How a Billings Photographer Paid Off Her Own Student Loans

With everyone out there looking for somebody else to pay their bills, looking for someone else to pay off their student loans for them...I thought this was pretty cool and worth commending.

Amy Lynn Nelson is one of the great photographers you might stumble across at The Billings Gazette. I ended up chatting with the fellow Glasgow, Montana native at the PBR at the Metra a while back while the bulls were kicking up dirt towards the photographers on the arena floor.

Here's what she shared on Facebook recently along with the above photo:

Amy Lynn Nelson: "This summer I reached a milestone... I paid off my student loans! I paid off just under $30,000 in 11 months, entirely with freelance photography income. I want to give a heartfelt thank you to everyone who supported me along the way, especially everyone who supported my small photography business. Photography is my only source of income. I am grateful every day for the opportunity to live my dream of being a full-time professional photographer. Today my only debt is my mortgage. There is no joy quite like witnessing the impact professional images can make in people's lives. Thank you for supporting my small business and making my dreams come true!!"

Amy Lynn Nelson is a 2016 graduate of Glasgow High School. She graduated with a BA in Political Science from Bozeman in the fall of 2020. She wrote a great story back in 2022 about buying her house in Edgar amidst the skyrocketing post-pandemic housing prices in Montana.  

Amy Lynn Nelson: "After getting settled into homeownership, in the spring of 2023, I got serious about the idea of paying off my student loans as quickly as possible. In fact, when the Supreme Court came out and said they’d struck down loan forgiveness, I had just made my first real payment because it solidified the idea that you can’t rely on the government for financial forgiveness. So the process of me paying off my loans was 11 months from start to finish. I watched nearly every Dave Ramsey video for motivation and adopted the snowball approach. I started by knocking out my smallest loan first which was $450 then went up from there."

She tells us about her "drive for frugality"- the low mileage car her dad found for her at the auto auction, renting a room from a friend when she first started working at the Billings Gazette, and saying yes to nearly every side hustle photography gig that came her way.

Amy Lynn Nelson: "Paying off my very last loan this summer was the best feeling in the world. Knowing that I had accomplished it through hard work was unlike any other accomplishment. It was many, many months of working on my days off and saying yes to nearly every photo opportunity that came my way, but I’m in an incredibly fortunate position at 26. If I could go back, I would do it the same."

Very cool. In a way, it's almost crazy that paying off your debts is a story these days. Paying off your debts is just something that we as Montanans and Americans have always been expected to do (barring extreme circumstances, of course). When I got my first job in broadcasting at a local TV station, I was lucky enough to have my monthly National Guard drill pay to subsidize my income. And I was still paying off my own student loans.

Back in 2022, I shared one simple sentence on Facebook that ended up getting half a million impressions in the first few days. I simply said, "I paid off my student loans in Afghanistan." Boy you should have seen how triggered some people got over that one.