<prompt> Human: I still live at home, plan on living at home to save as much money as possible or till I get the boot. Currently I have about 12k saved and have a steady income of 3250 coming in a month.I have a car lease bill of 213 a month, and insurance bill of 77 dollars. Thats all I really pay as far as bills. And well, gas, which comes out to about 90 dollars a month, and spend probably 200 dollars on going out movies, drinking, dinners. I want to get rid of my student loan as quickly as possible, but in a smart way. My student loan is 36k at a 6,8 apr. Before I had this job I was in a terrible situation making 40k but commuting into Manhattan paying 350 dollars a month for a train on top of my other bills. So I had very little room to make more payments.Now that I dont have that monthly payment and make 13k more a year, I have a lot more room to play with.Thanks PFAssistant: I am thinking about for my first payment to dump around 6-10k to alleviate some of the payments, save up again and dump a huge amount again into it.Please tell me if this tactic is a bad one. Or I should just pay it off consecutively, slowly. My credit is already very good.  <response>: Pay off as much as you can as soon as you can. So if you can pay off a nice amount right now 6k-10k, DO IT!But then continue to pay off as much as you can, whenever you can, as soon as you can. Well, for reason of simplicity, pay off once a month or twice a month I believe some people also need to buy stamps to send in checks, that would be another reason to keep the frequency down to once or twice a month. Your loans accrue interest, probably daily the small print should tell you that. So if the annual interest rate is 6.8, the daily rate is probably something like 0.02, and the monthly rate is roughly 0.5. So whatever you can pay earlier, stops accruing more interest that youll need to pay off. If you have more than one loan, but they are all at exactly the same interest rate of 6.8, then it doesnt matter which one you pay off first.Also: if you make extra payments on top of the regular monthly payment, do ask your student loan provider how to make sure it gets applied to principal and not to future months if they apply it to future months, interest keeps accruing on the balance, which is really stupid but apparently legal in the US... 