2020 Needs to Stop Playing With My Finances

Like so many others my age, 2020 was finally starting to feel like financial stability was around the corner. So much for that.

Michael Arceneaux
LEVEL

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Photo: isorepublic.com/ Creative Commons

Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.

For the first time in so very long, I entered this year confident that 2020 would not beat the everloving shit out of me the way so many recent years have.

I was confident that my student loan debt — this burden I have discussed every single day for well over a decade, this thing that has affected my life so much that I wrote an entire book about it — was no longer going to control me. That I was finally in the position to be able to afford the kind of freedom that’s been deprived of me my entire life. That shame and self-loathing would no longer engulf me whenever my student loans came up in conversations.

For the first time in so very long, I was beginning to feel like I had attained something within even driving distance of security. 2020 finally felt like my year.

And then came a pandemic.

Curiously, and with ever greater frequency, people have been telling me that my book, I Don’t Want to Die Poor, which was published…

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