Paying off $120,000 in student loans is a journey, and Bekkah and Joel take the time to tell you some practical tips they used to pay off their student debt. This might be just what you need to get you started on your own debt snowball. Using Dave Ramsey’s tips, they got creative with their time and resources to accomplish their goal. If you missed the first episode, you may want to go back and listen to it to get the full scoop!
Welcome to Business Talk Sister Gawk! I’m Bekkah! And I’m Ruthie! And today we have Joel with us again for part two of our series on how to pay off student loans. We’re going to give a brief recap after Bekkah gives us a little plug for our Facebook page.
Bekkah: Hey, guys! If you have been working on paying off your student loans you should totally share your story with us on our Facebook page! Business Talk Sister Gawk. Check it out, like our page, and hang out with us there because then you’ll get all the updates about when we have new episodes. If you didn’t hear the first episode you should go back and listen to that one. The one right before this one because that’s when we started talking about how Joel and I, as a married couple, paid off $120 000 in student debt. This is part two. In 20 months we paid off $100,000. We’re going to keep going through different ways that we did that.
Turn Your Habits Into Strengths
Another one of the tips that we have for you in doing that is turning your habits into strengths. If you really like shopping or if you’re like Joel and you really like research or documentation, crafting, fixing cars, gardening, biking, foraging. I mean there are so many things! Find out what your natural hobbies are and turn them into something that can either make you cash or save you money. Joel does this all the time for me because I am not a researcher but he is. Actually, marriage tip, you guys! If you are married to a researcher or are thinking about getting married to one I will tell you that you should say, “Here’s the thing, research it, and do not tell me until you’re ready to buy it.” Because I am someone who wants to buy things like right when I hear about them and if he’s not ready then it just takes forever because he’ll research for six months. At least! But now that’s his job. I make him research things.
Joel: Not for every investment, though. I don’t go out and research a two-dollar item for six months.
Ruthie: Do we really need milk?
Joel: We’re talking like bigger investments, but, yes, I do a lot of research.
Know Your Car Situation Before Your Start Your Debt Payoff Journey
Bekkah: Okay yeah, so he’s really good at that. When we needed a car because Joel’s car was broken well it was kind of broken. It was more like, we had paid more in fixing it than it was worth. That’s one of the tips we have on here as a note on cars: you should figure out your car situation at the beginning of paying off your student debt. Because if you don’t have a quality reliable car, it breaks down, and you don’t have the money to fix it you could lose your job. That whole emergency fund part having that a thousand dollars is really important but set yourself up well by making sure that you have taken the action to maintain your car. If it’s a car that’s like you know what, this is not really worth it. I bought it for 500 bucks and it breaks down every week.
Ruthie: It’s a money pit.
Bekkah: You’re just putting money into it, it’s not worth it! You should be looking at trying to buy something that you don’t have to pay for repairs on all the time.
How to Use An Emergency Fund – What Is Considered An Emergency?
Ruthie: Tell us a little bit about the $1000 emergency fund we didn’t really talk about that in the last episode.
Joel: A thousand dollar emergency fund really is just for if anything comes up that you’re like, “Oh, well this is going to need to be taken care of very soon.” Such as car issues –
Ruthie: Health stuff
Joel: Health issues
Bekkah: Your basement starts leaking!
Joel: Things that happen in your house that you just can’t do without it being fixed. Those are the things that you do need to save up for. I mean part of those items, they just happen. I mean when we were paying off for student loans, we ended up having to switch out our heating system because the city was forcing us to do that. We ended up having to get a new roof because our insurance company was telling us that we needed to get it replaced. Then just car issues. Those kinds of things happen to all of us and we need to save up for those regardless of what our budget looks like.
Ruthie: How did you decide together what would be considered an emergency item?
Bekkah: Anything that is going to be detrimental in the long run and cost you more money than if you were to do it right now is something that we really considered. With a roof, if our house is uninsurable if it burns down then no one’s going to pay us anything for everything that was inside of it. So we need to make sure our house is insurable but on top of that if our roof is not good water can get inside, it can cause mold damage, and then our house is less valuable and also not livable. If it’s going to cost thousands of thousands of dollars in the future because we put it off we should do it right away.
Those things are things that sometimes they drain all of your funds and then you have to save again and build your emergency fund back up to that a thousand dollars but it’s important to do. Because if you don’t have something in place you could be facing some issues and literally have nowhere to turn.
Ruthie: So when you drain out your thousand dollars then do you pause the debt payoff until you replenish that a thousand dollars again?
Bekkah: You have to make sure that you always have a thousand dollars and if you drop below that you have to make sure that you build it back up. When we were talking about turning your habits into strengths – I love shopping, but because I love shopping I need to know how to turn that into a strength for my family. Let me tell you guys about this magical program called rebates. I love them.
Use Rebates to Save Money on Gifts
It’s basically like how I would find a lot of stuff because rebates if you get good ones or you research them and take the time which is something that I do enjoy researching, you can find stuff for free. You just basically buy it and then you turn in the receipt and a month later they send you your money back! It’s amazing. Sometimes you have to pay tax depends on what it is so really do the math and see if it’s worth it but that is literally how I paid for all of our Christmas presents for like two years of our lives!
Ruthie: Bekkah and Joel are basically the equivalent of the most hardcore, fangirls of Menard’s you have ever met!
Bekkah: Okay but right now, seriously, everything is 11% off and they never have their other rebates. Which is fine you know. With that, Joel also said, “No, we can’t do anything else. We can’t -” Okay I’m making Joel sound like an evil person when he really wasn’t Joel’s a great man.
Ruthie: He’s very gracious.
Bekkah: You need to tell us about the bathroom situation.
How to Build a New Bathroom for Free
Joel: Yeah, so Bekkah kept coming to me and saying, “We really need to redo the bathroom.”
Bekkah: No! It wasn’t even that! We needed a new bathroom!
Joel: We needed a new bathroom in the basement. She kept coming to me saying, “Yeah, we need to get a bathroom in the basement.” And I keep telling her, “You know what, we have nothing in the budget to make room for that. That’s not an emergency even though it would be nice to have, it’s not an emergency.” So following that she proceeded to do some research online and do some searching and found a whole bunch of materials to build our bathroom in the basement.
Ruthie: For free!!
Bekkah: For free!
Joel: All for free! There were different construction sites that we had looked at that were just giving away lumber.
Ruthie: To clarify was not stealing they were actually getting rid of it.
Bekkah: Okay but let’s just also clarify that this was the most time-intensive building project ever because they were just like getting rid of half walls. We had to like tear off all the sheetrock, pull out all the nails, disconnect everything, and then boom! You have yourself one 2X4. It took a really long time! But we started building a bathroom for free!
Ruthie: And people found out about it and were like, “Oh, hey! Do you want this? Do you want this?” That was fun to watch for me.
Tell People That You Are Trying to Pay Off Your Student Loans
Bekkah: That is a tip I’m going to tell you guys. Okay, seriously! Tell people that you are trying to pay off your student loans. Don’t be afraid! Don’t hide it! Because you know what if you tell people, “Yeah I’ve got a lot of student loans that I need to like pay off! I’m sorry I can’t do that right now, or whatever.” They’re actually really respectful of that.
The fun thing about that, too, is if they’re your friends like good friends and if they don’t treat you like this then maybe they shouldn’t be friends you hang out with but our friends would be like, “Oh, okay. You’re paying off your student loans. You might want to do something inexpensive. Cool. Well, let’s find something that we can all do for really cheap. Or let’s just go over to each other’s houses and have dinner. I’ll bring a dish, you bring a dish.” And it was so great.
All of our friends were super supportive of that and when I was like, “Yeah, I’m building a free bathroom because Joel won’t let me spend any money.” Suddenly all of these people, by the way, I tell people all the time, “I love free stuff!” People just like now just go out of their way to tell me about free stuff! And it’s so awesome! Whenever there’s any opportunity somebody’s like, “Oh, Bekkah, I heard that such and such is getting rid of some tile, do you want that?” I’m like, “Yes, I do!”
You Don’t Have to Be a “Cheapskate”
Ruthie: But I think we should add a caveat here that I would never consider you guys to be cheapskates. I think that you guys do take the time to invest money into things that you think are valuable to you, you just really love cheap things! You know, like inexpensive things. You’ll spend money on things that are quality, but you’re not like, I don’t know. You’re not a miser with your money. You’re both very, very generous.
Bekkah: Especially, if you get things on rebate! Then you just get to give them away! You’re like, “Hey, I got you this present!” And I love watching people’s faces but like, little did they know I got it for free. It’s still a great feeling.
Ruthie: Sometimes they know you got it for free.
Bekkah: Yeah, that’s fair. One time I got like 12 containers of grape jelly for free and then I gave them out to everybody and they totally knew I got it for free. Which is fine! It’s fine! It was good! It was Italian, imported, grape jelly. It was very good.
Stop Watching TV and Spending Time Online
Anyways, okay, stop watching TV and being online. When we did this we did not have a TV. That was something that we actually thought a lot about when we got married and we’re like, “We don’t need a TV because we need to be out and moving around and this is not something that is productive for our lives right now.” And, yeah, we watched movies, but we did it on our computer or whatever. But, for the most part, we didn’t have a TV in our house until this year, like almost at the very end when we got it for a really good deal on Black Friday and the only reason we did that is because we have children. We were just like, “They need to watch a little bit of TV.” You should tell them about why it’s important to have a garden.
Joel: Yeah, so gardens. I mean, there are many ways to go about doing this but gardening is one of the ways that you can save a lot of money on produce. Over time if you can grow your own vegetables what you can do is freeze a lot of them. You can make stuff into sauces and use it for your own cooking. That goes right into your pocket of saving money and right into your student loans. Those are really good ways to save money.
Use Hunting and Fishing to Pay to Supply Your Meat
I think some of the other ways that we save money with food is honestly just going hunting or going fishing. Knowing that I’m buying this fishing license for this year and I’m going to make an effort to go fishing and actually catch fish to be able to feed our family for some of the meals during the year. That’s a great way to save money as well on food. There are many ways to do that.
Bekkah: Joel shot a deer one year and we processed it ourselves, put it in our freezer, and from November to February we did not have to buy meat. That was a huge thing! Most people were like, “Well, what are you gonna do with venison?” Literally anything you want! We found some really good recipes! We used it as a substitute for beef. If you process it yourself and you know how to do it right because you watched a youtube video – Surprise! It tastes really good! Oh my goodness! I was not a venison person before we processed our own and wow!
Plant Your Own or Partner With Someone Who Has a Garden
It saves so much money! And it’s like you’re not getting a cow that’s been sitting in a stall for like forever! It’s way more organic, you guys! Another thing that I would recommend, I wanted to go back to the gardening thing really quickly because for all of you that are like, “Well I live in an apartment, so that’s not an option.” Okay, we lived in an apartment, too. And I’m just going to let you know!
Ruthie: She’s getting passionate!
Bekkah: That we made a deal with an elderly couple! Guys, get creative! Do not come at me with all of these excuses because I will not stand for that! Be creative! We made a deal with an elderly couple where we planted in their garden and we helped them out with their garden and guess what we reaped so many benefits from that! One because they loved us coming over and helping them with their garden and two because we got a whole bunch of food! So like, seriously, do not be afraid to talk to people about, “Hey. this is our goal! Would you consider this with us? If we do this for you, will you do this for us?” Or whatever.
Asking to Borrow Something Can Be a HUGE Budget Saver!
Don’t be afraid to ask to borrow something. This is something that we took actually pretty seriously. And what I mean by seriously is that we were responsible when we borrowed something. Because if you break it you better replace it. Within that when we talked to people about, there was a time where some of our kids like they just really wanted to go snowmobiling like so bad and I’m like not about to go buy a snowmobile or pay hundreds of dollars just to rent one for a weekend.
I knew a couple of people that had them and so I just called him up and was like, “Hey I know this is really weird, but would you be okay with maybe taking my kids out snowmobiling one weekend?” And they were totally fine with it! And they were like, “Yeah! Let’s do that! Let’s make a weekend of it!” And all this stuff and they had a great time and it was a great opportunity to develop a deeper friendship with that family. Know that borrowing something maybe it’s for a project where you have to fix something and you just need like a tile cutter then you bribe them with food. I’m just saying! There are definitely ways to do that!
Make Personal Gifts Instead of Buying Them
When we talk about “time is money” substitute your time, because the reality is if you don’t have money to spend on things you can take the time to personalize things. Whether it’s making someone a birthday cake or – I’m serious! Did you know it’s like less than a dollar to get a cake mix? Seriously! You do not need to go to the bakery and buy one right now if you are on a budget. Take the time to make it yourself and be a blessing to other people. That’s what you can do if you’re skilled at drawing or painting or whatever. If you’re like, “Well, I really want to do something else for somebody!” Ruthie is excellent at writing people cards.
Ruthie: Thanks!
Bekkah: Those are all those are all things you can do and it’s just your time! And maybe a piece of paper! Think about those aspects of like it makes your friendships even deeper and sweet because you take the time to invest in them and not just throw money at them. We’re going to have a whole other episode because, you guys, there is much and we have so many more things to give you as recommendations.
