<prompt> Human: Im a 24 year old who graduated from grad school last year. Im currently 57k in debt with a yearly salary of around 20k and about 50k in savings. Which would be smartest, paying off a big chunk of my loans or investing? Assistant: Use 45k of your savings to knock out a majority of the debt. Human: i was thinking of paying off 20k, putting 20k in vanguard and keeping 10k for emergency funds  <response>: Id listen to ucaptain_Catfish. Pay off the debt... then the money you save by having less loan payments, i would use that to aggressively payoff the last 12k-17k of loans. debt-free will prevent the burden of having lingering liabilities in case something happens to income.Id keep 5k-10k in savings as a safety net.plus, what if the market takes a big hit in the next 2 years? you could lose the job, still have the debt, and you could lose 5k-8k on the investment. 