Tokelaun and now I can say “Malo ni!” and “Manuia lele!” and “”Toe fetauini!” with an okay accent and it would be a shame to waste that amazing language knowledge, right, and anyway Tokelau is totally an atoll and totally going to wash away because of global warming in like ten years so I better go see it sooner rather than later.

So I thought would take the trip, pay off the whole entire loan, and then invest the rest, but then I thought it might be nice to invite some friends on this trip, wherever it ends up being to (I still haven’t ruled out plain old Australia) and plane tickets aren’t cheap as you know. And then I thought that I would really like to send my mom on a luxurious vacation too, and then I thought my sister and her fiancé should get one as well if we’re going to make it a family thing, and that’s just going to add up, especially if I did two trips: one with family and one with friends, and of course I would want everything to be very nice and I would also want to buy trees or whatever to offset the carbon from all those flights.

I thought, too, about any little selfish material things I might want—I mean, hello, I just won the Lotto, I think I get to splash out just a little, don’t you?—but actually nothing really was springing to mind in terms of major purchases. I guess a car would be sort of useful, but secretly I have been seeing this super cute bright orange Vespa right around the corner from my house that I pass every morning in the pitch dark as I walk to the bus stop, and every day I check to see if the owner has taped a For Sale sign to it, because I also secretly believe I was born to ride a Vespa because my hair is so curly and so all over the place that it seems it would be naturally sort of helmet-resistant, don’t you think, so it would be good to set some of my winnings aside in case that Vespa around the corner from my house ever does go up for sale.

And then I wondered if there might be some outcry, you know, in the papers and everything, when I won the Lotto, because even though I’m a New Zealand resident now, as previously mentioned, I’m not, like, from here and I thought that maybe some people would be a little resentful of a foreigner’s winning. And then I remembered that both Rachel and Rachael, my similarly-named housemates, work for a couple of very excellent charities, and I thought that it would look really good, as well as be a cool and useful sort of a thing to do, if I gave a certain amount to each of those charities, like as a gesture of goodwill towards my adopted land. I brought this up with Rachael this evening while she was stoking the fire and she said that she’d rather I just give her and Rachel the cash, and I was like, “What, like create a contracted position at your work?” and she was like, “No, like buy us a house,” and I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s a good idea” but I still felt like I’d want to be contributing to the greater good and I still don’t want to be pilloried in the New Zealand press so I’d want to make a sizeable charitable donation of some kind anyway.

And that’s all fine, of course, but now I’m really worried because between making major donations to two charities, buying a house for me and Rachel and Rachael to live in (and anyone else who wants to stay because we’d probably have at least four bedrooms because it’s nice to have a guest room), going on a friend trip, going on a family trip, and buying the orange Vespa around the corner from the house that me and Rachel and Rachael currently live in, I don’t see how I’m ever going to pay off that student loan, you know?