$0.00 that’s how much I owe on my Duke MBA Student loan. Yes, $0.00, because March 2018 was the last payment, I made on my ~ 100K student loan debt!!!

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I graduated from Duke in 2010 and so my payoff was not overnight. I know you hear about people paying off large amounts of debt in 1 year, 2 years or 3 years and that is awesome. However, I say do what works best for you. I could have been more aggressive, but I personally wanted to have more cash on hand. If I had aggressively paid off my student loans as I initially wanted, then I would not have had enough money to purchase my apartment. The market value and investment in my apartment was well worth the additional student loan interest I paid by taking longer to pay off my student loans.
Here are a few things I did to attack my student loans:

1. Set a target date for Payoff – I set March 2018 as my date to pay off my loans. I was already on the most aggressive 10-year repayment plan, but I wanted to be done and this date influenced my spending behavior and decisions.
2. Managed My Money – I created a budget and stuck to it. I was very serious about getting rid of debt and saving. My spending habits revolved around this. I always say if you can’t manage $50K then you can’t manage $100K. There are folks who make a lot of money but stay broke.
3. Automate – My student loan payment was automated which also gave me an interest rate deduction. I also changed my loan due date to coincide with my paycheck. My paycheck would hit, and my student loan money would be gone by the next day. I changed due dates for all my bills to dates that suit me. CFNC does not allow this. They are super whack, but I’ll save that for another day. I automate most of my bill payments and I have automatic transfers set up to move savings, investments etc. to certain accounts. I like my main checking account to be cleared out within 2 days of my paychecks.
4. Make More Money- I put in work to earn more raises and bonuses at work. This may not work for everyone depending on your job. If I had to then I would have had some side jobs to make it happen. I also “made more money” by having a roommate the first 2 years out of business school. Could I get my own apartment then? Yes, but my bank account saw different.
5. Avoid Life style creep – I pretty much live off the same salary that I lived on in 2010. I love to travel and so that is my major spending indulgence. However, every time I received a raise, it went to debt, savings or investments. The same with bonuses. I did not start balling out of control with every raise or bonus.
6. Snowball – I started putting extra money on my highest interest loan first. Once that was paid off, all that money went to the next high interest loan and so on and so on until my balance was $0.00. Borrowed from Dave!!!

This was my process and I hopefully you can take a few of these nuggets to attack your student loans. I know some folks have loans and are barely making it. This is to encourage you to keep pushing regardless.