Name: Martin Lilienthal Jr.
Age: 43
Hometown: Wallingford, Conn.
We focused on finding every available extra dollar and put it to our car loan and paid off the $9,691.09 balance by January 2010.
After that, every extra dollar we could find, every raise we received, every time we negotiated a lower bill on items such as insurance or phone service -- that money went to pay down the debt on our house.
On June 1, 2011, we made the last payment and became debt free.
NEXT: Strengthened safety net
