In June 2007, exactly seven months ago, I was in debt to the tune of $15,000. That may not sound like much, but consider that my annual after tax income as a recent broadcasting school graduate, working in retail while looking for a “real” job, was a meagre $13,000. That means that my total debt load was 115% my annual salary. Even if I was able to dedicate half of my income to debt repayment, it would have taken me twenty-seven months of pay it off, more than two years! And that’s not accounting for interest. Now consider that most entry level broadcasting jobs don’t pay much better than retail, and the situation seems more than overwhelming.

I am not the type of person who can ignore problems and go about life with a smile on my face. And when it come to debt, I think our society has become altogether too comfortable with it. I’m not one of them. I would look at what I owed and think of all the things I couldn’t do until I fixed it. I couldn’t go travelling. I couldn’t buy a new camera. I couldn’t start a new job in the broadcasting industry with the proverbial monkey on my back. So I made the decision to eliminate my limitations.

I took a job with a construction company. Most people who know me found this more than a bit surprising. I don’t fit the construction worker stereotype by any stretch of the imagination. And to this day I don’t quite fit in with the group. So in many ways it was a sacrifice, but the immediate benefits more than made up for it. By taking that job my income immediately tripled. I was able to pour every spare penny into paying off my debt.

I started with my credit card debt. Only about $1000, mostly for eating out when I was a student, and for a trip I took with my ex-girlfriend. I paid this off in the first month.

I then tackled my car loan. I owed about $4,000 on an original loan of $7500. I had already been paying on it for two years. $1500 of the original amount was for borrowing fees. The other $6,000 is what the bank actually gave me to buy an overpriced used car. In the two years I had been paying I had paid about $500 in interest. So already my $6,000 dollar car had cost me $8,000, I was not willing to let that go up any further. In two months I had paid off this loan completely.

My final obstacle was the student loans, which amounted to about $10,000. Once again I put every spare penny I had into them. When I had paid about half of the balance I had a bit of good luck, though it didn’t seem that way at first. I parked my car at work one morning, alongside the road by the job-site as usual. I had left me car and walked around the hedge into the driveway where I met a co-worker who I began chatting with. At that moment I heard a loud crunch followed by the sound of a tire popping and grass breaking. I new it was my car. I rushed back to the street to find the drivers side of my car smashed to bits. As it turns out a flat deck truck and driven by with a crane extending into the shoulder of the road, it hadn’t been secured properly. My car was a write off and I received a settlement. Rather than spend it on another car I used it to pay off the rest of my loans. I was now totally debt free. I started getting to work through a combination of cycling, begging rides, and carpooling. Eventually I bought a beater car for $300.

Fast forward to today and I have no debt, and a positive net worth of several thousand dollars. It not much, yet, but it tastes like freedom, and freedom is delicious.