I've been waiting for nearly 2 years to make this post and I can finally do it. Last night SO and I clicked the button to finish off our student loans.
Graduated in May 2014 with 52k in loans
28k @7.9%
24k @4.625%
Shortly after graduating, SO and I decided to go abroad, see the world, and teach English. We went into it knowing we wanted to knock out the loans fast and, making a little less than 15k/each per year with free rent with only 9 hours a week of work, decided to tutor hardcore, 20-30 hours a week +commute+lesson planning/each until a patch of my hair went white (literally) after about 5 months. Doing so however, we doubled our income for 5 months of our 10 month contract, which allowed for us to 1)do a month long tour of East Asia 2) Indulge in the mango smoothies of SE Asia multiple times and 3) Get married. Year 1 netted us a 91-94% savings rate (difficult to compute due to being a cash country.)
Year two, new job, same city. Doubled salary with free (not third world) housing with only 16 hours/week of work. The new salary reduced stress a lot, allowing for us to not tutor anymore. SO loved this, it gave her time to focus on her professional development. Meanwhile, I started volunteering all my free time to an international nonprofit hoping it may open up into a fulltime gig. I had a friend working there who told me I'd take a 50% paycut, but I figured who cares? I'd be debt free and I'm helping people. More on that later. Financially, we've gotten bad this year, estimates coming at around 75% savings rate due to us: eating western food more often, taking more language courses than the year before, knowing enough of the language to do things the easier/more expensive way, etc. We also did our honeymoon on a beautiful island, did a month long tour of Europe (hostels all the way through during the offseason), which postponed our loan payment by a month.
So now here we are, newlyweds, having just paid off student loans, having traveled extensively, having also just made a payment for gradschool (in cash!) And now I found out I'm being offered a great job at that nonprofit in a field I actually want to work in and, though I haven't received the notice of benefits yet, the talk makes it sound like if anything it's a 10-20% pay increase with more if they decide to pull our free housing.
I'm on cloud 9 right now...