How I Paid Off $23,000 of Debt During Grad SchoolYou might be wondering why I wrote “paid off”, because I didn’t truly pay off that amount during grad school. Like I shared in my student loan story, I created a strategy to make grad school work and pay down my loans during it. Some of the $23,000 was truly paid off, but most of it was just redistributed I guess you could call it.

I highly suggest poking around on Pintrest if you have large amounts of debt. It’s what I did when I first started realizing I needed a plan to pay my debt off. There is nothing quite like reading other people’s success stories to motivate you to get serious about debt pay off and money management. Also, I recommend looking into Dave Ramsey, he is brilliant when it comes to debt pay off and money management. I’m planning to use his snowball method to pay off my debt.

During my one year of graduate school I truly paid off about $3,500 of the $23,000. I did this by working 2 jobs while going to school full time. It was definitely a lot, but with some organization and time management I was able to pull it off. If you’re going to work almost full time (I roughly worked 30-35 hours a week), I highly recommend working jobs that require minimal take home work. What I mean by this is, work jobs that allow you to do very little work at home once you leave work. For me, that involved working in a toddler half day classroom, babysitting afterwards, then going to class at night. The toddler classroom required minimal take home work and babysitting never required any work at home. Actually, babysitting worked perfectly because I could do work during the toddler’s nap time. Also, I lived by a budget and cut spending wherever I could, while still making sure to save 10% of my income every month.

The other $20,000 was paying off some of my private loans with federal loans. Even though I only needed a couple thousands to make it through graduate school, I still took out the maximum amount of federal loans they would offer me. I know, this sounds crazy and when I first decided to do it, I thought I was crazy too. But, I’m a teacher, meaning there are a lot of great federal loan forgiveness programs in place for me. This didn’t help me much since I had a ton of private loans (with super high interest rates) from my undergrad. By taking out federal loans to pay down my private I was kinda swapping the same amount of debt for a better interest rate. My particular private loan I worked on paying off with my federal loans carried a 8.05% interest rate and the federal loan had a 6.21% interest rate. I was very pleased 🙂 It might not seem like a big difference, but interest is the absolute worst, so getting a lower interest rate is always better.

What are some strategies you used to pay down debt while still in school?