I have always hated debt, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why.
My father is a CPA, so I grew up with a vague awareness of money. But we never really talked about the details. I had no idea whether my parents carried credit cards, auto loans, or a mortgage with a high interest rate. As a kid, those things were invisible to me.
In high school we could choose a few elective classes, and I signed up for accounting. I don’t remember learning much about debits and credits, but I do remember one thing clearly: the teacher made us read horror stories about teenagers who had racked up thousands of dollars in credit card debt and couldn’t pay it back.
That class left me with one very clear takeaway:
Debt is bad.
Starting Out
I graduated from college with no student loans and no auto loan. I was incredibly privileged in that my parents helped significantly. I also worked throughout college — as a student manager at a campus convenience store, a resident assistant, and a summer counselor for incoming freshmen.
When I met my future husband, however, things looked very different financially.
He already had about $40,000 in undergraduate student loans, and he planned to go to medical school.
He attended for two years before realizing he wanted a different career path. By that point he had accumulated another $140,000 in student loans. Pivoting careers required an additional degree that cost around $15,000.
By the time he began working, his total student loan balance was about $200,000, and interest was accruing daily.
No “Aha” Moment
There was never a dramatic moment where we suddenly realized we needed to tackle the debt.
The moment he left medical school, we already knew.
We understood that if we didn’t aggressively address the loans, we could easily drown in them.
Knowing you’re headed into financial hell is very different from suddenly looking around and realizing you’re already there.
Structuring Our Life Around Debt Payoff
When my husband finally started working in the city we moved to for his new career (I had already been working for five years at that point), we made a deliberate decision:
Our life would be structured around paying off debt.
That meant buying a starter home far below what our combined income could support.
It meant living on a very tight budget from the beginning.
Every extra dollar went to the loans.
When we had a baby two years later, I added a small car loan into the total. Our starting debt balance came to:
$227,787
At the time, the loans were accruing about $40.38 in interest every single day.
Skipping coffee wasn’t going to solve that.
Using One Entire Income
Fortunately, we had planned for this situation.
We essentially used one entire income to attack the debt.
You might think people would have been encouraging.
They weren’t.
Family members told us things like:
“You don’t have to do this.”
“You can just pay the minimum.”
“Doctors still have loans in their 40s and 50s.”
But we weren’t doctors.
And we had no interest in carrying student loans for 20 years.
Finding the Debt Free Community
For the first few years, I felt completely alone in our debt payoff journey.
Then in September 2018, I stumbled across a Dave Ramsey Baby Steps post on Instagram.
The person who posted it was part of something called the #DebtFreeCommunity.
Suddenly I realized something important:
We were not the only people trying to do this.
At the end of 2018, I started my own account to document our progress. At that point, our remaining balance was:
$135,621
That community gave me the motivation to go all in.
We reduced our 401(k) contributions to just enough to get the employer match.
We cut our spending dramatically.
I sold plasma.
My husband drove for Uber.
Every extra dollar went toward the loans.
The Final Payment
On December 13, 2020, we made our final payment.
We had originally started with $227,787 in debt, but by the time we factored in all of the interest that accrued along the way, the total amount we paid off came to:
$301,521.
Over three hundred thousand dollars.
It took years of focus, sacrifice, and a lot of saying no to things that felt normal for everyone else.
But in the end, the result was worth it.
Absolute freedom.