We Were $30,000 in Debt — Here’s How We Got Out in 18 Months

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Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal, tax, or investment advice. Financial decisions depend on your personal circumstances. If you’re unsure which strategy is right for you, consider speaking with a qualified financial professional.

The night I sat on my bathroom floor adding up the numbers on my phone, I told myself I was just going to check. I wasn’t. I was finally facing it.

Credit card 1: $8,400. Credit card 2: $6,200. Personal loan: $9,500. Car loan remainder: $5,900. A few hundred here, a few hundred there. When the final number appeared on my calculator — $31,200 — I actually laughed. Not because it was funny. Because I had convinced myself it was going to be bad, just not that bad.

My partner Marcus walked in and found me sitting on the cold tiles, phone face-up on my lap.

“How bad?” he asked.

I turned the phone toward him.

He sat down next to me on the bathroom floor.

We didn’t say anything for a while.

That was November. By the following May — 18 months later — we had paid off every cent.

This is the story of how we did it. The real version — the fights, the moments we almost quit, the things that actually worked, and the things that people told us to do that were completely useless.

If you’re reading this with your own number sitting in your stomach like a stone, I want you to know one thing before we start: the number is not the end of the story.

Why Most Debt Advice Doesn’t Work (And What Does)

Before I get into what we actually did, let me save you from the same frustration we had early on.

We spent the first two weeks of our debt payoff journey reading articles. They all said roughly the same thing: make a budget, cut your spending, pay more than the minimum. Fine. True. But wildly incomplete.

Nobody talked about the shame that makes you avoid opening your bank app. Nobody mentioned the specific kind of exhaustion that comes from saying no to everything enjoyable for months on end. Nobody warned us that there would be a Wednesday in month four where we would genuinely consider just… giving up and going back to the way things were.

The practical steps matter. But they only work if you understand the emotional landscape you’re going to be walking through. So we’ll cover both.

Step 1: Stop Pretending and Write the Real Number Down

The first thing we did — the thing that actually started everything — was writing it all down on paper. Not in a spreadsheet. Not in an app. On actual paper, with a pen.

Every debt. The creditor’s name, the balance, the interest rate, the minimum payment, and the due date.

It looked like this:

Seeing it on paper was painful. It was also the most useful thing we did in those first two weeks.

Here’s why: until you see it clearly, you make decisions in a fog. You keep paying the minimum on everything without understanding that on a $8,400 balance at nearly 25% interest, the minimum payment barely covers the interest — you’re barely moving the needle on the actual debt. Writing it down shifts you from avoidance to information. And information, however uncomfortable, is the only thing you can actually work with.

Financial educator Tiffany Aliche, who paid off close to $300,000 in personal debt and now runs one of the most-followed personal finance platforms in the US, says the first step is always the same: “List everything out. It’s almost like going to the doctor. You need a checkup before you can get a prescription.”

Do the checkup.

Step 2: Pick a Payoff Method — and Actually Stick to One

Once we had the full picture, we had to decide how we were going to attack the debt. There are two main strategies, and both genuinely work. The mistake is trying to do both or switching between them.

The Debt Snowball

You pay off your smallest balance first, regardless of interest rate. While doing that, you make minimum payments on everything else. When the smallest debt is gone, you take that payment and roll it into the next smallest. The “snowball” builds.

Best for: People who need psychological wins to stay motivated. The early victories — paying off that $1,200 store card in two months — give you momentum.

The Debt Avalanche

You pay off the highest interest rate first, regardless of balance. You still make minimums on everything else. When the highest-rate debt is gone, you move to the next highest.

Best for: People who are motivated by logic and math. This method saves the most money in interest over time.

We chose the avalanche method, targeting that 29.99% store card first (even though it was small, that rate was criminal), then the Chase Visa at nearly 25%. In terms of pure math, it was the right call. We paid significantly less in interest overall.

But here is the honest part: there were moments where I envied people using the snowball method. In month three, when we had barely moved the Chase balance, I would have loved a paid-off account to celebrate. If you’re someone who needs early wins to keep going — and there is absolutely no shame in that — snowball your way out.

Neither method is wrong. The wrong method is the one you abandon in month three.

Step 3: Find the Extra Money (This Is Where It Gets Real)

Here’s the part that every article breezes past: paying the minimum plus a little extra barely makes a dent on $30,000. You need more money moving toward the debt than that. So the question becomes: where does it come from?

We attacked it from two directions simultaneously — cutting spending and increasing income. You probably need to do both too.

Cutting Spending: The Non-Negotiables

We went through every single subscription and recurring charge. Every one. Not to cut the fun ones — to audit whether we were even using them. We found:

• A gym membership neither of us had visited in four months: cancelled. ($85/month saved)
• Two streaming services we had doubled up: cut to one. ($18/month saved)
• A meal kit service we had forgotten about: cancelled immediately. ($72/month saved)
• Random apps with subscription fees: killed. (~$25/month saved)

That’s $200 a month we didn’t know we were losing. $2,400 a year. Gone, without changing anything we actually cared about.

We also made the uncomfortable decision to stop eating out except for one deliberately chosen meal per month. This was the hard one. We’re social people. Our friends wanted to go to restaurants. We started saying yes to the invite and ordering the cheapest thing on the menu, or eating before we went and just getting drinks. It’s not glamorous. It worked.

One thing we did not do: we didn’t cut absolutely everything enjoyable. We kept a small “sanity budget” of $80 a month each — money we could spend on whatever we wanted, no questions asked, no guilt attached. This was Marcus’s idea and it was a genuinely good one. Having something that felt like freedom, even a small pocket of it, made the whole thing sustainable.

Increasing Income: The Unglamorous Side Hustle

Marcus picked up a second job on weekends — weekend shifts at a restaurant he’d worked at years earlier. He knew the manager, asked, and was back on the roster within a week. It wasn’t his dream. It was $900–$1,100 a month extra that went entirely toward debt.

I started freelance proofreading, picking up work through a couple of platforms I’d found through a quick search. Not life-changing money — $200 to $400 a month — but money I hadn’t had before that went directly to the balances.

Every extra dollar we made went to debt. Tax refund? Debt. Birthday money from Marcus’s aunt? Debt. The $75 we got for selling a coffee table we never used? Debt.

This sounds extreme. It kind of is. It was also what made the 18-month timeline possible instead of a five-year slog.

Step 4: Call Your Creditors (Most People Skip This)

This is one of the most effective things we did and one of the least talked-about.

We called every creditor and asked for a lower interest rate.

That’s it. Just called and asked.

The store card immediately said no. Fine. The personal loan said they couldn’t change the rate but could skip a payment if we were struggling — we weren’t, so we passed. But Chase came through. After a 12-minute phone call explaining that we were committed to paying off the debt and had been a customer in good standing for four years, they reduced our rate from 24.99% to 17.99%. Seven percentage points. On an $8,400 balance, that was hundreds of dollars in interest saved.

Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, a financial author who paid off $100,000 in credit card debt, did this extensively during her own journey: she got multiple cards down to rates as low as 0%, 2.9%, and 4.9% through direct negotiation. “I learned the importance of asking,” she said in an interview with CNBC. “Most people don’t.”

You won’t always get a yes. But the call costs you nothing but time, and a yes can save you real money.

Step 5: Automate and Make It Boring

One of the best decisions we made was removing decision-making from the process.

On the day we got paid, automatic transfers went out:

• Rent and bills — already automated
• Minimum payments on all debts — automated
• The extra “attack payment” on our target debt — automated

By the time we touched our accounts, the debt payment had already happened. It wasn’t a choice we had to make while tired on a Thursday night. It just… happened. Every two weeks.

This removes the single biggest threat to any debt payoff plan: the moment when you look at a paycheck and think maybe this month I’ll pay a little less and just treat myself a bit.

There’s no decision to make if the money’s already gone.

The Months That Almost Broke Us

I want to be honest about something: there were two months in this journey where we came very close to stopping.

Month four was bad. We were tired. We’d been saying no to things for four months straight. Marcus had been working weekends for four months. We had a fight about whether any of this was worth it — a real fight, not a disagreement. The kind where things get said that linger.

We didn’t quit. But it was close.

What helped was this: we pulled up the paper with the numbers. We looked at how far we’d come. In four months we had paid off the store card entirely, made a serious dent in the Chase balance, and cleared about $7,200 total. We had gone from $31,200 to approximately $24,000. That was real. It had happened. Looking at the evidence of what we’d already done made stopping feel like wasting the work we’d already put in.

Month eleven was the second wobble. We hit a car repair — $1,100 — that we hadn’t anticipated. We had a small emergency fund ($1,000, which we’d built before starting the debt payoff, following advice we’d read from multiple sources) and it covered most of it. We had to pause the attack payment for six weeks to rebuild the emergency fund before hitting the debt again.

This is not failure. This is life. Build the emergency fund first — even a small one — before aggressively attacking debt. Not having any cushion turns every surprise into a crisis that derails the whole plan.

What $31,200 of Debt Costs You If You Don’t Pay It Off

Let me put this in concrete numbers because it helped us understand what was really at stake.

If we had continued making only minimum payments on everything:

• On the Chase card at 24.99% with a minimum of $210/month, it would have taken approximately 8 years to pay off — and we would have paid roughly $12,000 in interest alone on top of the $8,400 we owed.
• Across all five debts, making only minimums, we were looking at spending well over $20,000 in interest over the life of those debts — money we would pay and have literally nothing to show for.

Interest on debt is money that disappears. You don’t get a product. You don’t get an experience. You pay it to borrow money you’ve already spent on something you may not even remember buying.

That realization — more than any budgeting trick — was what kept us going.

The Day We Made the Last Payment

May 14th. A Tuesday.

Marcus was at work. I transferred the final $812 to the personal loan — the last debt standing — from my phone, sitting in my car in a parking lot.

I called Marcus. He picked up immediately. I said, “It’s done.”

He didn’t say anything for a second. Then: “Are you serious?”

“I’m serious.”

He went quiet again. I could hear him breathing. Then he said, “I’m buying you dinner tonight. We’re going somewhere good.”

We went somewhere good. We talked for three hours. We didn’t talk about debt once.

The Full Breakdown: What We Did, Month by Month

For those who want the practical summary:

Months 1–2: Built $1,000 emergency fund, tracked every expense, cancelled unused subscriptions, found extra income sources, set up all automatic payments.

Months 3–5: Paid off store card ($1,200) entirely. Began heavy attack on Chase Visa. Called creditors for rate reductions.

Months 6–9: Paid off Chase Visa ($8,400). This was the psychological turning point — crossing off the biggest high-interest card felt enormous.

Months 10–12: Hit the car repair detour. Rebuilt emergency fund. Continued minimums on remaining debts. Paid off Capital One.

Months 13–16: Cleared the Capital One balance. Personal loan down to under $4,000. Beginning to see the end clearly.

Months 17–18: Final assault on personal loan. Last payment: month 18.

Total paid off: $31,200. Total time: 18 months. Total interest saved vs. minimum payments: approximately $18,000.

What to Do Starting Today (Not “Someday”)

If you’re sitting where we were sitting — with a number that feels too big to face — here is the actual first step:

Write the number down. Every debt, every rate, every minimum payment. On paper.

Not tomorrow. Today.

The number doesn’t get smaller by not looking at it. It gets bigger. And the longer you wait, the more of your money quietly disappears into interest while you try to figure out a plan.

You don’t need a perfect plan to start. You need a first step. The plan gets clearer once you’re moving.

The floor of a bathroom at 11pm with your partner next to you, looking at a number that terrifies you both — that was, genuinely, the best financial decision we ever made. Because we didn’t look away.

Have you paid off debt and want to share what worked? Or are you somewhere in the middle of the journey right now? Drop your story in the comments — the real version, not the clean one. This stuff is hard, and it’s easier when you don’t think you’re the only one.

Related reads you might find helpful:

• What Is a Sinking Fund? Why You Need One Before Life Gets Expensive
• Should I Pay Off Debt or Save First? Here’s the Smartest Strategy

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