Last Updated on September 5, 2019

Are you a millennial? If so, are you in debt?

There are numerous statistics about millennials being in debt. In fact, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the words millennials, student loans and credit card debt in the same sentence! Our generation is dealing with an insurmountable amount of debt. Bloomberg.com states millennials are facing $1 Trillion in debt; student loans make up the majority of debt amongst, 19 – 29-year-olds.

Today, I am excited to share with you Emily Brown’s debt-free story! She’s a millennial mom of two and both her and her husband have paid off $117,149.03 of debt in 7 months.

Read her story below.

Complete the sentence “I knew I was debt-free when….”

I could fill my gas tank without having to check our bank account first!

Tell me a little about yourself?

I am lucky to be the wife of the most amazing man I know, mom to 2 beautiful boys 2 and under, and I work full time.

What did your debt consist of and how much did you (or do you) owe? 

We had $5,731.75 in credit card debt, $25,023.11 in car loans and $86,394.17 in student loans.

At what point did you realize you wanted to be debt-free?

During pre-marital counseling, we took Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. This course helped us to set a solid financial foundation for our marriage. It allowed us to get on the same page. I am so glad we did that. It is a lot easier to start the right way than break bad habits. But as you can see even with the knowledge we had we still found ourselves 8 years later in over $100,000 worth of debt.

I do not want to know what that number would have been if we didn’t take that class. We have had quite the 8 year journey but finally reached our career goals and we were both working full-time January of 2019. That is about the time the student loan payments kicked in. That was by far the biggest payment and the payment that hurt the most. We were on track to have everything paid off in 5 years. But I dreaded that monthly payment so much I was willing to do anything to pay it off.

What steps did you take to reduce your debt?

What was the most difficult challenge you faced in eliminating your debt?

Just the length of time it took. If you count from when we started making payment to when we were debt free, it took 7 months. However, it has been an 8 year journey. I was getting tired and I could feel my enthusiasm to pay everything off start to drop so we made the decision to sell our house. It was difficult because we had been in that house basically our whole marriage. I went through 2 pregnancies in that house, we brought our boys home from the hospital to that house. We always said we would keep that house forever and use it as a rental property. So letting go of that dream and those memories wasn’t easy, but totally worth it to be debt free.

Now that you’ve reached this goal, what’s next for you?

Ah this is the fun part!

We are taking a few weeks to have some fun. Our anniversary is September 3rd and we are going to away for a night. We haven’t gone away for our anniversary before so we are excited! We also plan to go to Disneyland before the end of the year. Then it’s back to our next goals. We are going to build up 3 month emergency fund. After that we get to start really investing in retirement and start college funds for our boys. My husband has done everything on his own for longer than he should have had to. He has always told me he wants to be able to pay for their college and give them the best start in life. So for us to be able to pay for college and not have our boys take out loans will be one of our biggest accomplishments.