Pay Off Student Loans: Strategies We Used - Money and Mountains (2024)

Paying off student loans is hard and to be quite honest, it kinda sucks. But the weight that is lifted once they are gone, gone, GONE will be so worth it!

I know how motivating it can be to read about how other people became debt-free. I definitely read my fair share of blog posts just like this one over the past few years.

And now here I am sharing my own debt-free story! And soon you will be too!

So, to get you pumped up to crush your own debt, I want to share how my husband, Joel, and I paid off just over $40,000 in student loans (as well as a ~$22,000 car loan) in under 2 years. It wasn’t easy, but a combination of setting big goals, budgeting, and working hard got us to where we are now.

Photo by Stargazer Photography

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Joel and I met in college and dated for four years before getting married in the summer of 2015 right after graduating college. Our wedding was just like the fairytale I’d always imagined.

Just a few weeks after we got married, we moved halfway across the country from Michigan (Joel) and Minnesota (me) to Albuquerque, New Mexico so I could start my graduate program in Speech-Language Pathology.

I was fortunate to receive a full ride to grad school. It was a chance we couldn’t pass up. If you would rather avoid student loans altogether, be sure to find out exactly how I received over $100,000 in scholarships!

The only problem with our plan for grad school was, Joel didn’t have a job in Albuquerque and the age-old saying of “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” was definitely not working in our favor in this new area of the country.

So there we were, all alone, newlyweds, unemployed, with a mountain of debt and about $4000 to our names. It was almost 3 months before Joel was able to land a job.

We had to keep a SUPER tight budget to get by with our “savings” aka that $4000 of wedding gift money we had been lucky to receive.

For the first two years of our married lives, I was in grad school. So that means I was making approximately $0 a year. Quite a salary right?!

We took full advantage of the 6 months grace period on the student loans. Then for the first 12 months after repayment began, we paid the minimum required for a whopping ~$3,500 dent in our $40,000 of student loans.

OUCH! That’s when we started to really get serious about ways to pay off student loans, and fast. I frequently made use of various student loan calculators to figure out ways to pay off our loans faster.

I definitely recommend using that kind of tool to help you make a plan to get rid of your own debt. Tweaking things with our budget was something I was constantly doing.

It helped show what we could accomplish with our payoff date and the interest paid depending on how much extra we could afford to contribute each month.

Seeing how much interest we would pay if we held onto these loans for the full repayment period also helped motivate (and disgust) me.

We slowly started adding extra payments each month. At first, we didn’t have much extra to add. But we held off on contributing to retirement for about a year after starting aggressive payoff.

This allowed us to put about $400 a month more towards our student loans each month. We did that for about 6 months until I started receiving a bit more stipend money for school which helped with our expenses.

That meant we could keep putting that $400 towards debt pay off and also begin to put away a bit of money for retirement.

We for sure weren’t contributing the recommended 15% toward retirement when we were just living off of Joel’s salary. (So if you can’t do that right now, don’t freak out! It will be ok.)

Since we were able to pay off student loans quicker though, we are now able to put about 30% of our after-tax income towards retirement.

It is definitely a balancing act to manage both things, but we decided to do a little of each.

Towards the end of our debt payoff journey, our payments each month increased to be about $2000 or more a month. (I finally started working full time at this point.)

Essentially we pretended to live off of just one salary and put as much as possible extra towards loans and investing.

This was easier for us since we actually had gotten used to living off of one salary. But if you are in a two-income household, this plan definitely worth considering.

See if you can tweak the numbers and save more money in order to contribute all or most of one salary towards debt payment.

I realize if you are a single income household this is harder and it will probably take you a bit longer. But you can definitely still pay off your student loans in less than 10 years (the standard repayment term) if you make a plan and stick to it.

Enrolling in the free course below is a great way to get started! And keep reading for more tips to kick your debt to the curb once and for all!

Throughout our journey to pay off student loans, I did odd jobs here and there. In fact, I have been side hustling all the way since high school, so it really wasn’t too much of an adjustment to keep that up.

I did a little bit of babysitting, cleaning for

people with a house I could only dream about etc. They at least told me I was overqualified for the cleaning gig which was nice…

You can find babysitting and cleaning jobs through a website called Care.com. If you are willing to put in the work, these side hustles are awesome for a few reasons.

First of all, there tends to be more flexibility with scheduling than many other side jobs like working at a restaurant or department store. If you want to have control over your schedule, this is definitely the way to go.

If you already have a full-time job, that flexibility can be the difference between a successful side hustle and one that just quickly burns you out.

In addition, these options are probably some of the highest paying side jobs you can land. In fact, you can bring in 16-20 dollars an hour as a babysitter. Do that one to two times a week and you are going to see a noticeable decrease in your debt over time.

I also started teaching an

class at the elementary school I worked at as a speech- language pathologist. This last side hustle allowed us to bump up our payments by anywhere from $500-$700 a month.

While this isn’t an option for everyone, it can be a great way for educators to make extra money. It usually doesn’t require a significant time commitment and is set up perfectly for your schedule.

In addition to my extra after school income, pretty much all of Joel’s bonuses went straight towards making us have less negative money.

It isn’t glamorous to aggressively pay off debt. That’s for sure.

But now that we have no student loans or car loans we are able to have so many more options for our lives! Like living in an RV and traveling country!

If you’re like me, you know the pain of trying to cut your budget to pay off loans. Eventually, it gets to a point where you just can’t cut anything else.

Then, the only way to increase your loan payments is to make more money. There were so many times during my debt payoff journey that I read a blog title that promoted “AMAZING ways to earn money online”.

I excitedly clicked on it only to discover all they were promoting was survey sites. Survey sites are fine for some people, but I swear every time I tried I would fill out a bunch of information and then get a “sorry you don’t qualify for this survey” notification.

Honestly, they ended up just being a HUGE waste of time, and I SWORE I would never recommend them. Here are a few ACTUALLY AMAZING ways to make extra money to pay off your debt though.

Proofreading is a great way to make extra money on the side! It is so much more flexible than your run of the mill,

, in-person job. People who proofread check material like books or manuscripts for grammar and spelling mistakes.

Plus, there is potential to make really good money.

According to Caitlyn Pyle, who started Proofread Anywhere, for proofreading 15,000-35,000 words, you can earn between $100-$500 (per job!). And the more experienced you become, the more you can charge.

Imagine what an extra $500 or more a month could do to in terms of helping you pay off debt! You know what is even crazier? Caitlyn just released her new book Work at Home (which you can get for free). In the book, she shares how she became a MULTI-MILLIONAIRE by working at home. I dunno about you, but that sounds pretty good to me.

Proofreading is not for everyone. If you HATE reading, this would NOT be a good side hustle for you. Trust me, doing something you hate just to make money is never worth it.

But, if you love reading, want a flexible schedule, and want to ELIMINATE debt from you life, this could be an awesome fit.

The best part is you can take Caitlyn’s FREE workshop that will help you determine whether or not this will be a good fit for you and teach you how to start attracting your very first clients!

If you have a college degree, another great way to make money online is by teaching English.

In an increasingly global world, more and more people are turning to native speakers of English to help them learn the skills they need to get ahead.

So, not only will this job put some extra cash in your pocket (you have the potential to make $14-22 per hour), but you also be helping people!

The best program out there is VIPKid.

It is 100% free to join. The best part is, you get to teach kids 1-on-1, and the curriculum is provided for you so you don’t have to do ANY off the clock planning. Plus the company handles all of the “client finding” for you.

Since you will be working with kids from China, the hours tend to be late night or early morning which means you can easily fit a few classes in even while holding down a full time job.

So who is this job NOT for? Well if you don’t like kids, I would really recommend steering clear of this one.

If you want to accelerate your debt pay off, be sure to check in here for even more side hustle ideas.

Okay, so now that we have covered some (actually) amazing side hustle ideas that you can do in person (babysitting, cleaning, etc) and online (proofreading, teaching English, etc), let’s get back to this success story and get you motivated to do the same!

Even though I tried to make as much extra money as I could with my side hustles, we did still need to cut our expenses as much as possible. Here’s how we did it!

While working towards pay off of our student loans, Joel and I had to employ many money-saving tips in order to be able to achieve freedom from our loans.

We frequently shared a cut of meat to save on our food budget. In fact, we still do. Eating more vegetables and less meat is not only more affordable, but it is healthier for you too.

Smart shopping allows Joel and I to eat for around $50 a week total! And we still eat healthily and have lots of organic food in our diet.

I also started meal planning which helped reduce the number of times we would eat out. Meal planning allowed me to shop smarter and buy items that were on sale at the grocery store.

We also both packed lunches for work/school to save even more money on eating out. We did allot about $50 a month towards “fun” activities and stretched our money by doing lots of free things.

Even though we have now paid off all that debt, we only bumped up our “fun” spending to $100 a month. We still live very frugally, because it allows us to reach our other financial goals like saving money for a house.

Seriously, if you want to be debt-free you NEED to embrace frugal living and cut back on things you don’t need to be happy.

Another thing that made saving money easy was the fact that there are tons of incredible things to do in New Mexico. While we were there, we did some kind of outdoor adventure almost every weekend.

Our list of free or inexpensive activities really kept us going throughout our debt payoff journey. Here are some pictures of a few of our adventures.

We even ski hacked by getting a season pass for $99 each at a Mount Bohemia, a Michigan ski resort that had exchange days at many “out west” ski resorts including some in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado.

Another way we were able to save money was actually through Joel volunteering for the New Mexico Adaptive Sports Ski Program for a year.

While he would have done it regardless, getting a free lift ticket for each day he volunteered was a pretty nice money-saving tip especially for something as cool as helping others.

While the ways you choose to save money may be different from what we did, depending on your interests, the point is to get creative.

If you are creative and resourceful in your spending, you will likely find you are able to save a lot more money than you thought you were. So I challenge you to think about clever ways to cut back in your own life.

There is no magic answer, but there are a ton of possibilities!

Here are a few more

hacks that Joel and I used while working to pay off student loans.

All of the money we saved by using just a few simple and easy to use programs went STRAIGHT to our loans and really helped to speed the process along.

The first easy (and FREE) way to save money when shopping is by using Ebates (now called Rakuten).

To use Ebates/Rakuten all you have to do is sign up for a FREE $10 welcome bonusby joining with my exclusive link. After that, you can get cash back on TONS of online purchases.

Even though we didn’t do a ton of online shopping while paying off debt, we did still do some.

Think Christmas shopping, birthday gifts etc. We weren’t total crazies who eliminated all traces of fun during this process (we probably would have quit if we tried that method), but we did work to save money whenever we could.

You can use Ebates to save on purchases at over 2,000 stores. You can log in to the site and click on the store you want, or you can install the google chrome extension which will automatically search for bargains for you.

It is seriously a no-brainer way to save tons of money on things you would already be purchasing!

Do you HATE searching the internet to try to find a coupon that is still valid? I know I do, and yet I am always looking for a bargain, so I used to spend

too much time scouring the internet for coupons.

Seriously, if there is a chance I could save even $1 I would be the one to find it. Maybe I better take back what I said about not being a crazy…

Thankfully, I have since learned aboutHoney.

Honey is an amazing (also FREE, because I love free things) google chrome extension that searches for available coupons and automatically applies them at checkout. This can save you anywhere from 10-20% and sometimes even more!

So let’s say you are looking for a product on Amazon. You find it, add it to your cart, and then Honey will automatically search for apply the best coupon. Boom! Money saved!

Last but not least is yet another way to save on your everyday purchases. What Ibotta has that Honey and Ebates don’t issavings on GROCERIES(in addition to hundreds of other stores).

Maybe you don’t do tons of online shopping, but we all have to eat. It’s one of those purchases you just can’t avoid. And your grocery bill has the potential to get wildly out of control if you aren’t careful.

Luckily when you download Ibotta, you can find tons of coupons that will earn you cashback on your purchases, all for (you guessed it) FREE.

The best part about joining Ibotta is that when youuse my exclusive link to register, you can get up to $20 in welcome bonuses! Wouldn’t you pick up a $20 bill if you saw it lying on the ground? This is basically the same thing.

For even more ways to save you won’t want to miss this article on tips to save tons of money with just a few simple lifestyle changes.

All of our

tips really helped us to direct more money towards our loans. The real difference, though, came when I FINALLY graduated from grad school and got my first real job.

Once I started working we were able to put pretty much my entire paycheck to either pay off loans or contribute to our retirement savings since we had grown accustomed to living off of just Joel’s salary.

That made a big difference in knocking out the rest of our debt. As I mentioned earlier, I highly recommend trying to live off of one salary if you can swing it as a married couple.

Plus, that way if you want kids down the road, the potential loss of income if you decide to go the stay-at-home-parent route won’t be nearly so devastating.

With me frequently making Joel login to his account to make extra payments once or sometimes twice a month, he finally got fed up.

He looked at our outstanding balance on the loans which was just over $13,000.

Then, we looked at our savings account which was just over $14,000 (we had been growing our emergency fund in addition to debt payment).

We decided to go for it and made one last hurrah payment to wipe out the last $13,000. It felt AMAZING! (Shortly after we snowballed all these payments into our car payment to pay off ~$22,000 over the next several months to become 100% debt free!)

The day after we paid off our student loans, we celebrated by skiing and telling our friends we couldn’t go out for dinner afterward because we had no money in the bank. Like I said before, the journey is not always glamorous, but it IS worth it!

Luckily, soon after, with no student loan debt, the number in our bank account began to quickly grow!

Jumpstart your own debt pay off journey by mastering your budget. Enroll in the FREE 5 Day Budgeting Email Course today!