The Tiny Apartment – How We Paid Off $80,000 in Two Years

We signed a one-year lease on the wrong apartment. Smaller, worse, not the one we inspected. We were 22 and 20, too scared to go back to the agent, so we moved in anyway.

No car. No TV. No furniture we owned. Half-price sandwiches for dinner and two laptops on a two-seater couch.

That apartment is also where an $80,000 student loan got paid off in two years, and where every money habit we still use got built.

In this episode:

• The lease we signed for an apartment we'd never seen
• What living below your means looked like day to day
• The budget rule, and where every dollar of savings went
• Clearing an $80,000 student debt in two years
• Why we kept renting long after we could have bought
• The month Amazon self-publishing first crossed $10,000
• What it cost us: marriage and kids, both later than we wanted
• What Ashton would tell his 22-year-old self

Next episode: turning income into assets. Saving isn't the end of it – at some point you have to decide what the money is actually going to do.

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Educational content only. Not financial advice.