Grad Clears Student Loan Debt, Offers Surgery After Avoiding Facebook TV | Tech Reddy

• Melanie Brecht said she was able to pay off her student debt by selling TVs on Facebook Marketplace.
• When he was an international student in Canada, Brecht said he paid too much for tuition.
• After paying off his debt, Brecht saved enough money to get the cosmetic nose job he had always wanted.

Melanie Brecht had always wanted a cosmetic nose job, but after taking on a huge amount of student loan debt, she was sure she couldn’t afford it.

It wasn’t until February of 2021 that he began a campaign to pay off in full more than $60,000 in debt he had taken out to attend college outside his home country.

“I always wanted to do it. But again, I didn’t even know how to pay for it because I didn’t want more debt,” Brecht, 25, told Insider.

In 2016, Brecht moved from Venezuela to Canada at the age of 19 to continue his studies in business administration at NAIT, a college in Alberta, Canada.

According to NAIT’s website, international students like Brecht pay more in tuition than domestic students.

Brecht told Insider how the debt he got as a student has kept him from moving forward in life after he graduates in 2019..

“How can I buy a better car? Help my family in South America because things are so bad,” Brecht said. “So I was mostly discouraged because I didn’t see a way out, not with my regular job and not in a few years.”

Brecht said he was able to survive his student loan debt by listing TV sets on Facebook Marketplace as a side hustle.

‘I was doing more than my job’

“Since childhood, I have learned that you can turn to the Internet if you know how to take better pictures, how to advertise it better, and how to make it seem like it has more value than it is without lying. People, they are only seen by value,” said Brecht.

He got the idea to modify TVs after he bought an affordable one on the Facebook Market in 2021 which he later discovered was broken.

Brecht said he used the TV for a few days, even though the screen was broken, and then resold it on Facebook’s Marketplace for a higher price, letting buyers know it was broken.

“So it became something like this: I’m going to buy a TV in my room, use it for two days, take pictures while it’s on, repeat, repeat, repeat until I make it over my work,” Brecht said.

After months of working alongside him, Brecht told Insider that he paid off his student loan in July 2021. Then he saved enough money to buy a new SUV a month later so he could install bigger TVs to increase his profits.

Brecht said she felt empowered to be financially debt-free and spent a year after buying her car saving enough money to pay for a cosmetic nose job she’d wanted since she was 14.

Brecht told an insider that he paid $13,500 in October for a nose job in Toronto. But with flights, hotel, and food, the total cost came to nearly $19,000, an amount she couldn’t afford if she still had student debt.

“Some people spend their whole lives with student debt and think it’s useless, but it is,” Brecht said, adding that there’s a “liberation you feel when you get rid of that.”

Brecht continues to host television as his side is busy today but uses that income to send money to his family back home in Venezuela and invest in his retirement.

“I think in general it’s a scary thing, especially when you get out of college and you want to go to the next stage of your life, to buy a better car and maybe you’re thinking about a down payment or whatever,” Brecht said. “For me, it really helps my family in South America.”