“We come from a culture where we have this like moral obligation to care for the community as a whole.”
-Samantha Tillapaugh
Samantha Tillapaugh
Biography
Samantha Tillapaugh is known as TheDebtist, for having accrued over half a million dollars of student debt in order to get her dental degree. Rather than waiting 25 years for loan forgiveness, she is one of the few who chooses to pay it back aggressively in order to reach financial independence sooner. She writes on her blog about how she manages her debt by implementing a number of intentional lifestyle choices, including slow living, minimalism, and frugality. She created a course on Mastering a Budget in the hopes of helping others manage money better. She published the 75-page course for free on her site so that it would be accessible to all. She has been featured on ChooseFI as well as on Student Loan Planner. Her goal is to not let the student debt deprive her of her life now, as well as her life later.
Samantha was born in Quezon City, Philippines and moved to the United States in 1998. Her parents wanted her to pursue the American Dream, but the accumulation of status symbols and wealth symbols turned her away from the glamour of the West Coast, and back towards her roots and the qualities of a simpler life. Her ideal day in the life consists of doing a few yoga stretches as soon as she gets up, making a cup of pour-over coffee in the morning, writing on her site until lunchtime, reading books in the afternoon, and cuddling her adopted (once-homeless) toothless cat, Theodore in the evening.
Samantha Tillapaugh is a debtist – a dentist who graduated with a lot of student debt. After four years of undergrad and four years of dental school, she ended up with a debt of over $550k, which I then had to start paying back. This led Samantha to a series of life changes and discoveries about herself in her late twenties that shaped her lifestyle into what it is today. Saving money required her to be more frugal, and being more frugal opened up the doors to finding alternative ways to find happiness in things that don’t require consumerism.