A woman has celebrated paying off her $102,000 student loan debt at 27 years old by holding a funeral for the 'burden' – the last third of which she 'killed' in only eight months.
Mandy Velez shared images from the ceremony on Instagram and donned a lacy black ensemble for a photo shoot outside Trinity Church in Manhattan.
The New York journalist graduated from University of Pittsburgh in 2013 and set a goal of paying off her loan by the age of 30, without help from her family or boyfriend.
But she hit the achievement two years early despite initially only earning $40,000.
She paid off the first $70,000 in five years, an average of $1,166 a month, and the last $32,000 in eight months, which equates to $4,000 a month.
'DING DONG MY LOANS ARE DEAD,' she wrote on Instagram. 'It is with immense pleasure that I announce the death of my student loans. On August 2, 2019, after 6 years, I finally killed them. It was a slow death but was worth every bit of the fight.'