Photo: Mike Arrison
Mandy Velez, 27, recently paid off more than $100,000 in loans, and celebrated with a funeral-themed photo shoot that officially declared her loans dead and gone.
In the photos, which have since gone viral, Velez is dressed in all black in New York City’s Trinity Church Cemetery, and poses with silver balloons reading, “102K,” the staggering amount she says she managed to pay off in just six years.
“It is with immense pleasure that I announce the death of my student loans. On August 2, 2019, after six years, I finally killed them,” she wrote on Facebook. “It was a slow death but was worth every bit of the fight.”
Velez, a senior social media editor at The Daily Beast, explained in her post that she graduated from college in 2013 with $75,000 in loans, not including interest.
She soon moved to New York and did her best to pay off $1,000 per month, taking jobs she didn’t care for but which could help her “survive.”
For five years, she never missed a payment, managing to fight through setbacks such as a layoff from her job.
Mandy Velez.Mike Arrison
Despite the progress over the years, Velez said she felt a sudden change last fall that inspired her to kick her payments into overdrive — and with that in mind, she paid off the remaining $32,000 in just eight months.
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Velez wrote that though it was difficult to turn down various opportunities with her family and friends because of her financial situation, it was entirely worth it.“I used the ‘snowball’ method to pay them off faster and avoid more insane interest rates, which is how my loan total came to 102K —27k more than what I actually borrowed,” she wrote. “Was it easy? No. Worth it? I’m smiling in a cemetery. 102K lifted from my back. You tell me.”
“All I know is, this nightmare, this crisis, needs to end,” she wrote. “Being open about my debt, and the hoops I had to jump through to get rid of it, is how I’m trying to help.”
source: people.com
