<prompt> Human: So inspired by How the heck do people afford anything? How much were your big purchases house, car, etc and how did you manage to pay them off?  <response>: I paid off 27K in undergraduate school loans by going in the Army. Back then the Army had a student load repayment program. The Army paid 13 of your student loans for each year served. It is funny now, because back then 27K seemed like so much money. It really isnt.Over the last 24 years I have paid off four new cars by making the payments. One of them we doubled the payments and paid it off in half of the term, in hindsight I wish we my SO and I hadnt done that. We should have used that money in other ways, mainly to avoid credit cards.Unless we live on someone elses tit, we will always have housing costs. Also we will always have car payments either by servicing a loan or by making repair payments. So you have to decide which you want to deal with. I paid off a mortgage by selling the house. We got a starter home right before the housing bubble hit in earnest, so we were able to sell it and make a huge profit. We used that to buy a house that was much bigger but maintained the same mortgage payment. Needless to say the new house needed a lot of work so we spent a lot of time and energy working on it. There were several factors that made us want to move. The first house had 1.5 baths and the middle school my kid was slated to go to was complete shit. Again in hind sight, I wish I had not moved. Owning a fixer upper gets to be a pain in the ass. Yes, houses always needs attention, but working for extended periods on your living space gets exhausting and you also have to content with the other maintenance efforts.Looking back I wish I had put an addition on the house and sent him to private school for three years. Now that he is almost out the house, I want to down size this house and I dont give a shit about schools. But it is all good, I have a nice house, he survived to early adulthood and soon he will be on his own to make his choices.We paid off 18K in credit card debts. To do that we built a plan put it in the budget and stuck to it. We laid out an 18 month plan and focused on it. We didnt allow any expenses that were not necessary. We didnt eat out, we didnt go on vacation. The most important thing we did was NOT put any more costs on it. We stuck to the plan. It is so nice to get free from those. 