"I felt like if we were going through a weight-loss journey and you lost a ton of weight and you celebrated by eating a lot of pasta," said Ashley Wilson, who spent just $25 to decorate a small party she had with her husband. "It didn't make sense."
Wilson paid off $22,000 in student debt in three years by cutting back massively. She did not have cable or internet during this time, and says she did not eat out once.
Zina Kumok, a personal-finance blogger who paid off $28,000 of student loans in three years as well, said that the point of paying off debt is less about achieving the moment, and more about building good money habits. Kumok said once when she was still in debt, she saw a $300 dress at Anthropologie and told herself she could've been able to buy it, had it not been for her loans.
But even after paying off her student debt, she realized that she didn't need to spend $300 on a dress. Similarly, she didn't feel the need to splurge on a debt-payoff party.
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"Everything I learned by paying off my student loans taught me I don't need a lot of money to be happy, I need financial security," Kumok said. Her one splurge when she paid off her loans was on a $20 pie.
Yet Wilson said if she could go back, she may have splurged on something bigger.
"It was a huge deal — emotionally it was big; financially it was big," she said. "Maybe I should've celebrated in a bigger way."