Reply to Max out on 401k or pay off student loans?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't know the answer to this - I'll just tell you what I did. About 7 years ago, DH and I went to a financial advisor. At that point, we did not own a house, were doing 401K matches at work + fully funding our Roth IRAs, and together had about 60K  in student loan debt. They gave us an action plan, which was to build up emergency fund to minimum 25K, which we did. Then, we    saved for a down payment (a small one as we did an FHA  loan). Then, we paid off the loans. In hindsight, I think I wish we had invested in addition to the 401K/Roth AND paid off loans at the same time as we were paying 1600 a month to get rid of the loans. We ended the loan and that next month had to start paying daycare, so the timing was great.

I am SO GLAD we don't have those stupid loans hanging around now that we have a second kid. I feel so flexible and nimble having literally no debt (except mortgage). I'm sure we could have more in investments had we invested versus focused on the loans, but at this point, we have about 300K in investments, no debt, 2 kids, and a house. I feel ok![/quote]

This is unclear. You don't state whether you nixed your retirement contributions entirely while building the ER fund and then paying the loans. That's kind of a big difference there. [/quote]

We continued to fund the 401K/Roth while building the ER fund and paying the loans. We didn't do after tax investing, in order to pay down the loans. I sort of wish we did, but at the same time, I am more than happy to not have the loans over our heads.[/quote]

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