In this article I'll explain how I paid off $30,000 of student loans using YNAB.

Made a budget

Before I even started my repayments, I learned to budget. This was a big part of 2020.

I spent several months getting a handle on what my expenses were. I paid off my excess credit card debt. I broke the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. In that time, I paid the minimums on my debts, but nothing more.

Set a goal I knew I couldn't fail to begin with.

I set the goal to be debt-free by thirty. I knew I could do this, and it was a nice milestone.

I set a budget to pay off my debt over 2 years, leaving me budgeting $1250 per month. This was significant, but built into my budget like any other category. I paid this off while maintaining all other areas of my budget, including long-term expenses.

Every month, I made tradeoffs with my other categories

Any time I had leftover money in a budget, I would decide to keep it or move it into my loan.

I didn't make extra payments immediately. Instead, I'd shift the money into my budget in YNAB to cover next month's payment. This way, I never stretched myself too thin (I still had the money) but saved 3 month's payments.

When I knew for sure I'd beat my goal, I made a more ambitious one.

As I started to gain momentum towards my goal, I experimented with more challenging goals.

I continued to save on categories I wasn't using, like my eating out budget. Now that I had a few months' extra payments saved, I put additional money on the student loan itself. This enabled me to choose a more ambitious goal.

When my priorities changed, I used my budget to stay on track, and adjust to reality.

At first, I went extreme, and set it to October.

Then, Prince Edward Island reopened travel. I knew I needed to take my vacation early to see my family for the first time in 2 years. This set me back, but not as much as if I didn't have my budget. In fact, I was able to pull from several long-term expense budgets and only set myself back to December.

A budget is all about confronting reality.

Whatever that entails, if you can stick with it and adjust as the situation changes, you will reach your goal.