The Investing for Beginners Podcast - Your Path to Financial Freedom
IFB123: Investing vs Paying off Student Loan Debt
Announcer: 00:00 You’re
tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium
investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern to decode
industry jargon, silence crippling confusion, and help you overcome emotions by
looking at the numbers, your path to financial freedom starts now.
Dave: 00:36 All
right folks, we’ll welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast, this is episode
123 tonight. Andrew and I are going to answer some of our listener questions.
We’ve got some great ones recently, and we wanted to take a stab at answering
them for you on the air. So I’m going to go ahead and read the first question
and then Andrew and I will do our little thing. So our first question is, hi
Andrew. I currently make over six figures, and my wife stays at home with our 20-month-old
twins. Wow. We have a few school loans left, roughly 15,000. I am still balling
the payments as well as to pay off quicker. My question is, should I continue
to dollar cost average and invest or take that amount and put it towards the
loans? I also put a little bit aside for my paychecks for my daughters. I also
have a 401k with my company. I get a fully vested 3% than 100% of my first 3%
and 50% of the following 3%. So I don’t want to lose out on the free money.
Does it make sense? I just turned 34 last week, as well. Thank you to you and
Dave for all the advice constantly. Andrew, what are your thoughts?
Andrew: 01:46 Hmm.
So this kind of hits home a little bit because like I can relate with it and I
think it’s something that more and more people who are a little, I’ll say like
coming up, but you know, starting their careers, starting to look into
investing. A lot of younger people have student loans. And so this is one of
those things where, you know, not only are you trying to figure out, you know,
how do I make a budget? And then it’s like, well, how does the stock market
work? How does investing work? And then now it’s like, well, should I invest or
should I pay off that? And there’s get millions of different answers. So let’s
tackle that back half first. And I want to see what you think about the 401k to
Dave. So basically, basically, I look at a 401k matches free money, and I think
that takes priority over anything.