How to Get Rid of Those Dadgum Student Loans
In a recent post, I talked about my belief in the importance of going to a college you can afford to avoid going into debt. The purpose of that post was to help high school juniors and seniors as well as their parents make a good college decision. But for someone who is already graduated from college and has student loan debt, it was essentially useless.
Although I never took out loans of my own to go to school, I did end up marrying someone who did. For me, this whole paying off debt thing was completely new. Before I got married I had never made a debt payment in my life. It was completely foreign to me.
At first, the idea of having to pay back debt made me very uncomfortable. I was even a little bitter about it. But after a while I started to get used to it. It was normal to have student loan debt right? Most of my friends had it and they seemed to be doing just fine. Some people even called it "good debt" (a term I have never understood).
Throughout my phase of being resigned to the fact that I had loans to pay back, Rachel and I paid an extra couple hundred bucks every month to try and get rid of them faster. I thought we were doing pretty well. We were doing more than we had to at least.
This went on for the first two years of our marriage. Every month, we would pay about the equivalent of a rent payment towards student loans and ever so slowly the balance would trickle down.
Then, after two years of this and barely any headway made, something changed... and six months later, on December 1st, 2016 we made our last student loan payment. Ever.
So what changed?
I would be lying if I said that listening Dave Ramsey's podcast and taking Financial Peace University at our church didn't help. Those things helped immensely! But we were the ones that had to actually deal with the debt. Dave Ramsey didn't pay it off for us. We had to do that.
There was something else that triggered all of this.
Before we even got into all the Ramsey stuff I took a little time one day and I started running some numbers. The main things I calculated were how long it would take us to pay off the debt at our current rate and how much interest we would end up paying. To put it lightly, these numbers made me absolutely sick! I could buy multiple cars and drive them off a cliff with just the money we would be spending on interest!
That day, boiling with anger towards those loans, I decided that we were not going sit around and wait for them to go away. To get rid of them we couldn't just pay a little extra every month. We had to pay massive amounts every month. I'm talking thousands extra, not hundreds.
Before that day, I wanted the loans gone, but I was afraid to cut into our savings and I didn't want to sacrifice in other areas in order to get them gone faster. I wanted results, but I didn't want to pay the price to get those results. (which really means I didn't want the results bad enough) It wasn't until I got raving mad that I actually made a change. This anger expressed with intensity and focus was the catalyst for us paying off our student loans in such a short amount of time.
I know some of you might be thinking, "well that's nice, but you don't understand how much debt I have." That is true, I may not have had as much debt as you do, and I do not know every detail of your situation. But I do know that you have another level of intensity that you have not tapped into yet. And I do know there are a lot of things that you could be doing that you probably aren't, as well as some things you are doing, that you could probably stop doing.
For starters, you could get on a budget, take a Financial Peace University class in your area, and stop going out to eat twelve times a week. But you won't do any of this until you get mad. Really mad. Not mad at yourself for going into the debt (it's too late for that), but mad at the debt itself. The Bible says that "the borrower is slave to the lender". How mad would you be if you were someone's slave? Probably mad enough to go to extreme lengths to free yourself. That is what you are when you are in debt. You are a slave. And until you get intense, that is what you will continue to be.
When you develop this anger at the debt it gives you the willpower to work six extra jobs and cut your lifestyle down to nothing for a period of time while you pay it off. If you need help getting mad, start running the numbers on your own student loans to see how much they are killing you financially. If you want to get really crazy, you can even plug your payments into an investment calculator online and see how many millions of they would become if you invested those payments instead.
If you have a lot of debt, it might take you longer than six months to get out, but if you want it bad enough, you will get out. Don't buy the lie that you will always have debt. Or that it is just a "normal" thing for college grads. Don't be normal! Normal is paycheck to paycheck for sixty years, then you die. The last thing you want to be is "normal".
Those of you who know me, know for certain that I am no super hero. So if I can pay off student loans, you can too. You just have to get raving mad like I did.
Although I never took out loans of my own to go to school, I did end up marrying someone who did. For me, this whole paying off debt thing was completely new. Before I got married I had never made a debt payment in my life. It was completely foreign to me.
At first, the idea of having to pay back debt made me very uncomfortable. I was even a little bitter about it. But after a while I started to get used to it. It was normal to have student loan debt right? Most of my friends had it and they seemed to be doing just fine. Some people even called it "good debt" (a term I have never understood).
Throughout my phase of being resigned to the fact that I had loans to pay back, Rachel and I paid an extra couple hundred bucks every month to try and get rid of them faster. I thought we were doing pretty well. We were doing more than we had to at least.
This went on for the first two years of our marriage. Every month, we would pay about the equivalent of a rent payment towards student loans and ever so slowly the balance would trickle down.
Then, after two years of this and barely any headway made, something changed... and six months later, on December 1st, 2016 we made our last student loan payment. Ever.
So what changed?
I would be lying if I said that listening Dave Ramsey's podcast and taking Financial Peace University at our church didn't help. Those things helped immensely! But we were the ones that had to actually deal with the debt. Dave Ramsey didn't pay it off for us. We had to do that.
There was something else that triggered all of this.
Before we even got into all the Ramsey stuff I took a little time one day and I started running some numbers. The main things I calculated were how long it would take us to pay off the debt at our current rate and how much interest we would end up paying. To put it lightly, these numbers made me absolutely sick! I could buy multiple cars and drive them off a cliff with just the money we would be spending on interest!
That day, boiling with anger towards those loans, I decided that we were not going sit around and wait for them to go away. To get rid of them we couldn't just pay a little extra every month. We had to pay massive amounts every month. I'm talking thousands extra, not hundreds.
Before that day, I wanted the loans gone, but I was afraid to cut into our savings and I didn't want to sacrifice in other areas in order to get them gone faster. I wanted results, but I didn't want to pay the price to get those results. (which really means I didn't want the results bad enough) It wasn't until I got raving mad that I actually made a change. This anger expressed with intensity and focus was the catalyst for us paying off our student loans in such a short amount of time.
I know some of you might be thinking, "well that's nice, but you don't understand how much debt I have." That is true, I may not have had as much debt as you do, and I do not know every detail of your situation. But I do know that you have another level of intensity that you have not tapped into yet. And I do know there are a lot of things that you could be doing that you probably aren't, as well as some things you are doing, that you could probably stop doing.
For starters, you could get on a budget, take a Financial Peace University class in your area, and stop going out to eat twelve times a week. But you won't do any of this until you get mad. Really mad. Not mad at yourself for going into the debt (it's too late for that), but mad at the debt itself. The Bible says that "the borrower is slave to the lender". How mad would you be if you were someone's slave? Probably mad enough to go to extreme lengths to free yourself. That is what you are when you are in debt. You are a slave. And until you get intense, that is what you will continue to be.
When you develop this anger at the debt it gives you the willpower to work six extra jobs and cut your lifestyle down to nothing for a period of time while you pay it off. If you need help getting mad, start running the numbers on your own student loans to see how much they are killing you financially. If you want to get really crazy, you can even plug your payments into an investment calculator online and see how many millions of they would become if you invested those payments instead.
If you have a lot of debt, it might take you longer than six months to get out, but if you want it bad enough, you will get out. Don't buy the lie that you will always have debt. Or that it is just a "normal" thing for college grads. Don't be normal! Normal is paycheck to paycheck for sixty years, then you die. The last thing you want to be is "normal".
Those of you who know me, know for certain that I am no super hero. So if I can pay off student loans, you can too. You just have to get raving mad like I did.
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