Birthday Gift to Myself: Paid Off My Student Loans! (Total Paid ~$188k) 😭🎉

My birthday was on Jan. 3rd and I decided the best gift I could give myself was to bite the bullet and pay the remaining $6700 I had of the ~$188K I borrowed in student loans!
(Though, I technically paid it on 1/2 because my birthday fell on a Saturday 🙃)

I graduated from undergrad in 2014 and from a master's program in 2017 with six figures of debt total (this includes: mostly federal loans for grad & undergrad, ~$77k in Parent PLUS loans I took over from my retired parents, and 1 Sallie Mae loan). Things were looking pretty bleak, as I made very little money and bounced between deferment, forbearance, and paying only minimum payments for those first 5 years out of college.

It wasn't until the pandemic pause in 2020 (which miraculously coincided with my income increasing substantially) that I was able to make any real progress on my loan repayment. Between 2020-2023, I paid my student loans down in several bulk payments. First, the private loan. Then, the Parent PLUS loans. After that, I focused on my federal loans. Before interest started accruing again in 2023, I paid my last remaining loan down to $20K and paid off the existing interest.

I had expected to pay that last $20K off within a few months, but life happened and my (unpredictable) career hit a lull. At the end of 2023, my longterm contract ended and I had to live off savings and whatever (much lower paying) freelance gigs I could get for the next year-and-a-half. I couldn't keep making big payments, but I could pay enough to cover all the interest and chip a little off the principal each month.

In mid-2025, I was able to get another higher-paying, longterm contract like the one I had in 2023. After recouping some of the savings I'd spent in 2024 and early-2025, I made a bulk payment at the end of last year. And now, my very last student loan payment EVER has officially posted today (which is not my birthday, but close enough)!