The payment went through on a Friday at 7:40 in the morning, while I was scraping a granola bar wrapper off the passenger seat of my car in the office lot. $846. Then the app refreshed and the balance said $0.00, and I sat there for a minute before going inside to start my claims queue.
That card balance had been with me since my Rogers Park year. As of this week, it isn't anymore.
Where the $2,350 came from
I'd love to say it was one big emergency. It wasn't. It was a year of small, comfortable choices in a two-bedroom near the lake with my friend Tess. Takeout two or three times a week because I was tired after work. A couch we bought new, because the free one on the curb had a smell neither of us could identify. A lot of rideshares home from Lakeview and Wicker Park when the Red Line felt like too much at midnight.
None of it felt like a lot at the time. That's the problem with a card. By the time I moved home in July 2024, the balance was in the low two thousands and the minimum payment was barely moving it. In March, when I started this blog, it was $2,350 at 27.24% interest.
At that rate, $2,350 costs about $53 a month in interest alone. My student loans, all six of them, cost about $82 a month on ten times the balance. Once I saw those two numbers next to each other in the club sheet, the order was obvious.
How I cleared it in three months
Living at home made this possible, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. My paychecks are $1,342 every two weeks, about $2,908 a month. With no rent, my fixed costs are small: what I give my parents, $35 for my line on the family phone plan, $95 to my dad for my share of the car insurance, gas, lunches and toiletries.
So I kept paying the standard amount on my student loans and threw everything else at the card. Here's how it went:
- March: $800
- April: $800
- May: $846, the final payment, which included the last of the interest
That's $2,446 paid on a $2,350 balance, so about $96 went to interest over those three months. I helped it along by selling a bag of old clothes online in April for $212, which felt like being paid to clean my closet.
The rest came from small, unglamorous choices. I packed lunch four days out of five. I said no to a concert I would have liked. I stopped ordering delivery on Friday nights and started eating whatever my mom made, which honestly was better anyway. None of it was dramatic. It was just three months of saying "after the card" a lot.
What it actually cost me
The $96 in interest over these three months is the part I can see. The part I can't see clearly is everything I paid in interest during the two years the balance sat there while I made minimum payments. I tried to add it up from old statements and stopped after a while, because the answer was clearly a few hundred dollars and knowing the exact number wasn't going to help. That money is gone. The useful thing is not doing it again.
The other cost was my credit score. A balance that high on a card with a small limit meant my utilization was terrible, and that's been dragging my score down along with the late loan payment from 2023. I'm curious to see what happens over the next couple of months now that the card is at zero.
I'm not cutting it up or closing it. It's my oldest account, opened in 2019 as a student card with a $1,500 limit and no annual fee. I'll keep it open and leave one small recurring bill on it, paid in full every month, so it stays active without me carrying anything.
And the money that was going to the card? Starting next month, it goes to my student loans. I'm already working out how much I can send, and the number is a lot bigger than $330.
My mom found out I'd paid it off when I didn't open a delivery app on Friday night for the twelfth week in a row and made a joke about it. I told her. She hugged me in the middle of the kitchen like I'd graduated again. It was a small win, and I'm going to let myself count it.
