Did you pay off student loans before buying a house?
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Anonymous
| Looking for responses from younger folks. |
Anonymous
| No. |
Anonymous
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Mid-30s, and we are waiting to pay off our student loans (which we are currently paying off very aggressively) because that extra $X/month will allow us to afford a much nicer house than we could buy right now. We need about 2 more years. We don't have to, we just want to.
We are also NOT the norm. Pretty much everyone else we know owns a house or condo, regardless of their student loan situation. |
Anonymous
| No. Student loans are bound to be the lowest interest rate you'll ever pay on debt, so it wasn't worth it to us, nor did we have so much that the extra cash would substantially increase the value of the house we could buy. I guess it depends on how much debt you have and how much house you hope to buy. Mine will be paid off in 5-6 months. Hubby's will take a 3-4 more years. by then we'll have kids out of daycare - which WILL substantially improve cash flow. We'll trade up to a nicer house then, but in the meantime, we like building equity that we can roll into a new house later. |
Anonymous
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No. We bought a house 2 years ago and will pay off our loans in 18 months.
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Anonymous
| Nope. The interest rate is so low, I may take them to my grave. |
Anonymous
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Late 20s here. We bought a condo before paying off our student loans, some of them even high interest ones. We figured it was better than renting. It wasn't an issue though and we are still able to pay off a nice chunk of our student loans each month.
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Anonymous
| Op here. Thanks all for responding. DH and I have been going back and forth over which to do first. So many variables to consider! |
Anonymous
| No--but ours were very low (DH only and less than $20k), we had no other debt to hurt our mortgage app, we were still able to deduct the interest, and didn't have the extra cash to pay them off. We paid them off a few years later as our incomes went up and we lost the tax deduction and had the cash reserves to pay them off easily. |
Anonymous
| No, but we did pay them off before pursuing fertility treatments/adoption/parenthood. I wanted a clean slate with no debt except for our mortgage. |
Anonymous
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Yes, but we did not have alot. I only had $50k and DH had zero. Our income was too high to qualify for the student loan interest deduction. We paid off the $50k and then bought a house.
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Anonymous
op here. May I ask how much of a downpayment you put down? |
Anonymous
| Yes, but we only had $13K and could not take the interest deduction. |
Anonymous
| Yes. I mostly paid for DH's law school (I was working then) and got a scholarship to my grad school, so the total was only about $20,000. We paid it off about 3 years before buying. |
Anonymous
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FYI, I am a financial planner. If all else is equal, it is better to have a lower mortgage vs. student loans. The reason is that student loans are not attached to your house and won't force foreclosure if you later have financial difficulty.
Student loans are very easy to defer if you lose a job, get divorced, have medical issues, etc. So if the tax adjust rate difference isn't signficant, it is much better just to keep the student loan debt. |