Anonymous wrote:73k. 12.75 years. It was a 30 year loan at 2.875%. While I did pay them off "fast" (because I didn't keep it going for 30 years), I was never in any real rush to pay them off. Even during my 9 year stint in biglaw, while I made double monthly payments, I NEVER put my bonuses towards the loans. I wanted to walk out of biglaw with a sizeable net worth -- so in an environment where the market was returning more than 2.875% per year (and many years FAR more than that), I was more interested in investing my additional cash rather than paying more to the lender. No regrets.
Honestly I don't know why more of my biglaw peers didn't do this -- focus on investing rather than paying loans as fast as humanly possible esp. since we graduated 11-12 years ago with sub 3% rates. Admittedly I should have invested even more. But most of my friends at the firm were determined to pay off debt in 4 years or less -- that means every dollar of savings/bonuses etc. went to loan payments rather than 401ks or investment accounts. Then at year 4 when the debt was gone, many of them bounced out of biglaw voluntarily or bc of the recession; so then they landed jobs often paying 100k or 150k -- a fraction of what they used to be paid -- and are trying to save on those salaries, which is obviously doable but much much harder esp here in NYC.