Americans owe a collective $1.78 trillion in student loans, and the average borrower has a payment of $337 a month. But not everyone is equally saddled with student loan debt.
About 50% of Americans pay less than $300 in student loans per month, according to Motley Fool research. And more than 20% of borrowers have a monthly payment of $199 or less.
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If that's the boat you're in, consider yourself fortunate. Almost 20% of student loan borrowers are on the hook for a monthly payment of $500 or more.
But if your student loan payments are low, it begs the question: Should you try to just eliminate that debt quickly? Or should you stick to your regular repayment schedule?
The upside of accelerating your payments
The sooner you pay off your students loans, the less money you end up spending on interest. Even if your monthly loan payments aren't so large, it may be that you're paying a large amount of interest on that debt by spreading it out over a longer period of time. So if you're able to shed that debt sooner, you can potentially reap some savings.
Plus, it may be that your student loan payments are preventing you from meeting other goals. So if you're able to cut back on spending to get that debt paid off sooner, you'll then be able to focus on the other things you want to save for.
The downside of accelerating your payments
You may be eager to ditch your student debt. And if you don't have a lot of it, that may be feasible in a shorter time frame than what your current repayment plan maps out.
But to pay off your student loans sooner, you'll need to pump more money into those payments each month. And that could mean having less money to save or invest for retirement.
In fact, let's imagine that right now, you're paying $150 a month toward your student loans, but you're also putting $150 a month into your IRA. If you were to double your loan payments to try to shake that debt faster, you might face setbacks with regard to retirement savings, because not funding an IRA for a period of time could mean losing out on a lot of investment growth.
What's the right call?
If you're not sure whether to accelerate your student loan payoff, ask yourself a couple of questions:
- Can I afford to put more money into my loans without wrecking other goals?
- How much does my student debt bother me?
If you have spare cash at your disposal, you might as well aim to shed that debt sooner if it won't stop you from saving for other important things. But if money is already tight, you may want to stick to your current repayment plan.
Also, for some people, the simple act of owing money is bothersome. But if you don't feel that way, and you can swing your monthly payments pretty easily, you may not want to make changes to your current repayment schedule.
It's a great thing to pay off student loans ahead of schedule. But that may not be in the cards for everyone. And that's OK.
