Welcome to Money Moves: A 12-Week Guide To Investing In Yourself, our e-course in partnership with BlackRock that aims to help more and more people experience financial well-being. Each week, we demystify the true cost of the milestones we want most in life—retirement, marriage, home ownership, business ventures, and more—and deliver the tools you need to achieve your money goals. That includes real stories, from real women, with *very* real debt.
I graduated from law school with about $117,000 in debt (after receiving a partial scholarship and taking out federal loans to cover the rest).
I didn’t like the feeling that my career or life options were limited by the fact that I had debt hanging over my head gathering interest, so I made a plan to pay it off, fast. My interest rate was knocked down if I set up automatic withdrawals for my minimum monthly payments, so I did that, but I knew I wanted to pay more than the minimum as often as I was able. Periodically I would check my bank account, see that I had extra money and then make a random student loan payment. I also always made a big loan payment with my end of year bonus.
Law is a somewhat unique field where, post grad, you have the opportunity of getting a really high-paying job right out of school at a corporate law firm. I took one of these jobs with the express intent of earning a salary large enough that I could quickly pay off my loans.
I graduated law school in May of 2016, I started work in September of 2016, and I finished paying them off in January of 2019. So all in all, I paid my loans off in under 3 years. —Andrea, 28, NYC
For more stories from women finding solutions to their financial woes, sign up for our e-course, Money Moves, in partnership with BlackRock.
