How We Paid off $50,000 of Debt in 1 Year

In May 2010, I married my dream girl. She was funny, beautiful and chock-full of 90's TV trivia. Our first couple of dates consisted of a lot of Saved by the Bell and Seinfeld jokes.

Outside of knowing the Soup Nazi episode verbatim, Nicole and I both came into the marriage knowing the general basics of personal finance. You know, advice like:

• "Don't carry a credit card balance"
• "Always have some savings for a rainy day"
• "Good debt is okay to have"

In the years before our marriage, we did rack up a hefty amount of "good" debt. Car payments and student loans were a few of the good debt offenders we carried into our marriage. Hey, you NEED a car to get around, right?! And how else are you going to pay for college?! 

After some research and personal soul-searching, there really was no good debt or bad debt in our eyes. It was just debt to us. This was all just money we owed someone. It wouldn’t go away until we decided to clean it up.

We decided that being in debt was not something we wanted for our new family. We vowed to become debt-free (outside of our mortgage) before our first child was born.

In September of 2010, we owed $20,908 on my wife’s car and $27,124 on my student loans for a grand total of $48,032 of good/bad/indifferent debt. During the next 12 months, we took that $48,032 of debt and clobbered it!

By September 2011, we owed $0. Zilch. Nada. Bye-bye debt.

Here are the 5 steps we took to rid debt from our family forever.

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