How to pay off $90K in student loans in 7 months (plus contest winner)

June 18, 2012 · 7 comments

Congrats to Kaeli BainBridge, winner of my “I’ll pay your rent or mortgage next month” contest.

And thank you to everyone who helped spread the word. More great stuff on the way…

Some interesting links for you today

Each day, I post short insights on http://twitter.com/ramit about psychology, testing, personal finance, investing, the best links I’ve found, and stupid people.

You won’t find these on my blog.

Here are a few of my favorite recent tweets:

To get all of my Twitter updates as they happen, follow me here: http://twitter.com/ramit

7 comments

Leave a comment
1 S June 19, 2012 at 10:45 am

About the Harvard guy still being able to get girls’ numbers despite the flask, I think it helps that he looks like a male model.

2 Ramit Sethi June 19, 2012 at 11:12 am

Do you want me to set you up

3 Casey Camilleri June 19, 2012 at 1:10 pm

He scaled back and focused. He made paying off that debt a must in his life before everything else. If you do that then you could achieve the same thing he did. Awesome story.

4 John June 19, 2012 at 2:24 pm

I loved the article about paying off the student loans in 7 months. It made me laught that right next to it is a link to a video about some F1 driver’s daughters dropping $150 million on 2 houses. Definitely illustrates the average American’s priorities.

5 matt June 19, 2012 at 9:56 pm

Dario Franchitti is from Scotland, but overall your point is valid

6 Carla June 19, 2012 at 4:42 pm

My husband and I have made paying off my student loan ASAP a priority. After doing some calculation, we determined we could live on just his salary without depriving ourselves of too much. Aside from funding my Roth IRA, my entire salary goes to student loan payments. I started out with $46K in debt in January. Now I am down to under $19K. We hope to have powered through this by mid-November. It is not causing us to go uber frugal, but we are sacrificing some discretionary spending to achieve this goal. We do lots of cooking at home, for example. I fully recognize that not everyone could do this, but after determining we could, we are really going for it.

We had three reasons: 1) We’re planning to start a family and let me stay home to take care of the kiddo for maybe a year; this is a way to get used to living on just one income. 2) We didn’t know of any investment we could make that would return more than the interest rate on my loan (6.8%). 3) We already had several months’ worth of living expenses socked away for an emergency and are able to fund our retirement accounts

7 R June 22, 2012 at 10:49 am

The kid earns a 9.3079 and is quoted saying ”It’s more like it gives me a sort of confidence that I can do good in life.’? Embarrassing…

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post: