In this episode, we interview with Bekkah and Joel about how they paid off $120,000 in student debt. This is the first of a 3 part series. Stick around for some mental tips to get you on the road to debt payoff, and feel free to share your own debt payoff successes on our Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/businesstalksistergawk
How to Pay Off Your Student Loans
Today we are interviewing Bekkah and her husband Joel about their journey of how to pay off student debt. Which fits into our series on paying off student loans! So thank you so much for being us being here with us today, Joel!
Bekkah: Mostly Joel! I’m here all the time.
Joel: Good to be here!
Ruthie: Good! I’m glad! So what is it that you guys did?
Bekkah: We paid off $120,000 in student debt.
Ruthie: Dun dun duuuuhhh!! In how long?
Bekkah: What was it? The first couple years we paid off $20,000 and then we started getting really serious about it and we decided to set a goal. You should tell them about that.
Joel: Yeah so our goal was basically to pay off the remainder of our student loans in about a 14 month period of time.
Bekkah: 20 months.
Joel: Oh, I’m sorry. 20 month period of time.
Bekkah: It would have given me a heart attack if it was 14! It was 20!
Ruthie: So you paid off $100,000 in 20 months! I just a quick, little tallying in my head. Awesome! Wow! How did you do that? Or first, why did you do that?
How Was Your Motivation to Pay Off Your Debt?
Bekkah: Why we did it was because we had made a commitment to one another that we weren’t going to have kids until we paid off our student loans. Then when we started looking at our trajectory for when that was going to be I was like I’m getting old! And I don’t know if I’m going to like have all the energy to have children by the time we pay off our student loans so we should probably get busy on doing this! That was the decision we made and we actually started reading that Dave Ramsey book.
Ruthie: “Total Money Makeover“.
Bekkah: Yeah. It was a good one and we decided because he in the book he was like, “You should set a goal for like 20 to 24 months.” I was like, “Do you think we can do it in 20 months? We should do it!” Then we calculated it out and we were like, “That’s like more money than we make in a month, every month to pay towards student debt!” We’re like, “I don’t think we can do that! But we’re going to do it anyway!”
Ruthie: Okay so! How did you do that?
Leave Behind the “Just in Case” Mentality
Bekkah: We have a whole list. The first one was really hard for me. We needed to get out of “I need this just in case.”
Joel: Yeah, that was a really, really difficult one to get through. A lot of what we had to do was basically decide that we really only need this amount of money and for us, it was around a thousand dollars. For Bekkah that was really hard. It was really hard for her because she wanted the security of having more money in the bank account. In order to really pay down your student loans quickly, you need to be willing to take that sacrifice and pay it down as quickly as possible.
Bekkah: I was literally like, “Okay, but I did the calculations and this is how much we need to keep.” And he’s like, “I did the calculations too and you’re wrong.” I’m like, “Dang it!”
Ruthie: But Joel’s a lot more tactful than that. He probably mapped it out and showed you.
Bekkah: Yeah, he’s very gracious and also like a spoon to the heart. Oh my word. Painful.
Joel: Plus what I found through all this is she had secret stashes of money and other bank accounts. She’s just like, “Oh, yeah. I’ve got this bank account too. There are eight hundred dollars in this one. I’ve got a Paypal account with $1,200 in it.” And all this stuff and it’s like, “Yeah see we’re totally fine for this month until the next month.
Bekkah: Okay but for the record, it wasn’t the first time he knew about these bank accounts!
Ruthie: Surprise!
Bekkah: I do not recommend doing that to your spouse.
Ruthie: Keeping secrets bank accounts?
Bekkah: Yeah he knew about them. He had access to them. He just never looked at them.
Ruthie: I think one thing that you had said to me was something that I do too! Not so much anymore now that I’ve started my aggressive loan payoff but I’ll put 20 bucks in a bag and then if I find that bag later down the road I’m like, “Oh! Wow! 20 bucks! Good job thinking ahead! I saved that for myself!” So it was funny hearing you be like, “Oh, I found 20 bucks in this bag I had! And I’m putting it towards my student loan. I cleaned out the change container in my room or my car and I put it towards my student loans.”
Use Coupons and Weekly Ads to Get Good Deals and Meal. Plan.
Bekkah: It was literally like I had to strangle something inside me every time. It was hard. It was hard work. The next thing was we utilized coupons. I seriously like mean this wholeheartedly. I tried the Krazy Coupon Lady thing and we’ll talk about that sometime, but like this was utilizing the newspaper ads and knowing what is on sale? What are we going to make for the week? And we meal-planned every week. I never used to do this until I met Joel’s mom and then Joel was like, “You need to stop buying copious amounts of food. We don’t need all of his.”
I am way less stressed after I do that! Because then it’s on the menu board, and I know exactly what we’re having for the entire week and we’re not wasting food or spending excess money on it. Every week I sit down and I put together the meal plan of what we’re having. From there I know what to get exactly at the grocery store.
Also productivity tip: if you organize your list of groceries by produce, dairy, frozen, and dry goods it seriously will save you so much time at the grocery store looking back through your list.
Ruthie: That blows my mind. Bekkah can literally tell you what aisle something is in Walmart. I’ll call her and ask, “Where is this?” And she just knows. I will wander around Walmart for hours. I do Walmart pickup now. I don’t even go into the store very much anymore but I just think that that is insane that you can do that! So good work! Productivity hack!
Bekkah: No, seriously! It’s such a time saver to do that! I still go into the grocery store because I love shopping and it’s one of my only experiences to do that when you’re on a budget. Another thing we did was that – also we love food. So just keep this in mind that mentally for me deciding that we can’t have lots of food was a crazy thing. But what I started doing is every time I would think, “Oh! I really want to go to this restaurant!” I would go, look at their menu, see it online, and then Google the names of the dishes. Then we would figure out how to make them ourselves. Then I was getting exactly what I wanted!
I also love cooking so it wasn’t really that big of a deal for me. If you don’t like cooking you’re going to struggle. You’re going to really struggle. I also learned that if you’re a picky eater you’re also going to struggle because poverty is not a friend of a picky eater. I say that because I have worked with a lot of kids and that is true. Be okay with eating things that are different not necessarily nasty but try to be healthy in the food that you eat because it’s going to make you feel better, you’re going to have a lot more energy, and then you’re going to pay off your student debt faster. I’m serious. Completely serious.
Get Creative With Inexpensive Meal Options
Okay, so a cookbook I really like is “Good and Cheap.” You should totally check it out. I believe the government manufactured copious amounts of them. You can probably check it out at your local library or you could probably go to your local food shelf and ask them for a copy. It’s that available! The next thing that I would recommend doing is to identify what makes you overwhelmed. What is that claustrophobic feeling that kicks in? You should talk about that. Have an accountability partner. Joel is my accountability partner, clearly. Knowing what is going to make you feel overwhelmed you need to talk about why.
A lot of the spending decisions that you make or choosing to save money is all wrapped up in psychology. Why you do what you do and where are the moments that you feel like you’re trapped. A lot of times when you’re on a budget, when you think, “Oh, but I can’t spend money on this!” It can be stressful! It’s good to know ways to be creative with your budget in the areas that you can spend if you save in other places. But you have to have a budget from the beginning.
Ruthie: What things made you feel claustrophobic, Joel, and then we’ll go to Bekkah next.
Joel: I think that was the biggest aspect of getting over the hump of being able to pay off our student loans, the mindset of. “Okay, we’re committing to this and we’re doing this.” But also knowing that there are creative ways that you can use and utilize to at least feel like you’re not being constrained to the budget that you have set out and that you can’t spend money on anything. Because that’s really not the case. What I think the biggest things for me especially were that I started looking at what it looks like to continue to replace things in our house or fix up the cars and do all that myself instead of having to hire someone to do that.
Buying Tools and Doing It Yourself Saves Big $$
When you have work that needs to be done on your car that’s sort of something that you have to save aside as an emergency fund. But you can also utilize that money for being able to fix it yourself. You save quite a bit of money doing that. I think one of the ways that I felt like I was not as much in a box was the ability to be able to do things myself and be able to spend money on tools to do those different things. We knew that we were saving. Every time I did a project we’d maybe save like five hundred dollars on fixing the car ourselves, with maybe $100 of that $500 for whatever tools I needed to do that activity I could go out and purchase those tools. That was kind of a fun opportunity for me to be able to purchase things.
Bekkah: He loves his tools!
Joel: It’s like, you know, you don’t have to feel like you’re in a box. You really don’t. I think what I would encourage you to do is to go through all those things that are causing you to have apprehensions about paying off student loans and really focusing on that and write them down. Write every single one of them down and start to talk about it with your accountability partner with your spouse and start to become creative with “how can I make way for these things?” Because that’s a big part of it! There are really a lot of ways that you can be creative in being able to allow yourself to do those things even within paying off your student loans.
Communicate With Your Accountability Partner and Talk Through Your Barriers to Success
Bekkah: Oh my goodness! I’m just going to say Joel’s way better at that than I am in terms of listening and finding creative ways, but the communication is important. Joel would be like, “Okay, what are you overwhelmed about?” And I’d be like, “Oh, well, I’m so upset because of blah blah blah blah,” And then I would just like makeup something. I mean I seriously was upset about something! But then he would be like, “Okay, how can we help you feel like you can accomplish whatever it is?” Then we would have to strategize the solution.
It would push me from a pity party to actually like creative solution mode. Then we would come up with something and it would be like, “Oh, okay, I can do this differently here.” I mean that happens so many times. Seriously, we still do this even though we’ve paid off for student loans. I’m totally somebody that’s like, “We could just hire somebody to do this. I do not want to do this myself. We should just take the car in.” And Joel’s like, “No, I’m going to fix it. I’m going to fix it. I’m going to research it and find out how and when I’m going to fix it.” Then he does! And I’m like, “Wow! Yeah! You’re right! We just saved like $2,000! Thanks for doing that!” And then when I’m like, “Can I buy this shirt at the at the store.” And he’s like, “Yeah, you can! Do you know why? Because I saved you $2,000!” He’s a very gracious man because he makes room for my budget.
Within that, you have to do that for yourself. Especially, if you’re by yourself. Think about, “Okay, I’m going to do this here. I’m going to make the choice to cook my own dinner because it’s going to give me room in my budget to do this other thing. Go to a movie with my friend or whatever.” But you have to give yourself that! You have to sweat a little to have room in your budget to do those fun things because otherwise you’re not going to have any fun and then you’re going to be upset.
Ruthie: When we were talking about this earlier one thing that I really admired about you guys is that whenever there’s something that comes up, I rarely hear you guy or heard you guys say the words, “We can’t afford that. We just can’t do that.” It was, “Oh, that’s not in the budget right now. We could put that in the budget. We can plan for that!” You were just very strategic about the things that you prioritized and the things that you really set money aside to do.
From the outside looking in it wasn’t like, “Oh, they’re just like never doing anything. They’re eating like rice and beans constantly.” You guys ate well because you prioritize that. That was something that was important to you and you just were very strategic and intelligent about how you went about planning for those things. Actually, giving yourself the ability to still do things that you loved but just planning for it and implementing that in your budget to prepare for it.
Bekkah: When we talk about really liking food – I mean, okay, we love food!
Ruthie: Bekkah just made a Facebook group chat or group page? What am I trying to say?
Bekkah: Facebook group.
Ruthie: Facebook group! Thank you very much, about being foodies and stuff like that and there are different things on there that she’s been posting.
“Because I Love Really Good Food. I Will Make Sacrifices Elsewhere in the Budget.”
Bekkah: Because I love food! But here’s the thing! I believe wholeheartedly in the ads because we could eat steak like a nice steak once in a while but the way we did it is we waited for the ad because sometimes it’s $5.95 a pound. That’s like two dollars more than hamburger sometimes! Especially with this meat thing! I don’t know what’s up with this meat crisis. Everyone only knows how to make hamburgers so then suddenly like that’s really expensive but all the other cuts are really cheap. Knowing how to cook things is important but utilizing the library for cookbooks! Oh my goodness!
That was like my best friend because I never had to buy cookbooks and it was easier for me than looking everything up online and risking spilling something on my computer. Obviously we’re talking a lot about these simple things and I think a lot of people are probably like, “Well, get to the meat! What did you actually do to pay after student loans?” But it’s actually all of the small choices! Every small choice. And that’s not to be overwhelming but it’s a psychological shift that you have to make about what you’re doing. We’re talking about this so much on the psychology aspect because that is literally the number one reason why people cannot stay in a budget and pay off debt.
Ruthie: Because they can’t give themselves permission to just say “no”.
Bekkah: The last thing we wanted to cover before we’re going to move into our gawk, but don’t worry we have a couple more episodes on this at least one more so stick around because there’s a lot of stuff that we learned in a 20-month period! Have a goal! Make sure you have a timeline goal that you’re sticking to. Even if it’s astronomically like there’s no way. You guys, we did this and I was like, “There’s no way we’re going to do this! But you know what? We are going to trust the Lord to do it with us.”
I’ll tell you, somehow in the last month we were able to pay off like $19,000! I have no idea how we did that! But it all came together and it was like, “Whoa. We did it! In the timeline that we thought we were going to!” I seriously to this day I don’t know how it. Anyways! Take every opportunity to make money. We did stuff that was ridiculous. We went out and we shoveled off Joel’s grandpa’s roof, and he paid us to do it! I remember I literally sealed somebody’s driveway with a tar coat once.
Ruthie: And sold like everything in their house!
Bekkah: Oh yeah, we went through our stuff and we said, “Okay, this whole mentality of ‘I need this just in case’ totally applies to me in some hoarding things.” So I learned how to sell things on the internet and on Facebook Marketplace lots of different things! I would not recommend garage sales. They are way not profitable.
Ruthie: And a lot of work.
Bekkah: Oh my word. Yeah, do not do that. The return on investment you could work at Hardee’s for the weekend
and make more money than at a garage sale.
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