Thanks for visiting Ultimate Money Blog! If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. After I posted ‘The Debt Shoebox’ story, I received an email asking me exactly how Mr. Money and I dealt with the debt shoebox. The person was curious why I wasn’t more upset about the debt and what exactly came of the situation. What I did at that time wasn’t something I’d probably openly advocate, but I am so thankful it worked out for us. I let Mr. Money borrow cash from me to pay off a lot of his debt. These are actual pages from the notebook I used to keep track of his debt repayment.  This totally makes me laugh!  I remember a lot of the time he would just pay all the rent one month ($650) and I would deduct $325 from his balance because that was my part of the rent.  Six years later I think it’s hilarious that I tracked it this way! At 19, I had about $3,000 to $5,000 saved up in my savings [...]

If you are a Dave Ramsey fan, I’m sure you have heard of gazelle intensity.  Basically the gist of it is that you do whatever you can to pay off your debt in the least amount of time possible. Sell things you aren’t using, cut your cable, put the nix on going out to eat, and so on. We attacked our student loans with gazelle intensity, and paid it off a lot sooner than we had hoped. Now the only unsecured debt we have remaining is our car loan at 0%, and I’m not in a hurry to pay that off any time soon. I almost feel like so much time and energy was focused on paying off that student loan that I’m exhausted from it.  I’m tired of pinching pennies and scrounging up extra money and putting any snowflakes towards debt.  I feel like we’ve accomplished a lot in a short period of time, and now I want to take my time paying off this car. Seeing that it’s at 0%, it’s not like I’m paying tons of interest [...]

We are student loan debt free!!  On Friday, I made the final payment online, checked this morning, and it had posted.  I can’t tell you how excited I am to be rid of this debt!  We have paid off this last loan of $12,333.80  in 1 year, 3 months, and 25 days.  Yes! I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it on the blog before, but this $12,333.80 is not the only student loan debt we had.  In 2004, Mr. Money enrolled in culinary arts school and we moved across country for him to attend.  Fast forward to October 2006, and now he’s got his degree and has left school with over $36,000 in debt.  Yes, that is not a typo.  $36,000 was more debt than I ever cared to accumulate, and we went full force attacking it. We paid off  almost $24,000 in two years, on mainly my salary of $12 an hour full time, plus Mr. Money’s salary of $8(?) an hour part time.  Needless to say, we lived pretty poor to be able to pay off that kind [...]