College debt is a really big problem for a lot of people. I really don’t want to be in my 30’s and still paying off student loans. My goal is to live on the cheep for some time until I make a really solid dent. 1 week ago

$1,000 down; $500 to go. 3 weeks ago

Paid off almost $11k since last June. I should be able to chip away at another $1k-$2k before June of this year, so that’ll bring the total for the year to $12k-$13k. I’ve got a bunch of stuff to sell on eBay. I think I can get $500 – $700 for all of it, which would hopefully get the total close to $14k by June. I’d like to find an extra $1k somewhere—maybe with a side job someplace. I’m not sure how that would work… I’ll have to look into it.

Looking at this in a naive way, it’ll take about 10 years to pay down all this debt. It really shouldn’t take that long though, since as I pay off credit cards I’m making bigger and bigger payments towards the balance. By the time I get all the cards paid off, I’ll only have student loans left. By that time, the interest on those loans should be about $300/month, and I’ll have something like $2400 or so to put towards them, which means I should retire about $20k or more per year on the student loans. At that point it’ll still take two and a half or three years to pay it down. 2 months ago

Been thinking about this a lot lately. What keeps me up at night is my monstrous debt. Will be nice to have it gone. 2 months ago

I’m not sure what to do with my debt as it’s going no where now that I’m unemployed and unable to pay anything but minimum payments. I’m considering bankruptcy, but it’s a tough choice to make – keep paying my bills and never pay them down, or declare bankruptcy and never again be able to take out a loan for the rest of my life and forever be discriminated against by prospective employers when they pull my credit report. 3 months ago

I am still chipping away at the debt!

I had a major set-back when my husband and I bought some furniture on a credit card. Now I am working on paying this off…again!

But I’m focusing on this! 3 months ago

I’ve let my finances get totally out of control and have resolved to address this in 2013.
I have around £5k debt – 1st thing is to get a job that pays more so I can actually begin to pay things off. 4 months ago

I moved home from FL to save money and concentrate on this one. I did a balance transfer to a credit card that has barely any interest so it’s easier to pay off. When I moved home from FL, I sold all my furniture and used that money to pay off almost $1000 so that was a nice head start! Now that I have a decent job and live home with the rents, I am able to comfortably make bigger payments to pay off my debt. Slowly but surely! 4 months ago

Except mine involves a lot less killing.

So with my new job I have to travel to Nebraska at the beginning of every month. This month, on the 2 1/2 hour plane ride, I decided to figure a few things out with my finances.

First off, I came to the realization that whenever I drew up a budget in the past, it was always because I had to do it in order to get out of debt. I rarely, if ever, drew one up for what I would like my finances to look like. I didn’t take into account some of the things that I know that I’m going to wind up spending money on anyway. I wanted to change that a bit.

Also, a few other goals I have come into play a bit. I’m hoping that my mom will be able to move in with me for a few months out of the year. Currently, she lives in Salt Lake, and I live in Phoenix, so I think she’d enjoy getting out of the cold weather during the winter. Before that happens, I need to get into a house, and I’ll need a bunch of furniture—Moving from a one bedroom apartment into a 3 bed, 2 bath house is going to leave a lot of space that needs filling. Also, I’d like to have an emergency fund saved up.

My first goal, as I mentioned previously, is to have my car and three other small debts paid off all at the same time. That seems easy, and should be pretty automatic, so long as I don’t have any setbacks. Provided everything goes as planned, I’ll have that debt out of the way by the time I pay off my car in April 2014.

After that, I want to save up for an emergency fund and furniture. I figure with the small debts out of the way (and my car), I should be able to put all of the money for those payments towards savings, so it should go relatively quickly. I think I can save up $10k for an emergency fund and $16k for furniture by January 2016.

After that, I think I’ll be in the home stretch. I’ll only have my student loans and two credit cards left to pay off before moving into a house. Since I don’t want to move in the middle of summer (in Phoenix!) I’ll wait until October or November to find a house to rent. By that time, taking into consideration the money that I’ll need for deposits and moving, I’ll have only about $3-4k left to pay off on credit cards. That should be gone by the new year of 2017.

I’m really happy I sat down and figured this out. It’s going to take a while, but at least I’ve got a path out of debt, and will be a more financially secure. That’s a huge relief—I was worried that I would never be able to pay all this off. 5 months ago