re: Pay off student loan?

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Everyone will tell you the math, but the reality is you should pay it off.

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Why?

loan $110K 3.5 5yrs:

$2001/mo.
Total payment $120,065
Total Interest $10,065

5yrs from now, where will the S&P be??

Just throwing some numbers out. It gets a lot more complicated than this.

I would probably just pay it off. Student loans are a pain in the butt. I got about 13k left on mine and was just paying the minimum which is like $250 a month waiting for sleepy Joe to erase them but probably will just lump sum pay it off sometime early this coming year

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Why on earth would you pay off a 3.5% loan early?

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That's usually my logic, but it's worth keeping in mind that student loan debt is non-dischargeable, so I'm not always against retiring it on a more aggressive schedule.

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I have 110k saved to pay off my student loans and be done with it. I pay 2000$ a month. Interest rate is 3.5%. No other loans except mortgage. Should I do it?

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I'd like to parse out this turn of phrase a bit.

Did you literally save $110k over time? If so, why? Why weren't you just putting more towards principle as you went?

In the alternative, is this $110k liquid something you came into all at once, e.g. from the sale of a house, inheritance, etc?

To be clear, I understand that the "how" has nothing to do with the math, but it has a significant amount to do with the psychology.

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That's usually my logic, but it's worth keeping in mind that student loan debt is non-dischargeable, so I'm not always against retiring it on a more aggressive schedule.

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Sure, but when extremely low risk options like hysa pay more than 3.5%, he can always pay it off if needed whole generating more money than he is paying each month in interest. He controls his default risk.

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Did you literally save $110k over time? If so, why? Why weren't you just putting more towards principle as you went? In the alternative, is this $110k liquid something you came into all at once, e.g. from the sale of a house, inheritance, etc? To be clear, I understand that the "how" has nothing to do with the math, but it has a significant amount to do with the psychology.

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He probably voted for Biden and believed they would be forgiven

Didn’t vote for Biden. I had refinanced the loans in 2019, and have been paying on them the whole time. I have just put extra money aside since August.

Serious question- what kind of work do you do?

$210k in student loans is a lot…. It being able to save $110k cash is nice….

Just curious…

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I don't know why people get so butthurt on here when someone says something like this. I'm completely against student loan forgiveness but I sure as shite was not going to pay extra if its going to be forgiven. I didn't make any payments while it was frozen then started back up as soon as it was required

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This is 100% my opinion also. My wife has $8,500 left on her student loans. I pay a whopping $250 a month on her loan which is 4X the minimum payment but I didn't want to bite the rest off until the tuition forgiveness was killed. If I'm going to have to pay everyone else's student loans off through taxation, why not be on the receiving end of the government's stupidity for once.

As for the OP, my personal finance prioritization is safety first and returns second. Unless the interest rate differentiation is ridiculous, I'll always choose to eliminate debt first. If I had the cash on hand to pay off my mortgage, I would do it and not blink. There's no guarantee that the investment will go up on any certain timeframe, but your debt will 100% remain regardless of what the market does.