After a long fight, Ohio-based Josiah Poletta and his wife, Courtney, have finally paid off $142,000 in debt, $126,000 of which was student loan debt.
Whatever way you slice it, it’s eventually a narrative of success and optimism.
The husband and father of two, a high school history teacher in Van Wert, Ohio, expressed about the road he traveled to get to a far better financial and personal situation. It had been a difficult journey.
Nonetheless, he stated that he would not have desired the government to bail him out of the financial mess he had created for himself.
Currently, he and his wife are pleased with where they are and the actions they’ve done to “get our finances in line,” he added.
According to Poletta, he graduated from college in 2014. The pair was carrying “a total of $142,000 in debt — $126,000 of which was student loan debt” when he purchased a vehicle, he claimed.
He stated he was responsible for most of the debt since he attended a private school and took out several loans throughout time to support his expenses.
But he is not here to be a victim, he explained. Simply, they opted to pay off their debt because they thought it was the greatest approach to get our finances in order rather than owing money to other people, he explained.
They wished to have stuff for themselves and not be in a terrible self-worth situation, Poletta added.
He explained, they simply started adopting the Dave Ramsey approach of getting out of debt, step by step.
Poletta stated that he and his wife were inspired by a need to start a family and buy a home and they want a logical approach of clarity and structure.
They wanted to do a lot of things that paying other people’s money wouldn’t enable them to accomplish, he explained. They wanted to be able to get their finances in order and keep their money where it belonged.
One starts by making sure one has $1,000 in savings for any crises that could come up and a lot of folks don’t even have that, Poletta noted of how he and his wife adopted the Ramsey technique.
They may use credit cards if necessary, but they wanted to have their own money on hand in case they required it.
He then went on to discuss phase two, which he dubbed the debt snowball strategy. One makes a list of all of their debts, from smallest to largest, and uses a snowball-down-the-hill strategy to pay off one at a time with their own money. Then one uses the money one was paying to somebody else before to pay off the next loan and so on.
It’s “a debt reduction method,” according to the Ramsey Solutions team, in which one pays off one bill in order of smallest to largest, irrespective of interest rate.
However, more than that, they add on their website, the debt snowball is intended to assist one modify one’s money behavior so one never go into debt again; it gives one control over one’s debt as when one pay off that first one and move on to the next, one will see that debt is not the boss of one’s money; one is.
Step three, according to Poletta, is to save three to six months worth of spending in an emergency fund.
Step four is all about saving for retirement; step five is for one’s kids — doing the same thing, saving for them. Pay off one’s house, he urged as the sixth step. Seven, he said, is that one lives debt-free.
The Polettas are presently in phase 3B, he explained.
They’ve got their emergency fund in place and now they are saving enough to put a down payment on a house, which, in this property market, demands a larger down payment than in the past, Poletta said.
He also recounted the difficult times he had recently in order to make ends meet and pay off a large portion of his debt.
He donated plasma twice a week, Poletta added, earning between $70 and $120 every donation. He also went through a whole winter without heat in his car as he couldn’t afford to maintain it.
According to Poletta, he didn’t have a bachelor party or go on a honeymoon.
He also stated that he and his wife ate plain noodles since they couldn’t afford groceries. He’d save money on lunches to make food last longer, never ate out, sold a car so they could share one and kept their heat at 60 degrees in the winter.
Courtney and Josiah are an outstanding pair, personal financial specialist Dave Ramsey, host of “The Ramsey Show” and author of eight number-one best-selling books, expressed by the Polettas. They are individuals of character who work hard for their families and, sadly, they are two of the 45 million Americans who have become enslaved by student loan debt.
He is very proud of them for committing to ‘The Baby Steps,’ digging out of debt, and permanently transforming their family tree, he continued.
He explained that their income fluctuated slightly, so anytime they had extra money at the end of the month, they would dump it all on the lowest debt, in addition to paying the regular monthly amount.
He also stated that budgeting rescued them and debt repayment brought them out of the mess.
For nearly two and a half years, the pair was proactive in their debt payments, he claimed. He admits that he had assistance in repaying all of his debt. He and his wife did not accomplish it alone, and they are appreciative for the unexpected assistance they got.
Their debt would be paid off by October 2021.
When asked about student loan forgiveness today, Poletta said, he is not here to play the victim.
He recognized that he made the mistakes that got him where he was, he added, therefore he personally determined it was time for him to pay off those loans. He doesn’t think the government should help him out with that.
