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The Plan Nobody Gives You
A client came to me recently with 22 student loans.
Not one loan. Not three. Twenty-two. Undergrad loans and graduate loans spread across different servicers, different balances, different rates. The highest was sitting at 9%.
He's earning strong income. He knew the mountain was there and he wanted to attack it. That part -- the awareness -- is actually rare. It's a gift. Most people in his situation don't have it.
The case nobody talks about
When the debt is enormous and the income is high, the urgency is obvious. The numbers are too big to ignore.
The harder situation is the person making $100K with $80K in debt who feels like they finally have room to breathe.
They do have room. Just not as much as it feels like.
You spent years grinding through school with nothing in your account. The degree was supposed to fix that. Now the income is finally there and the instinct is to start living. That's human. But that's also how people end up five years out of school with the same balance they graduated with.
The lifestyle locks in before the plan does. And once it locks in, it's hard to pull back.
What the plan actually looks like
The framework starts with one question: what's the real monthly surplus?
Not gross income. Not what it feels like you have. Actual take-home after taxes, minus real fixed expenses. That number is your foundation.
From there, the structure looks like this:
- Guaranteed income covers the baseline debt payments. Attack the highest interest rate first, then work down by a combination of rate and balance.
- Variable income -- overtime, bonuses, commission -- gets stacked on top. One extra payment on the right loan can shave months off the payoff timeline.
- Other goals get their own buckets with specific deadlines. They don't compete with the debt -- they run alongside it. You just have to be intentional about which dollars go where.
The part most people skip
Before any of this works, you need to know what the degree was actually supposed to buy you -- not just in income, but in the life you want on the other side of the debt.
If you got the graduate degree to earn more, you need to understand what that income trajectory actually looks like over the next three to five years. Not every field pays the same at every stage. Knowing what you're realistically going to earn -- and when -- changes how aggressively you can attack the debt and what you can afford to save alongside it.
The degree was the investment. The income is the return. A strong income with a clear plan clears six figures of loans in two to three years without sacrificing everything in between.
The plan is not complicated. It's just the thing nobody sat down and walked you through.
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