Managing and paying off student loans can be a miserable, decades-long slog that forces some borrowers to put off major milestones — such as buying a house or a new car — for years. Sometimes forever.
While the data still shows that people who have graduated from college consistently make more money, on average, than people who have not, some students have questioned whether the potential benefits are worth the cost and the hassle.
In a recent report, theWall Street Journalspoke to a handful of borrowers who managed to pay off their student debt within a decade. Their stories are their own — everyone who borrows is different. Borrowers all face different circumstances, have access to different resources, and have different priorities and ambitions. One size does not fit all.
With that disclaimer in mind, the stories and strategies of those who have managed to pay back their loans have been collected here to hopefully provide some perspective and advice to prospective borrowers, though some of the tools they used no longer exist.
In Arizona, a 35-year-old woman named Lauren Braley managed to pay down her student loans — approximately $125,000 — in seven years.
But Braley also didn’t put her life on hold. She and her husband bought a house and had a child — major expenses — but she took advantage of the pandemic-era interest rate decline and refinanced her federal student loans, reducing the interest on those loans from around 6 percent to just below 3 percent. She refinanced twice more and ultimately saved herself $55,000 in student loan interest, she said.
Braley was working as a physical therapist but made a career change. She posted about how she did it on LinkedIn and began receiving messages from other physical therapists asking her for advice. She took that and turned it into a side gig. Braley used her moonlighting money to pay down the remainder of her debt and was free from her school loans in December.
In Denver, Christopher Villarreal, 31, managed to pay back approximately $46,000 over the course of nine years.
He told the post that he grew up poor and used college as a way to try to escape that poverty. In 2016, he graduated, but after school, he was working as a retail manager and making only $13 an hour. His monthly payments did not even cover the full interest accruing month to month, meaning he could dutifully pay as much as he could afford month and still never chisel off a chunk of his debt.
He told the Wall Street Journal he felt like he was “drowning” in debt.
After years of working to get by, Villarreal was hired to work at a ski resort company. He took on a side business doing security screening for live events, and put as much money as he could into his savings each month — sometimes up to $2,000 per month.
Villareal had, at that point, enrolled in a repayment plan that stopped interest accrual, a key factor allowing him to actually pay down his loan. But, earlier this year, President Donald Trump announced that he planned to allow interest to once again accrue on those loans.
Knowing that was coming, Villareal made it a point to pay off his debt before it started growing again under the Trump administration.
In New York City, NiaChloe Bowman, a 28-year-old teacher, managed to pay her loans off in only two years, and that is largely because she went into college with a plan.
When she searched for schools, she prioritized institutions with financial aid packages that could help her keep her debt down during school. While she was in school, she worked on campus and at a restaurant, and managed to pay $2,000 of her debt down before she graduated.
She knew early on she did not want the millstone of debt hanging from her neck, so she prioritized paying it down early.
“Debt and oppression have been two of the things that have held us back as Black and brown people,” Bowman told the paper. “I didn’t want that to be my narrative.”
She was paid $70,000 plus a $10,000 signing bonus for her first job, and she made $500 monthly payments during the pandemic-era repayment pause, which ate away at her debt.
Once she was free of her college debt, she visited Niagara Falls, a place her mother always wanted to see. Her mother died in 2019, so she went to honor her memory and celebrate her victory.
