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One of the things that surprised me when I began my student loan payback journey was how much interest I had to pay when I started making my payments. What was even more surprising to me was how much interest my loans had accrued while I was in school (and making no money). In fact, when I graduated and made my first student loan payment, it didn’t even reduce my student loan balance at all. All of it went directly towards the interest!

Interest is one of those things that we all sort of understand in theory. Most of us basically know that when we borrow money, we agree to pay it back at some point, with a little extra on top. But I don’t think we’re very good at really understanding what interest looks like on a daily basis. Maybe that’s why we sometimes let debt linger in our lives…

One of the things I always tell people about debt is that there isn’t any secret to paying it off quickly. There’s no magic method that will make your debt disappear. No secret tricks that will crush your loans any faster. And you probably shouldn’t count on someone else paying your debt off for you.

In the end, paying off debt really just comes down to a single basic principle. Live on less than you earn and use what’s left over to pay off your debt. The more you have left over to pay towards your debt, the faster it’ll be gone. It’s basically that simple…

One of the best things I did coming out of law school was to pay off my student loans as fast as I could. Doing this gave me a ton of flexibility in the type of money I had to earn. With my loans gone, I didn’t need to work in a job earning a certain amount of money, all so that a portion of it could go out the door to some student loan company. And I could rest easy at night knowing that I didn’t have to keep paying for a piece of paper that I had earned years ago!

Interestingly, even though I knew how much in student loans I had paid off, I had never actually looked at what I had paid over those 2.5 years.

I thought it might be an interesting trip down memory lane to see this information. So a few weeks ago, I requested my payment history from my student loan servicing companies and took a look.

One of the interesting things I find when people share their debt free stories with the mainstream media are the comments that result. Some commenters praise these articles and talk about how they’ve been inspired.

But more often, you notice the negative comments. These are the people who say that the story being shared isn’t possible or that what they’re reading isn’t helpful because most people can’t do the same thing…