The real (and staggering) numbers behind the pasta jar debt visualization
It’s easy to talk about debt in the abstract or show pictures of a jar full of pasta and speak in generalities about what it represents. And data visualization is an entire field of study to help our caveman brains quickly assess complex things. At the end of the journey, though…we can’t retire on pasta, and we can’t use an empty jar to pay the rent.
So with that, exactly how do we breakdown the real numbers attached to that jar? This is where it gets a little uncomfortable. Like I mentioned in this post, each green piece represents $3,000 of mortgage principal and each white ziti noodle is $1,000 of non-mortgage debt. But unless you’re a savvy math nerd that likes estimating volume based on the avg size of a noodle, you probably have no idea what it comes out to in US dollars.
Enter this post…
What’s crazy is that when we stumbled upon this idea we’d already made a significant dent in our debt over the last few years, just not with any real focus. If we started this jar in September 2016 it would have had $1,003,000 worth of pasta in it. Physically painful to write, and I learned it only as I was doing research for this post.
Debt Visualization – This Time in Dollars
But no sense looking back. As of Jun 2020, about the time we created this jar, it tallied up to about $773,000 USD. Yowza. Here’s the breakdown:
- $370,000 – Townhouse Mortgage (started at $467k; it’s a rental house now)
- $292,000 – Condo Mortgage (started at $330k; it’s our primary residence)
- $90,000 – Student Loans (down from $200k+!!!)
- $13,000 – Remaining 401k Loan balance from condo purchase (started at $45k)
- $8,000 – My car (a 2012 I bought in 2017)
That’s like…a lot of money. Looking at it now is…jarring. But the fact is, playing ostrich won’t make it go away. In fact, I can take some measure of pride that in the last 4 years it’s gone down by about a quarter of a million dollars! The savvy reader will take a look at our income and decide that was abysmal, we should have been paying it down much faster.
Cool. We weren’t. This isn’t that kinda blog. We do dumb shit like buy unusual station wagons and blow way too much money on fancy dinners (or at least we did, before the pandemic). The point is, we’re here trying to be more conscious about our spending, and more deliberate about our debt payoff.
So that’s our ugly mountain of debt. The numbers behind the pasta, and a major impediment to financial independence (and therefore early retirement). A lot can be said about the choices that were made, but the point is…they were made, there’s only one way out.
How big would your jar be? What’s in it and why?