Category: Debt Free Stories

This is a guest post by Financial Wolves, a blog about making money with side hustles to help you achieve financial freedom. It’s the story of how they paid off student loans while also investing in real estate.

Paying off student loans is a long journey that can feel like a roller coaster ride. Some days you feel like you are making massive progress. Other days feel like you have too far to go, so what’s the point?

But the point is obvious: Flexibility and freedom. Student loans cripple your ability on a monthly basis to do the things you actually want to do.

I’m starting to believe the government loves student loans because it forces people to work. You become enslaved to working because you need to, not because you want to. Student loans limit people from doing what they love to do work wise.

For example, what happens if you get burned out working in your job? Well, if you have student loans you have few options to simply take time off or switch careers.

For me, that was the ah-ha moment that sparked a massive urgency to payoff my $60,000 of student loans as fast as possible.
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It was May 2001 and as a recent college graduate I was on top of the world.

I finished packing up my belongings and jumped in my car for the 5-hour drive back to my parents’ house. The plan was to move back in for a few months until I got a job and figured out how much I could afford for rent.

The drive home was one of the best. I thought about the job offers that were coming my way.

I thought about the amazing apartment I was going to rent, the home theater system I was going to set up, and all the excitement that was to come.

But none of this happened.

Shortly after I arrived home, the economy went into recession and no one was hiring in the finance industry.
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(I’ve recently updated this post to add detailed info about our income.)

As the creator of this site, I’m really happy to finally be able to tell our OWN debt free story here today. Of course I’d love to to see your debt free stories here too!
So here goes:

We’re officially debt free! We’ve paid off approximately $147,106 in debt — including our mortgage. (About $52,000 of that amount was consumer debt.)

~ Check out the debt app I created to help you do the same ~

Tell someone that you’ve paid off your house (along with a slew of other debt over the years), and you’re likely to get responses like these:

1. How did you do it?
2. How long did it take?
3. I wish I could do that.

Well, let me speak to that last response first: You CAN get out of debt. You don’t need debt to get ahead, or to buy the things you want. You can stand on your own two feet — saving for emergencies and the things you’d love to do. (Stuff you probably can’t do very easily right now, in fact, because of all the payments you’re making.)

Becoming debt free is totally doable, so long as you’re willing to do what it takes.
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Many people don’t even think of doing an early mortgage payoff. Or if they do consider it, they decide not to pay off the mortgage early based on a couple of commonly held beliefs:

• that it’s good to keep a mortgage “for the tax deduction”
• or that it’s better to “invest instead”.

The thing is, neither of those beliefs are necessarily true.

You can both invest and pay off your mortgage. And you may not be getting any tax benefits at all from having a mortgage.

(Many people don’t, so check with your tax person to see if you even take the mortgage deduction.)

We sure weren’t taking a mortgage tax deduction, and we knew we didn’t have to make a choice between paying off our mortgage early or investing. We could do both!
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