While I was in college, like most young adults going through our higher education system in this country, I racked up some serious debt. I tried not to; I didn’t have a credit card, I lived with a roommate in a cheap apartment close to school, went to a state school, I bought groceries way more often than I ate out, and I worked my butt off- I had a serving job for 40-45 hours a week, AND I GRADUATED EARLY. I was in college for exactly three and half semesters…. and I still owed $54,000.00 when I graduated.

I thought I had been paying pretty good attention, I was pretty sure I’d be somewhere in the $40k- $45k range, but I was wrong. When I went through my exit counseling and I saw the very big, very real number, I cried. And not a “oh man that sucks” cry, I was “ugly-nose-dripping-how did this happen?!-full-on-sobbing” crying.

In the exit counseling they give you an estimate on how long it will take you to pay off your loans if you pay “X” amount of money per month. At a reasonable monthly payment, it would take me 10+ years. I’d be in my thirties before I had even come close to paying off my debt. To some people, that is reasonable and totally normal in this day in age, to me- that sounded like a whole hell of a lot of “not if I have anything to say about it!”.

Thus began my determination to be completely debt free in 6 years. I was going to do it! I wrote up a plan, I made charts, I’d saved every tip I’d ever gotten from serving, I was READY!

Then I graduated and literally nothing went accordingly to plan.

Since being out of school for a year, I’ve done a lot of things and made progress toward my goal (certainly not at the speed of which I’d prefer but… still.), and life happened. Life happens. After all the finance blogs, and college loan blogs, etc. that I read to keep myself positive about the whole thing, not a single one had prepared me for “life happening”.

Oddly enough, the people who feel compelled to write a blog post about these things (or at least the blogs that get popular), are the people who succeeded. Huh. Who’da thunk?

So here is MY blog- the very real (albeit sometimes depressing), very reasonable, blog about how I am navigating through “life happening” and still planning to be debt free in 6 years. Yes, it has already been a year since graduating, but 7 is still better than 10+ and life happens.

Sugar and Savings,

xoxo Taylor