I have a ridiculously complicated Excel spreadsheet that I use to play out payment plan scenarios and keep track of progress with this. It took me an entire Sunday, several months ago, to create it and come up with a game plan for repaying the debt—but it was totally worth it as now I pretty much just have a checklist to go down, which is nice.

I’d say I have paid off about 26-28% of the total outstanding debt since August. This is pretty notable progress especially since for the past few years until this point, I had thought I was “working on it” but I never seemed to get anywhere, at all. So now I can see the numbers actually going down, to which all I have to say is: Yay!