In celebration of the 50th episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast, we have a special Debt Free Theme Hour for you where we interview Jill & Sylvain Paslier about their journey paying off $197,000 of student loan debt in 28 months. They share how they practically accomplished this goal, their strategy for working together to knock out this debt and what is next up for their financial future now that they are debt free!
About Our Guests
Jill Paslier graduated with a Doctorate of Pharmacy from the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy in 2014. During the past two years, Jill has been involved in developing workflows and clinical services for a brand new specialty pharmacy with Banner Health. Her professional interests include working on projects to improve patient safety, optimize pharmacy workflows, and improve pharmacy quality. She leads the pharmacy Quality Council and precepts pharmacy students and residents.
Sylvain Paslier works as an Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Reputation.com.
Mentioned on the Show
Episode Transcript
Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to Episode 050 of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. We have a special treat for you in this episode as we celebrate making it to 50 episodes of this podcast. So as we approach 50,000 downloads of the podcast, and as we celebrate the 50th episode, on behalf of Tim Church and Tim Baker, from YFP, I want to say thank you for your support. It’s the encouraging discussion in the YFP Facebook group, the emails and support that we receive from you, the listeners, about the positive impact this podcast is having with regards to your own finances that keeps us excited about getting you a new episode each and every week. As we approach this mark of 50 episodes and 50,000 downloads of the show, I want to use this as a chance to ask you to help us share the good news with your friends and colleagues and to leave a review in iTunes or whatever podcast player you use, that will help more people learn about the show. And finally, if you have a story to share, a question we can answer or a topic you think we should address on a future show, shoot us a message inside the Your Financial Pharmacist Facebook group or by email at [email protected]. OK, let’s get started with today’s debt-free story.
Tim Ulbrich: Jilly and Sylvain, welcome to the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. So glad to have you on the show.
Jill Paslier: Hi. Happy to be here.
Sylvain Paslier: Thanks for having us.
Tim Ulbrich: Awesome. So Jill, why don’t we start with — I had a chance to get to know you a little bit, actually recently. I was in Tucson, Arizona at the University of Arizona doing a financial talk and got to hear a little more about your financial story. And as the listeners are going to hear just like I did, really an incredible story of what you and Sylvain have done and done together as a team. So why don’t we start with just giving us a little bit of background about where you graduated from pharmacy school, where you and Sylvain met, how long you’ve been married, and I think that will be a good kickoff to the episode.
Jill Paslier: Sure. So I am a 2014 of the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy. Sylvain and I actually met in 2008 when I was in my senior year of undergrad. I did a study abroad in France, and we met in France at the church there. And we kind of just kept in touch long-distance for a couple of years, started dating in 2010 and then get married in 2012, so right in the middle of my schooling. And then so from Minnesota, we moved out to Arizona for my first job out of school.
Tim Ulbrich: I think that was probably a good choice going from the weather of Minnesota to the weather of Arizona, so that’s a big plus. And Sylvain, tell us a little bit about the work that you do. And I’m also curious, just as a follow-up to that, knowing that you grew up as a French national, tell us a little bit about student loan debt and how that’s different and obviously, from what I understand, you voluntarily opted into marrying Jill with all this student loan debt, right?
Sylvain Paslier: Yes, that’s correct. When I said, “I do,” I said, “I do to the student loans as well.” Yeah, so, you know, in France, higher education is subsidized, so I was privileged to pursue an education for free, essentially. You know, paid back in taxes. And so obviously, that was pretty different moving over to the U.S. and realizing that most of my peers had a lot of financial baggage. So I’m very fortunate that I did not have that. And so it was quite an adjustment to get into that, understanding how to pay it back, obviously. And to your question, I currently work for a tech company. I do account management. It’s one of these dotcom companies, headquartered in Silicon Valley, but they have an office in Tempe here.
Tim Ulbrich: So Jill, take us back all the way to 2014. You graduate from pharmacy school, you get your PharmD, you look up, you’ve got over $180,000 in student loan debt. And obviously, that number would accrue some additional interest. I mean, at that moment, take us through what you were thinking and how that debt load impacted you and obviously secondarily, Sylvain, when you were a new graduate.
Jill Paslier: So I didn’t really keep track of my student loans while I was a student. I did a private undergrad. I took an extra year in the middle where I kind of worked and did some prereqs for pharmacy school and then, of course, the four-year PharmD. So I knew that I was taking out a lot of loans because a lot of times I would max it out. Almost my entire education was financed. So I knew it was going to be a lot, but I really had no idea what that number was until I graduated. So that summer, I got the paper that says how much it is. It was $187,000 right out the door from pharmacy school. So I just thought that was like a huge number. At first, I was really optimistic, you know, we’re getting a good salary, and we’re going to be able to pay it off really fast. But it was a lot harder than I expected.
Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. And I’m glad you brought that up because you mentioned kind of the lack of keeping track and awareness of it. We’ve talked a lot on this podcast about, you know, step No. 1 for students and new practitioners, residents, whomever, is really just inventorying your student loans and knowing what you have before you can obviously start to put a plan together to attack them. So Sylvain, talk to us a little bit about the journey of when that moment hit you guys of saying like, wow, we’ve got to pay this off. And obviously, as I alluded to in the introduction, you did it relatively — not relatively, you did it really quickly, I mean two years and four months — but what was that moment where you guys said together, wow, there’s got to be a different way of doing this. And then a little bit about just practically, what did that look like in terms of adjusting other expenses to attack those loans?
Sylvain Paslier: Yeah, absolutely. So at first, it was very overwhelming to realize the amount of student loans. But at the same time, it was almost numbing. And there is such a normalization of student loans that we didn’t feel any pressure to attack it very quickly. So it’s only through a series of events that made us aware of the issue and of the opportunity in our lives that would emerge from paying it off quickly that we took action. And some of these steps were becoming educated around personal finance and then modifying our lifestyle to increase our income and reduce our outgo lifestyle choices. So it’s really been kind of this series of events that — basically all that to say, we didn’t get it all at once. It was a number of little things that got us to the point where we realized we needed to work at it very hard.
Tim Ulbrich: And is it fair to see — Sylvain, were you guys kind of both on the same page from day one of we’ve got to attack this? Or was one of you taking the lead and then the other person caught up over time?
Sylvain Paslier: So we were in it together. You know, as soon as we got married, we combined our finances and you know, this is what we think — what we thought and what we still think is the best for our marriage. So you know, when Jill and I got married, Jill had two more years of pharmacy school to go through. And so I was the breadwinner of our household. And you know, there’s times when maybe one of us is not going to be able to work as much, and it just — basically, we need to be a team in good times and in the bad times, and so there was no doubt that Jill’s debt had become my debt, as much as I didn’t like that, and that we were going to tackle it as a team.
Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I love that, and I’m thinking even back to previous podcast episodes we’ve had, Adam Patterson is coming to mind from Episode 031, Allen and Ethan Coe (?) is coming to mind as well. And I think both of those podcasts really resonated this idea and power of team and how important it is to say, this is our debt. This is our issue that we’re going to tackle. And I don’t know how you guys feel, but once you get through that, the thing that my wife and I felt is, you know, when you’re going through that process of paying down student loans and in some regard, almost grinding it out together, when you get on the other side of that, you’re like, wow, we did that as a team. Like we accomplished that, and now what’s next? You know, what other goals are we after? What are we trying to achieve? So Jill, I’m doing just some quick back-of-napkin math, and the numbers are really unbelievable. I mean, you think about that debt load, you mentioned graduating 2014, $187,000, obviously that would go up a little bit with interest, you pay that off in two year and four months, that’s a lot of money per month that you guys are throwing at these loans. Can you share a little bit about just what that looked like each and every month and how you practically carve that money out? I mean, was that side hustling, earning extra income, working extra shifts? Was that cutting expenses and budgeting? Or was it a little bit of both?
Jill Paslier: So it’s a little bit of both. So we both kind of worked two jobs for about two years. So we didn’t really dive right in for the first couple of months after I graduated. I only started working in October, so there was a few months where, you know, we only had one income and we were putting tiny bits of money towards the debt, but we really started in October after I graduated. Shortly after, I got kind of a second job code with my company so that I could work nights and weekends on additional projects, I guess. And then Sylvain was also working two jobs. So I think we were both really motivated to work extra, try to get our income up. Another way that we were able to get our take-home pay up so that we could put it towards the debt is that we actually minimized anything coming out of our paycheck. So for example, retirement, we did not contribute to retirement for the first year since we weren’t getting the match. The second year, as soon as we were eligible for the match, we only put in that 3-4% for the match, nothing else. And then for health insurance, we are choosing like the HSA plan so that we have the lowest monthly premiums. And I think those things altogether really help to increase our take-home pay, which is what we could use to pay off that debt. I can also talk about like some decreased expenses, like what did we do there. So when I graduated, you know, we see our friends on Facebook, and we see them buying new cars, maybe getting a house, you know, going up in lifestyle right away. It was tempting to do that, and I would still like a bigger kitchen to this day because we’re just in the apartment that we started off in. So we’re still in a very modest apartment, it’s the same rent as what we were paying when I was a student, for the most part. We haven’t moved up in our cars; we have the same cars we were driving as students. We limited kind of other expenses, things that we like to do like eating out and traveling. We really reigned those in, and we said no sometimes, even when we wanted to. So those are kind of the ways we were able to decrease our expenses. One other thing I’ll just mention quickly is that we got really into an idea called minimalism, which basically means that you’re living with minimal items, I guess the amount of items and things that you need, but not excessive. So I think that that helped us to stop shopping as much because we realized that we were giving it all away to Goodwill a couple months later anyways. So that definitely decreased our expenses, just like we didn’t want to buy things anymore because we knew, you know, we probably wouldn’t use it in the future, and we were much more selective on that too.
Tim Ulbrich: So much wisdom there. I mean, I love the practicality of what you guys did, and I think one of the pieces so many people struggle with is, you know, they hear all those decisions about you know, giving up on potentially some of the house things or the car things or vacations or eating out or whatever. And I think a key piece there is that, you know, those can be, but they’re not necessarily forever decisions, right? So you’re a 2014 grad, you know, you’re approaching that four-year anniversary from graduation, now you’re in a position of debt-free from your student loans and obviously the doors are wide open in terms of what you guys can do. And I’d be curious to hear your opinion — I know one of the things Jess and I felt, my wife and I, as we went through our journey is that you get to the end of this journey of paying off all of your student loan debt, and you start to realize that over those years, you build these disciplines and these behaviors that carry on obviously beyond that repayment period. So how are you guys practically — for lack of a better phrase, like toning it down, you know, now that you have all this debt repaid? Or have you just said, we’re going to shift this money we were paying towards student loans and we’re going to now put it towards other priorities such as retirement, giving, home buying? How have you made that adjustment to that post-debt life?
Sylvain: Yeah, so the irony, first, is that the day that you pay off your debt, sure you jump up and down and you’re so excited, but the reality is after all, not much has changed. And so you’ve essentially practiced over a number of years, discipline and contentment, and I think those are huge investments in our personal character. And so really, one key is to realize that although yes, paying off debt is a really big deal, once you do pay it off, you know, you’re still waking up and going to work and trying to find meaning in your life. And so that meaning was found solely in consumption and keeping up with the Joneses, then achieving that threshold is not going to be fulfilling.
Tim Ulbrich: Before we continue with the rest of today’s episode, here’s a quick message from our sponsor.
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Tim Ulbrich: Now back to today’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast.
Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. And I think it’s — I mean, as you guys are now on the back end of that — and I couldn’t agree more on the focus of consumption, and actually it’s — Jill, I think you used the term “minimalism,” and we’re actually right now in a small group studying the discipline of simplicity. And I think same kind of idea there. And there’s so much power, I think, and value in that, but there’s also, you know, I think a balance point where you can enjoy some of that. And are there specific things, Jill, that you guys are now looking at and saying, OK, we’ve done this, we’re maybe toning down the two jobs each or we’re now shifting this towards retirement or giving or vacations? Or are you still in that period where it’s like, oo, it’s hard to tone this down, we’re so used to this mentality of grinding it out and paying off the loans?
Jill Paslier: So we’re no longer working two jobs each. We’re just doing the one. That was easy enough. As far as actually spending money, we still do not spend a lot of money. It’s funny because before, when we had the debt, we would say, OK, what are we going to do when we have an extra $6,000-8,000 a month? You know, what are we going to do with this money? Because that’s how much we were putting towards our debt sometimes. And you know, I kind of joke at this, but Sylvain said he wanted some fancy muffins, like from the nice grocery store. Like it’s just simple things, you know? And like, we’re not looking to buy extravagant, expensive things. So I think we’re finding some excitement in those little expenses, maybe eating out a little more, you know, we still travel a lot, and we do have an international travel to Europe usually at least once a year to visit with Sylvain’s family, so that’s where some of our money goes. Our other main goals now, we fully funded an emergency fund, so we have a good six months of emergency fund buffer in case anything happens. And then we’re really focusing right now on saving for retirement. So I told you we kind of postponed that a little bit while we were paying off the debt, and of course I wasn’t saving while I was a student, so we feel a little bit behind. So actually for the last year, we’ve been putting about 25-50% of our gross income into retirement because we weren’t using that money anyways. So it’s easy enough to just shift it from the debt now to retirement, and then we can actually see the money growing in our account, which is actually pretty nice. We thought about having more of that money funneled towards like a down payment on a home, but we don’t necessarily want to buy a house right now. So we figured the best place to put it is retirement, some of those tax-favored accounts, just let it grow there. And then when we’re ready, we can save up a down payment I think pretty quick once we re-funnel the income a little bit.
Tim Ulbrich: And just to clarify, I think what I heard you say earlier is that when you were in the beginnings of employment, that first year while they did not offer a match, you temporarily suspended any savings toward retirement. But then when the match was offered, you took that match, but nothing beyond the match. And now, you guys are obviously going at it aggressively. Is that correct?
Jill Paslier: Yep, exactly.
Tim Ulbrich: OK. So Sylvain, tell me, probably one of the most common questions we get through the podcast and the blog and the Facebook group is, should I be paying off my debt? Should I be investing? Should I be doing home buying? Should I be doing all of them? And obviously, you guys strategically made a decision that, we’re going all in on our loans with the exception of that retirement match. And obviously you’re also carved out and said, we’re going to wait on the home buying piece. So for the two of you, what was it philosophically that you guys said, you know what, we’re going to get rid of this debt. Was it your beliefs around debt? Was it the amount of it? The weight of it? The interest rates around it? I mean, what was the decision point for you guys to really attack that portion solely.
Sylvain Paslier: Yeah, absolutely. So basically, we discovered another resource, which I don’t know if I’m allowed to mention on the podcast, but Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University, which was instrumental for us to get started and have a methodology to basically start that journey. And so that was the, again, the game plan to start budgeting and then attacking the debt in the specific order. So that was the methodology that we used.
Jill Paslier: And I’ll share — I can add something to that. So kind of our mentality around the debt, we were paying — our minimum was about $1,100 a month. And $1,000 was going towards interest, and $100 was going towards the principal. So as soon as I really saw those numbers, I got so angry, and I said, those banks are taking all of our money, $1,000 every single month. And we just got really kind of fed up with like shelling out that $1,000, and we’re like, we’re going to be in debt, they’re going to get so much money that we have to pay in interest. And I think we just got really motivated and fired up and started to hate the debt. So I think that really helped with our kind of motivation. Like every single month, if we could pay an extra $1,000 or more towards the principal, we knew that was going to be saved from making an interest payment later.
Tim Ulbrich: And Jill, I recall when you and I met, I think I remember you saying something about you were originally on the pathway of 8- or 10-year payoff, and obviously that happened a lot faster. So was that moment where you kind of said, wow, yes, we could make this $1,100 payment, but we’re going to go much more above that? I mean, was that sort of the catalyst, the defining moment that allowed you to start accelerating that payoff?
Jill Paslier: Kind of. I would say budgeting was even more useful in that because we were already kind of fired up. And I remember we were paying $1,100, and I was like, what if we could pay an extra $1,000 per month? Oh my gosh, we’re paying $2,000, this is so great, we’re doing such a good job. And we laid it out, and we’re like, oh, we’re going to be done paying this in eight years. That will be so good. And once we really got ahold of our budget and seeing where the money was going and like actually choosing where it went and getting our incomes up and our expenses down, we saw that we had a lot more than just $2,000 a month to put towards the loans. So I think once we really got control of that, you know, we were able to put up to $6,000 and sometimes $8,000 a month towards the student loans.
Tim Ulbrich: Awesome. So since you brought up budgeting, let’s talk budgeting for a minute because I think — and the listeners know I’m a firm believer of that being the catalyst for a financial plan, and obviously for two people working together, a budget can often be the most difficult thing. So Sylvain, let’s talk for a minute about budgeting in the Paslier household. So what does this practically look like for you guys? I mean, is this something month-by-month, you’re sitting down? Is one of you taking the lead? If you could give listeners kind of a behind-the-scenes look of how you two go through the budgeting process and how you come to consensus and maybe even the tools, if any, that you use for budgeting.
Sylvain Paslier: Yeah, absolutely. So first, it was helpful to understand some guidelines around what percentage of your income should go towards rent, towards food, towards clothing, entertainment, etc. So we found some of these resources online, and then we tracked our expenses and realized that they weren’t aligned with these “best practices” of budgeting. And so we slowly — you know, it took a few months, but we slowly realigned our budget with what our goals were in order to have extra in our budget to allocate to debt or whichever other maybe short-term goal was happening. Practically speaking, Jill is very good at, she’s very analytical, she’s good at mathematics, and she loves spending time in Excel. And so she’s taking the lead on kind of drafting that monthly budget, and then we review it together. And so that’s kind of what that looks like. Typically, I mean, ideally, we should do that before the first day of the month. You know, sometimes we’re a few days late, sometimes we’re a few days early. The big idea is that we’re trying to be intentional towards the beginning of the month to set it in month for the rest of the month.
Tim Ulbrich: And I’m guessing Jill is a FPU, Financial Peace Univeristy, fan and my understanding — I think that you’re teaching a course as well. I’m assuming that you guys are using more of a zero-based budgeting process. Is that fair?
Jill Paslier: Yep, that’s what we do.
Sylvain Paslier: Correct.
Tim Ulbrich: OK. And do you keep it all in Excel? Or do you then translate it into a tool like Mint or Everydollar or something like that?
Jill Paslier: So we usually do actually more like a paper budget first, just so we can see the numbers and we can edit them together. And you know, the main categories are housing, food, transportation, I guess we don’t have — we usually don’t have a lot of healthcare or shopping categories. Now we have pocket money, which we didn’t really have when we were trying to get out of debt. Those are the main categories, and we put — basically, we write it out on paper and then we put it into Mint so that we can track our progress throughout the month. The categories pretty much line up, so we can see what our goals are and how close we are, you know, if we’re halfway through the month and we’ve spent half of our food budget, then we know we’re on track. You know, if we’ve spent more or less, we know how to adjust. So yeah, we use Mint. I think when we were paying off the debt, I probably looked at Mint like every other day. Like all the time because I wanted to see, is there any way we can spend less in a certain category or free up some money to pay off the debt so I think we’re a little bit more relaxed now but still on track to meet some of our longer term goals.
Tim Ulbrich: And when you say and use the term pocket money, are you referring to the concept of kind of discretionary spending money that each of you have that doesn’t necessarily have to have a specific money? So my wife and I call it blow money. Is that kind of the same idea?
Jill Paslier: Yep. Same thing. Sylvain and I get a little bit every month. Like we’re such savers at this point that we barely even spend it, really. So it just rolls over to the next month. That’s what we do.
Tim Ulbrich: Awesome. So Jill, let me ask you a question. I mean, if you could kind of put yourself in the shoes of a 2018 graduate coming out, you know, what advice would you have for either current students or new graduates this year or coming out or recently came out? What are a couple things that you’d recommend to them and those that are listening that are coming out with a debt load that maybe looks very much like yours?
Jill Paslier: I think I would just want to encourage them that it’s possible to pay it off. I mean, it’s a huge amount of debt, you know, if you’re up there around $150,000 or $200,000. But we’ve been there, and other people have been there, and it is possible to pay it off. And I would just recommend, you know, learning how to do a budget, really see where your money’s going, kind of maximize your income if you can. You know, if you’re married, work together with your spouse. If you have a roommate, hopefully that helps a little bit on the housing cost so if you can bring any of your kind of living expenses down, you’ll have more money to pay towards the student loans and really pay those off faster.
Tim Ulbrich: That’s great advice. And I find your story incredibly inspirational. I’m sure other listeners are going to as well. And you know, one thing to hit maybe as I’m just kind of thinking here of what we’ve talked about is Sylvain, you used terms I think earlier around — you said something like it felt numbing, and it felt overwhelming. And what I love about your story is I feel like your hustle, both of you working two jobs for two years, I can tell there was obviously a commitment to learn about this topic, whether it’s podcasts, books, Financial Peace University, whatever, and a commitment to do this together. And I think there’s so much wisdom there, and I appreciate you both taking the time to come on the show and share your story. So Jill and Sylvain, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, I appreciate it.
Jill Paslier: Yeah, thanks a lot. It was fun.
Sylvain Paslier: Thanks for having us, Tim.
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