- When she graduated college, the TikTok influencer who goes by Taylor BeepBoop found out she had $20,000 of student debt.
- She resolved to pay it off in a year, and made a plan starting with figuring out exactly how much she owed.
- She drastically reduced her living costs by renting a closet from a friend and taking side gigs.
- Read more from Personal Finance Insider.
The TikTok creator and freelance post-production professional who goes by the name Taylor BeepBoop online had just completed her bachelor’s degree when she got a strange text from her dad minutes after walking into her graduation ceremony. “Congrats, kid. Have fun paying off those student loans,” the message read.
She thought it was a joke.
Until that text, she believed her parents were paying the bill themselves due to a severe miscommunication. She didn’t realize they could no longer afford school after some financial struggles. She started college at 17 and didn’t ask questions as she signed forms. “I signed the paperwork, but I was a child,” she says.
“Within 10 seconds, I find out I’m starting my future in a mountain of debt,” the 28-year-old continues, later joking the synopsis of her financial history could be summarized as both “very impressive and very sad.” In one year, Taylor paid back over $20,000 of debt while working at $13 an hour, just a little over the minimum wage in California, where she lives. Below, she describes how she did this — and what she wouldn’t do again.
She worked backward to calculate exactly how much she’d need to pay monthly
For most of her life, Taylor was always financially conscious. “I remember telling my parents to not buy me toys anymore, because I didn’t want them to waste money,” she says. When the 2008
recession
hit, she begged her parents to open a brokerage account for her to invest the money she had — at the time, she was only in middle school.
“When the student loan hit me, it wasn’t extremely devastating; it was almost like I’d been preparing for this. I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop my whole life,” she explains.
Immediately, she started working on a road map to get herself out of the situation she’d been thrown into. Because she knew how detrimental high interest rates can be when trying to pay down debt, she knew she wanted to pay off the loans as quickly as possible. She ran her numbers through calculators to see how much interest she’d be paying over time. “That enrages me,” she says, “so I did whatever I had …….
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/taylor-beepboop-student-loans-2022-1
