Freemoneyfinance writes of how to pay off student loans while building wealth:

The real answer is: it depends. However as a rule of thumb, the lower the interest rate on your loans, the better off you’ll be just paying the minimum monthly payment and nothing more. Take the extra money you were going to pay on your loan and invest it instead.

Graduating from a private Christian liberal-arts school (Messiah College), my wife and I had $60,000 in student loan debt between the two of us. At first, because of some foolish spending habits and because of my introductory salary, we were barely able to cover the minimum payments. In recent years we have started to pay off our student loans at a faster rate (we are not done yet!). Our reason for doing this was mostly psychological — it is very satisfying to be getting debt out of the way. But the advice given above really is generally a wiser financial move for most graduates (depending on various factors, of course, as the article mentions), because in the long run it builds more wealth. In our case, our student loan rates are good enough that this is a wise move for us. So in the past year we have changed our strategy and are now socking away the money that we had been using to accelerate student loan payments.

Tags: Debt, equity, finance, interest, investment, money, personal-finance, psychology, salary, Saving, student-loans, tax, wealth

Zillow is a very neat and incredibly useful website where you can find a value estimate for many homes. Of course, for official numbers you’ll need to talk to an appraiser. But Zillow has enough real estate and property tax data, and enough smarts, that it seems to be able to make very reasonable estimates based on comparables.

I’m using Zillow right now as one gauge for when I should refinance. My wife and I bought our home using two mortgages, and between our payments, improvements we’ve done, and the growth in our home’s value, I hope to reach the magic 20% equity point in a couple of years (provided the housing market doesn’t collapse).

Check it out! I hope you’ll be pleasantly surprised at your house’s value, but even if not, it’s useful information.

Tags: appraisal, appraiser, comparables, equity, finance, home, house, housing-market, mortgage, personal-finance, property, real-estate, refinance, tax, tool, value, Zillow