Hey everyone!

Recently, Jonathan and I paid off $30,000 of student loans in nine months.

After posting a photo on Instagram about it, I had a lot of people reach out to me asking how we did it so I thought I’d share some things we did to knock out our student loans in less than a year. I hope this post helps others who may be in a similar situation as us.

Here’s what went on behind the scenes:

We first called myfedloan.org and asked them what our monthly payment would have to be in order to pay off our student loans in one year. They calculated $2,500 a month.

Jonathan works as a medical physics resident at Loma Linda University Medical Center. I work as a news anchor/reporter in Palm Springs. On top of the money we were making, we knew we would need to somehow come up with some extra money to make the monthly payment towards our student loans.

Jonathan, got a second job at Starbucks. I got a second job at a boutique in Palm Desert.

We knew we’d have to really grind to make it happen.

We gave up our weekends and worked all the time. It sucked, but it gave us that extra bit of money we needed to get this done. We ended up making money faster than we expected so we were able to pay it off in nine months, three months earlier than our one year goal.

The second thing we did sounds kind of weird. Jonathan googled ways to make extra money and one way he found was donating blood plasma. He would get up early and donate before going to work. With a need in blood donations there are several places that will actually pay you to donate blood. For the first five donations he made $250. Here is where he went: Octapharma Plasma

I sold a lot of my clothes and shoes on Poshmark and OfferUp. I made about $400.

We limited going out and cooked a lot of meals at home. We used EveryPlate to have super cheap ingredients sent to our door to make meals.

We didn’t have a gym membership. We didn’t have Netflix. We didn’t have cable. We didn’t have wifi. I would literally go to our public library every single week and rent movies from the library to watch on my laptop with Jonathan.

We had to say no to a lot of things which was really hard.

Another really big help for us is following Dave Ramsey. I recommend following him on Instagram and watching his videos on YouTube. Here is the link to his website for more financial advice.

I really hope this gives some insight into what we did to pay off our student loans. I know paying off debt is really hard and we feel so blessed that we were able to tackle it so quickly. The biggest tip is to just be very mindful of how you save and spend your money. Every penny counts and there are a lot of things in life you can live without and still be very happy. Setting a budget is also very crucial. We use the budget outline from Money Peach.

Next up, we plan on saving for a down payment on our first home!

We are so happy and look forward to our bright future!