18 Months Debt Repayment

It’s been about 3 months since I updated you on our debt repayment journey. And I think this might be the most exciting update yet! We have paid off the National Student Loan! I was so excited when the payment finally came out on April 1. It’s so nice to have that one out of the way because when we first started paying off debt aggressively, that loan was costing us over $2 a day in interest!

All we have left now is the Nova Scotia student loan, which thankfully is interest free.

This was the main reason we chose the debt avalanche instead of the snowball, because the National student loan was a higher balance and was charging interest.

In case you haven’t been following along since the beginning, we started this journey in October 2017 with $26,556.64 in student loan debt. We made it our goal to be debt free by September 2019.

Want to read our other updates? Check them out here:

3 Months, 6 Months, 9 Months, 1 Year, 15 Months, Debt Free!

By December 2018 we still owed 6987.64. Today we owe $3812.30! I’ll break down how it went:

December: We made our regular payment of $780.80

January: We made our regular payment of $780.80 and then an extra $200 which was leftover from our budget for the month.

February: Made our regular payment of $780.80

March: There was only $283.30 left on the national student loan, so we paid that and then the minimum of $80.80 on the Nova Scotia student loan. We were also able to put another $200 on the NS student loan.

So What Now?

Well May is another 3 pay month for us so I’m anticipating putting another big chunk down on the debt. We should have our taxes done soon and if there is any return we’ll put that on the debt also. This month we set a lower grocery budget and took out cash to help us stick to the budget, so I hope there will be money left over this month as well.

I think with some sacrifice we’ll be debt free by the end of June! I can’t wait for this part of our journey to be over.

I couldn’t have done all this without the system we created to budget monthly and track our progress. You can get our worksheets by getting The Budget Binder on etsy!