My dear husband graduated from Concordia University Austin in 2003. He had unsubsidized loans that were accruing interest while he went to the seminary and a fiancee that didn't like debt. For his first year at the seminary, we were engaged and occasionally his tuition would come due and he wouldn't have the funds to cover it, so I'd send him a check and pray that my next pay check would come soon so that I could pay my bills. We got married and realized that school was no longer an option for me if we wanted to get out of the seminary with no new debt and that would be a feat even with me working.
How did we do it?
Well, we come from a district in our church body that supports its pastors at the seminary and helped with David's tuition. My home church supported us. His home church supported us very much. A few other churches here or there adopted him as their seminary student. We used the Food Bank at the seminary. We kept a log of all the money going out, all of it. Every. Penny. And each month we lowered each number until there was no number to lower. We didn't go out to eat or on dates. We often told our friends we couldn't join them. We only air conditioned the bedroom in our 500 square foot apartment and tried hard not to use the air conditioner much at all. There were days that I saw 90 degrees on the thermometer in the apartment. We put a fan in the window. We put foil on the window. I tried to do all the cooking for the week on one day so that all the heat from cooking happened once. In the winter we'd pile on blankets and wake up to the apartment being really, really, really cold because we didn't turn on the heat. We did work for our landlord to get money taken off our rent, painting walls, fixing leaks, raking leaves, fixing up other properties. We had a benefactor who asked us what our largest bill was and paid it. Every. Time. And never asked for a dime back or even mentioned it since. We took the money from the hail damage that totaled my car and paid off the other car's car payment so that we'd have one less bill to pay. We hung our laundry up in the house to dry. The humidity and cold often worked against us, but we couldn't spare the quarters for the dryer at the laundromat. We paid the interest that was accruing on the loan. We didn't buy things. I asked my mom for toiletries for Christmas instead of a normal gift. Doing all this made it to where we did not add to our debt at all while in the seminary and if you consider that we paid off that car, we actually lowered our debt.
Once David was out of the seminary, we had to start paying on the loan. We rounded up to the nearest 10 and started by paying a whopping $8 extra each month. Over the course of a year, that added up a little. We got a credit card that had a reward of a student loan rebate check and we got that reward each time we could. By doing this we sometimes would pay an extra $200 or more a year. We were careful not to carry a balance on the card though. We stayed frugal. When David got a raise one time, we added an extra $20 a month to what we were paying. The interest was high and it was in our best interest to get rid of the loan. Babies came and with them doctor bills, so often money that might have gone to the loan went to doctors and hospitals for births (Kaytlin will finally be paid off this May! 2 and 1/2 years later! Good thing they let you keep them before they're paid for! Ha!). We kept our budget tight and hoped that we'd be able to pay it off.
And the day has come. The payment has been scheduled.
My dear husband has given up date nights and new clothes. He's given up smart phones and electronics. He's worked hard and pinched pennies. He put up with me. And the hard work has now paid off. WoooHoo!
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