August 16, 2016 was one of the biggest days of my life. It wasn’t the day I got a new job or started a new career. It wasn’t the day I earned a degree or celebrated any other traditional life milestone. However, on August 16, 2016, I achieved one of the biggest goals of my life up to that point. After three years and 10 months of sacrifice, saving, and toil, I paid off all $197,890.20 of my student loans at the age of 29. There is nothing unique about me that gave me a special advantage in accomplishing this feat, and this blog will provide steps that anyone can take to conquer student loans.
I am sure that many of you know a thing or two about student loans, and much digital ink has been spilled on the internet writing about the student loan crises in this country. Even some brief research will quickly reveal that borrowers owe over a trillion dollars in student loan debt, and the average debt owed per person is more than one typically earns in a year. Student loans have affected millions of people and have prevented many from buying homes, beginning families, and achieving other goals people hope to attain in early adulthood. The student debt crisis has been widely covered by the press, been discussed by politicians, and permeates many of the conversations we have in our daily lives.
Until recently, I too was one of those young Americans burdened by student loans. I debt-financed my college, graduate school, and law school education, and I was one of those few student loan borrowers with over six figures in debt. Indeed, at the age of 25, I entered the workforce with around $177,000 of student loans. This amount placed me in a small fraction of student loan borrowers who have massive debt burdens and are at the highest risk of defaulting on their loans. I had no one to rely on to help me pay off this amount, and I alone had to deal with my student loan burden.
According to the normal 10-year repayment plan, when I entered the workforce at the age of 25, I owed around $2,100 a month in student loan payments. If I decided to pay off this debt on an extended repayment plan, I knew that it would be decades before I was debt-free. In any case, the interest alone on my student loans in those early years accrued at a rate of around $31 a day, and that “juice” would run no matter how long my payment plan was extended.
When I was 25 years old, I wanted many of the things ordinary 20-somethings desire. I wanted to own a car, buy a home in the not-too-distant future, start saving for retirement, and reach some semblance of financial stability. However, my student loan burden meant that I would be forced to pay much of my paycheck just to finance a part of my life that was in the past. Furthermore, the massive amount of my income that was devoted to my student loans meant that I was ineligible for most mortgages, car loans, and other types of debt. Knowing that I would not be able to move on with my life until my student loans were paid off, I resolved that I would do everything in my power to pay off my student loans before I reached the age of 30. I ended up beating this goal by 10 months, and developed a number of strategies along the way.
My plan for paying off my student loans was very basic: increase my income and decrease my expenses. However, I resolved that I would try to enjoy my life and live as normally as possible. I didn’t live with family, eat nothing but ramen, or try another similar method to pay off my student loans. Rather, I used a methodical and simple approach to increase the amount of money I paid toward my student loans every month. This makes the strategy I used easy to emulate by those who do not want to massively change their lives in order to take their student loans head on.
I am not going to say that I didn’t need to sacrifice in order to pay off my student loans, and I naturally had to prioritize this goal in my life to the detriment of others. In order to increase my income, I worked thousands of hours on the side, which meant that I could not spend as much time with friends and family. In order to decrease my expenses, I couldn’t go on as many trips, attend family occasions, and missed out on a number of other experiences. However, the benefits of being debt-free made these modest sacrifices worth it, and as long as you keep moderation mind, you can take on your student loans without having much of a negative impact on other parts of your life.
I decided to begin this blog around the one-year anniversary of my last student loan payment in order to recount how I paid off my student loans and to give support and advice for others who wish to do the same. I also created this blog to provide a counter-narrative to the many accounts on the internet of millennials drowning in debt, and show that with some easy steps, anyone can get their student loans under control. In this blog, I will provide a guide on how you can increase your income and decrease spending so that you too can apply the methods I learned to attack your own student loans. I will also write posts on the topic of student loans more generally and answer questions posed to me seeking advice on student loans. I hope this blog will be a supportive force for everyone who is on their own path toward freedom from student loans.
There is an overabundance of blogs on the internet promising simple fixes to take care of debt, or any easy path to gain financial security. This will not be that type of blog. Instead, I will discuss the tangible, actionable steps that can be taken in order to decrease one’s student loan burden. These steps will require sacrifice and commitment, but hopefully you will find that the rewards of eliminating student debt will be worth it.
With this brief introduction concluded, stay tuned for my first article on whether you too should consider paying off your student loans early. Thanks for reading the blog, and be sure to check back every week or so for new articles.