u/vodkacranbury

Looking for ideas for areas my parents could consider for their next home.

My parents are thinking about moving to the triangle area from Wilmington in the next couple years. They are very active in their late 50s, love tennis, restaurants and live music. Walkable areas would be a plus. They are open to townhomes or houses under 600k if possible. They would prefer to be east-ish of Durham. Doesn’t necessarily need to be a 55+ community. Any ideas for areas my parents could look into?

I applied for borrower defense in June 2022 and received my decision letter in August 2025. I'm still in admin forbearance and interest has been accruing since September 2023 (like everyone else). Please don't suggest appealing - I've already explored that and accepted I need to pay these loans back.

I believe the letter said I may be credited any interest that was accrued while I was waiting for my decision. Has anyone actually had this happen to them before? I'm certainly not planning on it, but curious to know if it's actually a possibility.

I’ll try to make this as clear as possible.

I am on a drug that requires infusions, and I benefit from the manufacturer copay program. The process is: doctor bills insurance, insurance processes, doctor sends me a bill, I send the bill to manufacturer, manufacturer loads a debit card that I use to then pay the bill, which then counts towards my deductible (I am in an anti-copay accumulation state). Sometimes this process has changed, where the manufacturer sends the payment directly to the doctor, but regardless it has always counted towards my deductible. This year I switched to a HDHP and I was still eligible for the program and that it would still count towards my deductible. I meet my deductible every year since it’s only 2K, so this program saves me a significant amount of money.

In January, I had my first infusion and insurance sent me an EOB which only charged me for the office visit, not the drug. I didn’t think that mattered to the manufacturer so I didn’t think anything of it, and just waited for the bill from my doctor to send to the manufacturer. The bill didn’t come until May. I have had two more infusions since then, all of which have the same EOB.

Once I finally got the bill in May, I sent it to the manufacturer and they said they wouldn’t cover it since I was only charged the office visit and not the drug. I asked my insurance why I wasn’t charged for the drug and they said that the doctors office did not get a prior authorization so legally they can’t charge me for the drug. Except I have a letter dated before my first appointment confirming the prior authorization from my doctor. Of course I sent it to them and I’m waiting to hear back.

It was explained to me that bills are applied to the deductible in order of processing. So now that three of my appointments have to be reprocessed, do they go to the “back of the line” in terms of meeting my deductible or would it be applied according to the first date they were processed? This distinction could mean the difference of me paying $1000+

If they do go to the back of the line, what are my options? All of this is due to the error of my insurance so it would be very frustrating to not be able to benefit from my copay program.

Sharing here to hopefully provide a little encouragement to anyone getting started with their debt payoff journey!

My debt accumulated from a mix of student loans, personal loans and credit cards that stemmed from a house purchase gone wrong, an unexpected layoff and admittedly some poor decisions.

In October 2024 I was considering filing for bankruptcy and consulted multiple lawyers. I ultimately decided that bankruptcy was not for me since I didn't qualify for chapter 7 and because I felt like I could take care of the majority of this debt before the 7-year timeframe it would take for my credit to recover. I ended up consolidating most of my credit card debt (~31k) through a debt management program which negotiated interest rates between 0-12% with a monthly payment of $762.

In May 2025, my husband and I got married and were finally stable enough to start paying off all of this debt aggressively. Since then I've tracked every payment, balance and interest paid.

At a balance of 120k with minimum payments that added up to about $1600/mo, we would have taken 13.7 years to pay it off and would have paid about 53k in interest alone. In the first year since we started, we have made a total of $33,600 in payments towards our debt with $3800 of that being in interest. So far, this has saved us $11,600 in interest and 3.7 years of payments (assuming we never made an extra payment again).

So far we paid off two credit cards that were not included in the debt management plan, one high interest personal loan, and we are on track to pay off another high interest loan in just two more months. If we continue on our current trajectory, we will be debt free in just 22 more months, saving more than 10 years worth of payments and 46k in interest.

Happy to answer any questions and hopefully seeing the math helps give someone a little extra encouragement, it certainly has helped me.

My husband and I aren’t parents yet but are hoping to buy a home soon in our area. It wouldn’t necessarily be a forever home, but hopefully for the next 7-10 years.

What factors (if any) would you consider for school districts at this stage? Do test scores really matter when picking an elementary school?

We are on the border of two counties, one is more expensive with better schools, and the other is more affordable but not as good of a school system supposedly not sure which to pick in our case!

Husband leased a 2022 Tacoma in August 2022 and the lease is ending this year. He’s over the mileage limit so we are expecting to owe ~1k.

We don’t want to keep the truck since it is a 2-door and we want to start a family soon, and we just don’t need a truck anymore.

Our original plan was to just return it and buy a corolla instead but we realized that the trade in value on the truck is 25-30k and the lease buy back is only 18k.

Does it make sense to buy the truck (with a loan), keep it for 6 months and trade it in for a corolla later? It feels too good to be true that we could just have 5-8k in equity on the truck