I recognize that this will not be applicable to many of you, and I realize it's not even particularly original advice. But I have seen enough people here (and in Personal Finance) dealing with student loans that I thought it would be worth sharing.

For us, paying off these loans was not about the ideal ROI. We know we could have gotten a better return if we had put our money in the market, especially once we killed off all of the loans over 4% interest. But financial independence isn’t only about being set up for early retirement ten, twenty, or thirty years down the road. For us, it is about limiting our debts and liabilities now.

With student loans (or any other kind of debt) over our heads, we would have always felt like we needed to work. Now, especially with our spending so low, I will feel comfortable taking more time off each year.

Most of this is conventional wisdom from financial independence, but some of it moves away from a more conservative take on money in favor of getting rid of debt ASAFP.

*Edit for context: We earned roughly $100,000 over these two years. $39,000 the first year and $61,000 the second.

Without further ado, these are the seven steps I’ve followed to pay off $75,000 of student loans in just two years.

#1: Understand Your Loans

You can’t kill your loans if you don’t understand them. Just like it takes time and effort to get to know someone in real life, it takes time and effort to get to know your student loans - even if you hate them. If other Kindle books work as a dating guide, consider this a guide to breaking up with your student loans - and, like your crazy ex, making sure they stay away.
- Understand your interest rates and what they mean over time - Understand how little minimum payments actually do toward getting you out of debt - Understand the best way to make payments (some loan servicers take credit card payments, which went a long way toward churning for us) - Understand interest capitalization - this is how companies make money, and the #1 reason you should get out of debt ASAP

#2: Consider Your Purchases
The Latte Factor is real, ya'll. Giving up a $10 lunch out every workday in favor of paying off your loans means an extra $12,000 thrown at them over the course of five years. Considering your purchases looks different for everyone - in many cases, it is helpful to set up a budget and stick to it. I'll admit, we didn't budget at all, but we knew where our money was going and sat on "larger" purchases (i.e. anything over $50) for at least a few days. If you can't - or won't - budget, at least track your spending through Personal Capital or Mint. Delayed gratification is your friend.

#3: Make it a Game
We've been fostering nine little girls, and what's true for them is true for everyone: gamification makes everything better. Set a minimum loan payment goal (at least twice the actual minimum payment) and see how far above that goal you can get each month. We consistently set completely arbitrary goals, like getting below $10k by the New Year. These goals were not necessary, but they kept us motivated when the slogging got particularly sloggy.

4: Don't Sacrifice Too Much

Having only one financial goal for two years might have started to drive us a little batty. Instead of throwing every single penny at the loans, we also made the space, time and funds available for things we enjoy and value. We love to travel, and have spent close to $10,000 on it over the past two years. Sure, we could've used this to pay off our debt even faster, but we didn't want to be slaves to our goal. I also love to cook. The first year of hitting our loans hard, we spent around $100 per month on food, keeping our meals very, very frugal. The second year, we honestly got tired of that and upped our grocery spending to $400 in order to get imported items, meat, dairy, and healthier options like olive and coconut oil. I don't regret our spending, because I considered our purchases first.

#5: Work Smarter AND Harder One of my favorite themes in FI is to constantly look for higher paying work and to work out a side hustle. I honestly believe this is the key to FI. Over the past two years, I've been able to build up my hourly rate from $15 an hour to $35 an hour (still a pittance for some of the heavy hitters on here, but it's great for Central America). I've also built up a relatively lucrative side hustle. But building your hourly rate when you're paying off the emergency that is student loans is not enough. I've also consistently worked 50-60 hours per week. I'm young, I'm healthy, I have energy. Why not? By working at least ten hours extra per week, we were able to cut down our payoff time by about a fifth. The conventional wisdom that Millennials tends to perk up at is to work smarter, not harder. But why can't we do both? With my 25th birthday approaching and loans paid off, now I can consider more of a work/life balance.

#6: Keep Your Other Finances Healthy
There are really only two points to this: first, make sure none of your other debt is more of an emergency, and second, keep an emergency fund. It doesn't make sense to carry credit card debt while aggressively paying down student loans, but it would to keep a auto loan at 1%. That's about as mathematical as I get, so you're welcome. The other area of importance is to keep at least 3 months of expenses as an emergency fund. Since our required monthly expenses are so low, ours was only $1,000. I'll admit: we drained that a couple of times to throw extra slugs at our student loans. I helped us kill our loans faster, but it also added a little extra stress since we had no cash in our accounts at some points. It's not a strategy I'd recommend, so make sure you build up and keep up that emergency fund.

#7: Stay Consistent
This is by far the most important element of paying off student loans quickly. Getting the ball rolling may be difficult, but the 'middle' will be the hardest part of paying off your loans. It was very rewarding to see our balance go from $75,000 to $50,000. It was a lot less rewarding to see it go from $50,000 to $30,000 and see how far we had to go. We stayed consistent by maintaining a minimum monthly payment goal ($2,200 for us) and throwing whatever extra we had for that month. Sometimes our payments were right at $2,200 - sometimes they were double that. If you have a salaried job, I recommend setting up automated payments so that you don't even have to think about it. That limits the temptation to drop back down to the minimum payments.