How this couple paid off $114,000 of debt and then saved up $431,000

• Jhanilka and Anthony Hartzog paid off $114,000 in debt, a combination of student loans, an auto loan, and credit card debt.
• After meeting with a financial advisor, they set a goal to be debt-free in 23 months — by Jhanilka’s 30th birthday.
• They built onto their existing income by dog sitting, working at the gym, car sharing, and starting a maid service.
• The Hartzogs advise those who want to pay down debt to get serious about budgeting, start side hustles instead of cutting out expenses, and make sure the side gigs offer flexibility.
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In January 2017, Jhanilka and Anthony Hartzog were recently married and had relocated from Brooklyn to Dallas. They each had a good job, and their combined salaries added up to about $180,000 a year.

But they also had a problem: They were in debt for $114,000. The bulk of this was student debt, but it also included $30,000 for their new car and about $7,000 in credit card debt.

The Hartzogs wanted to travel and they didn’t want this debt dragging them down for decades. “Jhanilka had a New Year’s resolution in 2017 to travel more and save more,” Anthony Hartzog recalls. “I was saying, it’s going to be really, really hard to try to travel more and save more.”

That’s when the couple decided to get serious about paying off their debt quickly. After a meeting with a financial advisor, they set a goal to be debt-free by Jhanilka’s 30th birthday in December, 2018, only 23 months away.

Not only did they meet that deadline, two years later they’ve built up $431,000 in savings.

How did they do it?

Anthony works full-time as director of client support at an IT firm. Jhanilka is a licensed mental health counselor who works full-time for a managed care company and also provides online therapy via the mental health app TalkSpace.

Even so, they were able to build on their existing income with an impressive array of side hustles that the couple says fit comfortably into their lifestyle and the ways they already spent their time.

Here’s what they added:

• Working at the gym. Both Hartzogs love to work out and they already spent lots of time at their high-end gym. So they thought, why not get part-time jobs there? Anthony got a job on the maintenance staff and Jhanilka, worked at the reception desk, eventually becoming the front desk manager.

  Time commitment: 25-30 hours per week for Anthony, 20 hours per week for Jhanilka.

  Extra income: Approximately $1,000 a month, plus hundreds of dollars in monthly savings, since as employees, they were entitled to free memberships. 

• Dog-sitting. The Hartzogs have a dog, and even before the pandemic Jhanilka worked from home. So they signed up with a dog-sitting app because it was easy enough to have one or more additional dogs around, plus it helped develop their own dog’s social skills. They set their price at $25 per day per dog, and sometimes had three or four extra dogs around on weekends.

  Time commitment: “There weren’t really separate hours,” Jhanilka says, though she notes that having several dogs on hand can be more stressful than just one.

  Extra income: Between $150 and $500 per month.

• Car sharing. The Hartzogs rented out their car through a peer-to-peer car-sharing service in which customers rent cars directly from car owners when the owners aren’t using them.

  Time commitment: None (other than not having the car available). “They would come pick up the car, drive it around, and drop it back off,” Anthony says.

  Extra income: About $700 per month. 

• Maid service. Anthony heard a podcast in which a college student talked about starting a cleaning service where he contracted out the cleaning duties so that he never had to do any housework himself. The Hartzogs thought that was a pretty good idea, so they reached out to the student for some advice, and then started their own cleaning service, Maids2Match, funding the startup with some of the money from their part-time jobs.

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