Ken Ilgunas paid off $32,000 in student loans 2?1/2 years after his graduation in 2006 — starting with a $9-an-hour job.

With zero job offers in his chosen field of journalism, he instead moved from Wheatfield, N.Y., to Coldfoot, Alaska, a truck stop and tourist camp north of the Arctic Circle, so he could put every possible dollar toward his debt.

Every possible dollar meant virtually every dollar. His job as cook, maintenance worker and tour guide provided room and board. What Coldfoot (population 10) didn’t provide was places to spend what little he was making.

“I had literally no bills other than my student loan payments,” Ilgunas says. “I was able to send $18,000 toward my debt that first year.”

People who are passionate about paying off debt find plenty of ways to do it that go well beyond clipping coupons, turning down the air conditioner and consolidating their debts. Some free up money by tackling most households’ biggest expense: the cost of shelter.

After the tourist camp job, Ilgunas lived in a tent for a while as a ranger for the Gates of the Arctic National Park and saved up enough to wipe out the rest of his debt.

“I wanted a really free and adventurous life, and I knew I couldn’t have that life with debt,” says Ilgunas, 33.

His experiments in rent-free living went so well that he moved into a van so he could attend graduate school without taking out more loans, and then he wrote a book about it, “Walden on Wheels.” Ilgunas, now a seasonal park ranger, lives in a house in Stokes County, N.C., “with electricity and Wi-Fi and everything.”

You can’t get cheaper than free. But when a relative offered Chicago residents Aja and Kelvin McClanahan a home the relative had inherited and didn’t want, they turned it down initially because it was in one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

The McClanahans had made progress in paying off $120,000 in student loans, medical bills, credit card debt and a car loan, mostly while living rent-free in Aja McClanahan’s mother’s home. They longed for their own place and hoped to avoid a mortgage. And Aja McClanahan wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and home-school their two small children.

So they kept talking about the Chicago house. “We could be so much far ahead with retirement savings, with college savings” by moving into the house, she says.

In 2010, the family moved from the suburbs into the Chicago house. Seven years later, they’re still there and debt-free. Kelvin McClanahan’s job as a postal carrier supports the family comfortably.

In shifting from the suburbs to the city, the McClanahans may have felt like they moved to a different country, but Frank Thomae and his wife, Lissette, actually did and dramatically reduced their housing expenses.

In 2013, Frank Thomae was planning to travel full time after he lost his job as the chief financial officer for a Canadian importer. Lissette Thomae planned to work remotely as a marketing director. But then the couple was saddled with $46,000 in unexpected bills for expensive dental work, a bad business investment and remodeling overruns on their Montreal condo.

Rather than putting off their travels, they relocated overseas. They rented out their condo for $1,850 a month while paying $500 monthly rent in Prague, Czech Republic, and then $300 in Nong Khai, Thailand.

Two years after leaving Montreal, they were debt-free.