Paid off $48k in student loans

My wife and I decided to aggressively start paying off our student loans in November of 2026. After adding it all up we had a total of $48k.

I’ve been an avid Dave Ramsey listener and that helped as it has been a main motivator to continue making larger payments every month. We started selling stuff we didn’t use anymore on Facebook and clearing out junk even if we could sell it for a few bucks. After all necessary bills were paid, if there was any extra money in our account we would full send and only leave $500 in our account. All bonuses were applied to the loans and we stopped contributing to retirement.

We also cancelled all of our streaming services except Netflix (with ads) and Amazon.

Tonight we submitted our final payment. It feels good but very underwhelming and anticlimactic LOL.

This does however make me feel like if we did that in 9 months, we are unstoppable and why stop now? We plan to pay off our home (I hate paying interest) and max out our 401k contributions.

Another thing that help us greatly was having multiple checking/savings accounts. This helped up stay organized and we set up direct deposit to each one for yearly/bi-annual charges (car/home insurance and car/home maintenance) this was great to know when the insurance is due every 6 months we didn’t need to scramble to pay it in time. It was expected and we were prepared.

I will say, it wouldn’t have been like this if my wife and I were not on the same page financially. We both understood and committed to paying this off. If one of us was not on board, this would have been much different. It helped to have weekly discussions on how our accounts are looking and what we expect the upcoming week.

I’ve never really posted anything like this but I just wanted to share with somebody.