Category: Debt Free Stories

As the creator of this site, I’m really happy to finally be able to tell our OWN debt free story here today. (Note: I’ve recently updated this post to add detailed info about our income.) 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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If you’re married with student loan debt, you’ll want to read Fo Alexander’s debt free story below. She paid off over $78,000 in student loans at a great clip.

First $31,000 prior to getting married, and then she really kicked it into high gear after joining forces with her husband. They paid off the remaining $47,000 in just 6 months!

Along the way, Fo learned some valuable tips about how to overcome student loan debt as a couple. Here’s her story, along with 6 tips to make paying off your student loans go so much more smoothly.
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Got student loans on a non-profit salary or other low income? You’re not alone. But in Joyce Chou’s case, her loans entered repayment with an unexpected twist.

It was summer of 2015, and Joyce had just returned to the US after spending nearly a year teaching English in Taiwan. She’d been there on a Fulbright grant following her college graduation.

It was time to start her new job working as a grant-writer at an education non-profit in Houston. She was looking forward to starting work back in the US and getting settled in an apartment.

There was just one problem.

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