<prompt> Human: I Graduate with a B.S. this December and will be taking on about 30k in student loans not counting whatever interest accumulated over the last 4 years. I need to hear some success stories so I can stop working myself up into a panic and thinking I wont know happiness or success until they are paid off.Edit: thank you all so much for taking the time to write these down. I appreciate the advice and will try to follow your examples. I definitely am starting to feel more hopeful!  <response>: When I got married I inherited about 40k in debt between a masters degree and a car. We both worked at fairly good jobs that gave us roughly 75-80k a year. We were able to budget, scrape, and save enough within about 14 months to cover the total. I had a decent emergency fund saved from before marriage so that wasnt a concern. We simply buckled down and took care of it as a team. 