Salutations everyone!
Let me start by saying I'm extremely excited to get to chat and meet all of you fine Mustachians! I'm always usually a lurker on sites like this but I've finally decided to come out of my shell and make myself known. I may not be able to offer much advice at this stage in my life because I'm a new Mustachian, but I'm very humbled and eager to learn from anyone willing to offer advice. Let's just say I have a bit of peach fuzz brewing on my top lip :).
Anyways, a little about myself.
I'm a 25 (going on 26) year old newly Registered Nurse in the Pittsburgh area. Essentially I had very little advice from my parents growing up on how to manage my finances other than the usual "go to college and get a good job and work the rest of your life" sorta advice. I've been working odd jobs since I was 15 (a local amusement park that paid minimum wage every summer) that sort of helped get me through college and pay for fun. I knew in the back of my mind that saving was the way to go, but it always seemed like growing up there was never enough money to save because I would usually spend what I earned on my car to take me to classes, food, gas, and books with very little left over to sock away. Being that my parents were pretty poor, they had no way of helping me pay for school.
Sometimes I would spend money to go out and eat with my friends or see a movie. You could say my first mistake was going to college for a degree that had a pretty poor job outlook. All I can remember during those early years was that "going to college is the only and best thing to do to get ahead in this world" - Armed with this belief, I kept my nose to the grindstone and kept working a part time job and going to school at the local university because I was told it was the golden ticket - the only way to make a decent living in this world. Unfortunately for me, I was lazy and avoided all the STEM degrees because commuting to a university and working part time made it extremely difficult to study in those harder sciences. In fact you could almost liken my first degree to a liberal arts degree. Part of me knew that I should change majors or quit going all together but I was rather tenacious. Fortunately 4.5 years later I was able to graduate.
Fresh out of college and trying to avoid paying the steep mountain of student debt I had accrued, I swiftly enrolled into a local community college to get my nursing license because it seemed like the thing to do to pay the bills. Now I didn't do this job strictly because it seemed like it had a better than average job outlook, but it fit my base knowledge and current skills fairly well. Long story short I've finally put my time in and acquired my RN License and have a semi stable job with roughly 45k (interest included) in student debt. I really don't have a "salary" but i earn about 21 dollars an hour and am guaranteed around 40 hours a week.
My only expenses at this state are: food for myself, my cell phone bill, gas and STUDENT LOANS. I did have about 2k of credit card debt I immediately wiped away. But nearly everything I've been earning has been going to my student loans. I figure if i keep like this i can be debt free in a few years - maybe as early as 1.5 years. Also I live with my grandmother and she fortunately doesn't charge me rent. I help out around the house when i can to offset this charge. At this stage I'm mostly terrified because I don't have a penny saved in my name. I've taken to my student loans as being a "debt emergency"
My questions is this. Should I keep destroying my debt without worrying about savings/investing (the no more harvard debt way) or should slow down a little bit? The interest on most of my loans is around 6%. Pretty soon all of the interest should be paid for so that I can start nipping away at the principle. Any advice would surely be appreciated.
