Money Choices

I'm a personal finance nerd. I love personal finance blogs and podcasts. I think I missed out on not doing something in finance/advising as a career.

Mr. Making It Bright and I are at a personal finance crossroads. Decisions, decisions. Being a grownup is hard work... a lot of the time.

We used some money we'd saved for something else to pay off the Mr.'s student loans a few months ago. Headache after headache with the student loan company really pushed us to just be done with them. We were sending extra payments monthly and they were advancing his due date and not pulling ETF payments, even though we were sending a signed form with every payment highlighting "DO NOT ADVANCE DUE DATE". We finally decided to just write the check and be done.

Photo credit: Lendingmemo

But I still have a balance on my student loan from undergrad (cash flowed my Master's degree). A little less than $7,000.

Now we're tempted to pay off my loan because the student loan company (same as the Mr.'s) is starting to pull the monkey business they did with his account. And I'm just fed up with the insanity of dealing with them, and the debt. 

So, should we continue to slowly make extra payments and be done in a little over a year? Or should we pull money from our emergency fund and just be done with them FOREVER? Then we would be debt free, except for our mortgage. That's big, people.

Impatient me says to write the check and be finished, using the small balance in our emergency fund as motivation to pile more in there as quickly as possible. Anxious me says to be patient and just keep plugging away, and keep a healthy emergency fund. As it stands, our emergency fund would pay for three months of full expenses (saving and fun money) or five months of bare living expenses. Pull out what we need for the full student loan repayment, and we'd easily have three months of bare expenses, roughly two of full expenses... That's scary considering we have only one income. Yes, it's an incredibly secure income, and yes we have a very healthy retirement account balance...

This is hard stuff.

What do you think? 

Go for it and just pay it off from our emergency fund, using the small balance as a motivation to curb spending to save more to get our balance back to where it is today? 

Or play it safe and go slow and steady, finishing off the loan in a little over a year?