Reply to Should I pay off this student loan now or just stick to schedule?

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[quote=Anonymous]I have a student loan that, for a bunch of years, has been paid by my employer. Like they just made the monthly payment on my behalf, as a perk of my job. To qualify for the program, they specified the repayment plan you had to be in. The payment is about $230/mo.

I basically have not paid attention to this loan for years because of this set up. I don't have a ton of debt and it has a low interest rate (under 3%) and I wasn't even making the payment, so I just ignored it. It doesn't harm my credit, and I had bigger fish to fry financially.

Well I'm moving into management at work which means I'm no longer eligible for this program. That's fine, I'm also making more money. But now I need to figure out whether I should just pay the balance on the loan (21k), keep making the monthly payment ($230/mo for 11 more years), pay above the minimum payment (if I added $100 to every payment that shaves repayment down to 7 years), or maybe pay it off in chunks? Like do an extra payment of 1k once a quarter or something?

I have the money to just pay it off now if I wanted, but I could also just stick that money in the market or even just in CDs or something almost certainly make more that the loan is costing me in interest, especially given how deep into principal I am now. But the psychological benefit of just being done with student loans sounds good too? It seems dumb to keep paying interest on a loan I could repay immediately for another decade, even though I understand conceptually why it may not make sense to pay off a loan with such a low rate early.

WWYD?[/quote]

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