I am so incredibly excited... it's actually happening! I just submitted my very last student loan payment to the tune of $4,993.00 which should clear on the 31st. I originally had my debt-free day marked as 2/28/2016, but an incredibly generous Christmas gift from my grandparents of $2,500 made me start thinking "what if". After doing the math, the choice was obvious... 2016 was going to be completely debt free!
The student loan started at about $20,800 in 2010. For some reason, I never really cared to pay it down since it was "only" a payment of $165/mo (for 15 years LMAO), until I took Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University with my wife in 2013 and started to get serious about eliminating that final debt. I bumped the payment up to $500/mo for about a year, then started getting crazy (for me) going up to about $1,000/mo for about 7 months or so. That brings me up to now, and I'm feeling pretty badass dropping $5K and just being done with it finally!
As a disclaimer, this is not he full blown debt-free, as I do have a mortgage... but that day will come soon and this pay down process has definitely given me confidence to start chipping away at the mortgage at an accelerated rate too.
I am going to up my 401K contribution by another 5% now that I no long have that payment which should get our family to about a 20% savings rate.
Cheers to 2016! :)