How to Tackle Student Loans While Still Growing Wealth

Does the thought of your student loans ever feel like a heavy weight, constantly pulling against your dreams of building real wealth? You’re not alone. Millions of ambitious individuals like you feel caught between aggressive debt payoff and investing for their future.

In this video, we’re pulling back the curtain on strategies that can help you tackle your debt and simultaneously build wealth. Watch now!


Transcript:

Struggling with Student Loans? You’re Not Alone

Do you find yourself with a large student loan balance and you’re just not sure what to do?
Does it kind of hang over you and you’re just kind of like, I don’t want to deal with my student loans. They’re just an issue and you kind of feel like maybe they’re ruining your finances and that you have no future because of the student loans. I hope you don’t feel this way, but maybe you even regret going to school and taking out all the student loan debt.

There Is a Way Forward

Hey, if you feel that way, the good news is, I can be of help. My name is Ben Martinek. I’m a financial advisor with Bona Fide Finance, and I’d like to give you some direction on what to do with your student loans.

The Emotional Toll of Student Loan Debt

I can understand and appreciate this feeling of being overwhelmed. Loans, debts have a tendency to agitate us and make us feel a little worried and concerned, and maybe even hard to sleep at night because it’s just something that’s there and we can’t ever feel like we can get rid of it. But the good news is, your student loans can fall into place and don’t have to take on the highest priority in your situation.

Student Loans Don’t Have to Derail Your Financial Goals

And they don’t have to keep you from achieving other financial goals.But what you do have to do in order to make all that happen is we have to come up with a plan for those student loans.

Your Student Loan Repayment Options

So what are some of the options available to you in case you’re not familiar?

You could pursue what’s called public service loan forgiveness. If you work in the public sector, maybe a government entity or a nonprofit, and you’ve been working at them for a while, there are other eligibility requirements that have to be met, but you could very well have your loan debt forgiven.

Another possibility is we pay what we can over time through these different repayment plans that are available to you. And eventually we achieve a form of long-term forgiveness. And then they get taken care of through that means.

Or your third option could be like, look, yeah, we just have to repay this debt and bring the balance down to zero. And it’s maybe going to take us a little while, but we’ll eventually get them all paid off. And it’s a done matter.

Choosing the Right Strategy for Your Situation

Now, which way to go with any of those three options really just depends on the very specific details of your situation—your household dynamic, are you married or you’re not? How much money do you make now? How much money do you think you’ll make into the future? What type of loans do you have? What type of career do you have? Who are your employers? There’s a whole lot of details we have to look into to help have clarity as to what’s the right choice in your situation. But the good news is we can come to have clarity as to what the right decision, right choice is.

Creating and Following a Student Loan Plan

And then once we have that clarity, we can start to execute on a plan. And once we start to execute on that plan, those student loans can go from being this big, ugly, oh, I’m not sure what to do with them to like, you know what? They have their place. And we can now focus on other things.

We don’t necessarily have to repay these all back at once. They don’t have to be the number one focus or priority in our finances. We can maybe set money aside for a car or set money aside for a down payment on a house. Maybe we can relocate to another location because we don’t like where we’re living currently. Or maybe we want to be saving money into the future or even saving money into our children’s college education savings. So they don’t have to worry about student loans quite the way that you’re having to worry about your student loans.

Making Space for Other Financial Priorities

We can do all these things and figure out the priorities of what to do with your money once we’ve come up with a plan on your student loans and have only relegated them onto that back burner and we just execute the plan. Now, the reality is, the plan will probably need to get adjusted and updated and it won’t stay the same because this is a dynamic, fluid environment and things do change with it. But hey, have some constancy of heart. We can make this work and we can help make it work for you.

Let’s Build a Plan Together

So if you’re looking for someone to help you kind of come up with a plan on your student loans and then to help you implement that plan and just be a sounding board for you if changes are brewing and you’re needing some assistance, why don’t you reach out to me and my firm, Ben at Bona Fide Finance. You can reach us at hello@bonafidefinance.com.

That’s what we do for our work is we help student loan borrowers come up with their plan for their student loans so that they can focus their financial efforts on other things, more exciting things, things that they like and they enjoy, and to help them feel satisfaction and contentment with the career decision that they’ve made.

Student Loan Help Is Here—Let’s Move Forward

Don’t want you to feel down on your student loans any longer. There’s no need for that. Let’s come up with a plan. Let’s execute upon it. Let’s make this work and let’s move on to the other parts of your life, the best parts of your life. Student loans can be a thing of history. Thank goodness.

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Bonnie Martinek

Administrative Assistant
Bonnie (Ben’s mom!) is a mother of 9 and a grandmother of 17. She has lived in rural Indiana her whole life and has a master’s degree in Special Education. In her own words, she’s done a little bit of everything but is a master of none (teaching, construction, manager of a corn maze, CNA, farm work, cashier, auto bodywork, and the list goes on!). Widowed in 2019, she is reinventing herself through her work in the day-to-day operations of Bona Fide Finance and client relations. Bonnie loves getting to know our clients and is happy to serve them well!

Deb Martinek

Relationships Specialist

Deb has been with Bona Fide Finance since its inception in 2015 and long before that with her support of Ben studying for the CFP designation and the dream of starting the business of helping individuals and families meet their financial goals.

She fills the Relationships Specialist role – Deb is typically the first encounter our new clients have as she walks them through our service offerings and introduces them to the map of financial literacy.

She has a bachelor’s degree from Ball State University and a master’s degree from the Franciscan University of Steubenville. Deb lives in Bismarck with Ben and their two young daughters, is a card-carrying member of the CDL club (read more about those adventures here) and is happiest reading an epic novel, solving a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, or working in her kitchen where she can serve love to the people in her life through quality food (clients enjoy her holiday shipment of homemade goodies each December!).

Ben Martinek

CFP®, EA, CSLP®, RICP®, Founder and Advisor

Ben Martinek, CFP®, EA, CSLP®, RICP®, is the founder and lead advisor at Bona Fide Finance, an independent, fee-only firm dedicated to helping doctors, young professionals, and growing families take control of their financial future. With a deep understanding of student loan debt—having tackled his own—Ben specializes in guiding clients through debt repayment strategies, smart investing, and comprehensive financial planning so they can build wealth with confidence. Ben’s passion for financial planning comes from his desire to provide honest, objective advice tailored to each client’s unique situation. He loves seeing the impact of his work, whether it’s helping a family pay off student loans years ahead of schedule, setting up an early retiree for financial freedom, or giving clients the peace that comes from knowing their finances are in order. His clients appreciate his thoughtful, high-touch approach, often saying that working with him has changed their lives.

Before launching Bona Fide Finance in 2015, Ben’s career path was anything but conventional. The fourth of nine children, he grew up in rural Indiana and initially pursued a path in academia, earning a B.A. in philosophy and classical languages, followed by a master’s degree in philosophy. Along the way, he explored careers in construction and truck driving—logging over 600,000 miles across the U.S. with his wife, Deb—before finding his true calling in financial planning.

Now based in Bismarck, North Dakota, Ben and Deb stay busy raising their two daughters, Edith and Virginia. Since their truck-driving days, Ben is happiest on a long road trip—preferably behind the wheel of his TDI Volkswagen Jetta. He enjoys sailing on Lake Sakakawea, camping in their vintage ’90s pop-up camper, and smoking a pipe by the grill. A lover of strategy board games, he favors Clans of Caledonia (mostly because Deb refuses to play Risk with him). When he’s not working with clients, he can be found smoking meat, gardening, hiking, or diving into The Lord of the Rings or Dune. Ben also serves on the school board for his daughters’ Montessori school and is actively involved in pre-marriage ministry in the Bismarck Diocese.