My goal, as soon as I can get stable employment, is to pay off my outstanding debt in 1-2 years.
Half of it is student loans, a third of the remainder is a very stupid personal loan I took out three years ago, and the remainder is money owed to a friend who floated me through hard times.
I can’t wait.
Good job Ogre. Now you’ll be able to save up for the inevitable furnace/AC unit shitting the bed, water heater breaking down and/or the always popular leaking roof!
No need for me to mention those pesky car problems.
Just sayin. 
Congratulations, Ogre!
Whoa! Go out to do some field work, and yer thread blows up! Thanks a lot, guys. I know indebtedness is an endemic problem in the US, and I don’t mean to say we’re completely free and clear (mortgage, etc.), but we have no more life-sucking credit debt.
And BigT, through varying fortunes, it’s been about 8 years. We probably would have had it paid off before now, but I came back for my PhD, and they don’t pay us enough to make significant inroads on debt, y’know?
I will be debt-free by mid-October. While it wasn’t a huge debt, it was huge enough for me. But maybe it was huge because I didn’t know about it for a long time? Perhaps.
Also, hi friend Ogre.
Holy shit, Noc! How are you? What are you doing now? I have a baby! 
Good job.
Even for those who aren’t suffocating under debt, it’s a good time to put as much of your earnings toward debt repayment as possible – interest returns for savings, etc. are hovering close to zero, so by paying off debt that is almost certainly at a higher rate you can de facto achieve a yield with each incremental new dollar of 5% or 10% or 19.5% or whatever your old debt is at (almost sure to be significantly higher than current money market/CD yields).