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Comment by Roridge | Hacker News Reader

I have calculated that I will be 40 before my student loan will be paid off... I've been paying it since 2003

I had already started paying some of my loans when I finished undergraduate school in 1993. I started repaying the rest of them when I finished graduate school in 1996. I finished paying them around 2004. During my undergraduate years I was in an internship program, so over five years of school I had two years of fulltime work. And in grad school I was given a stipend and free tuition. This helped me (a) not borrow as much, and (b) have income to pay down my loans as quickly as I could.

I remember producing paydown charts in the early 90s and thinking it'd take forever to pay my loans off, but I planned the amounts I wanted to pay each month (more than the minimum whenever I could) and it got done. My rising income over the years helped more than I could have predicted when I started.

I don't know how much you owed, but was it worth it to pay the loans off so fast? It seems there must have been something more valuable a large sum of money could have done for you.

EDIT: I mean this as an honest question, not proving a point or something. I was under the impression that these loans have pretty low interest. If the interest is low I would pay as little at a time as I possibly could.

Yes, it was worth it. Being a debtor puts a drag on you, even when you've got a positive net worth. Owing debt reduces your freedom and flexibility, because you need to have enough cash flow to make your debt payments. That restricts your choices. Paying your debts off also improves your credit rating quickly, which is important after graduating college because sooner or later you're probably going to want a home, and mortgage you need for that will most likely be more than your school loans were. Paying your loans off first proves you can handle the mortgage debt.

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