<prompt> Human: I assume not. If the interest rate on the loans is return on 401k or whatever investment youre doing, then you should just pay the loans of first instead of doing any investing, right? If this is true, should you actually use all the money you would have used for retirement investments and dump it in to student loans? Ive heard that paying student loans off too fast can make your credit score look bad. Thanks for any clarification, and sorry if this is covered in the Wiki and I missed it.  <response>: Thats not necessarily true. I mean if youve got 30k of loans at 15 then maybe. But you should ALWAYS contribute at least enough toward retirement to get the full match since thats free money. Beyond that, YMMV but time in the market is the most important factor in saving for retirement. Its not an exaggeration to say that delaying saving by 10 years can be the difference between having 1,000,000 at age 65 and having 600,000 at age 65. Im not sure where youre hearing that paying them off early would hurt your score. Its conceivably possible if doing so drops your average account age too far, but no monthly payment is ALWAYS going to be better than having one. So at the end of the day, youre probably not going to be doing yourself any favors if you delay retirement savings to pay off your student debt. Invest at least enough to get the match and then pay down the loans, but unless youre going to be able to knock out your loans in under a year or something crazy like that, youre digging yourself a hole if you ignore saving. 