|
My wife and I are moving to Chicago mid-September. We got an offer on our house in Michigan nearly-instantaneously; it was on the market for two days, and the first person to see it put in a full price offer before we even had our first open-house. Assuming the sale goes smoothly, we will have an extra ~60k on top of the ~$50k we've been saving. Here's where we're at: Savings: $110k My salary: $100k Wife's salary: $44k Private student loan debt: $50k Federal student loan debt: $67k Until today, we had been talking about renting for maybe a year in Chicago and then buying a condo/apartment in a neighborhood we like. Then my wife had another idea, which is to forget about buying in the short-term and rent for a few years, use our savings to pay off my student loan debt, and then have the peace of mind of being debt-free. It really would be nice to not have any debt, but what is the smartest thing to do? A couple of things are on my mind. The first is that buying the house we're in now turned out to be an awesome investment that we profited substantially from (at least from our financial perspective), so buying an apartment in a nice Chicago neighborhood could yield similar benefit for us in the future. The second is that the economy is probably going to tank soon, according to popular mythos. That would be a...good time to buy? I think? I really don't know, so whatever the smart money people have to say about it could help us.
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 18:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 6, 2024 17:41 |
|
|
Chicago is a huge sprawling city and is very different neighborhood to neighborhood, so regardless of the money stuff you should rent for awhile while you explore the city to figure out where you want to live. If any of your loans are 6% or higher I would consider paying them off early, but you didn't really list much in the way of retirement investments so it probably makes more sense to start funding some retirement accounts before you do that. If you have other investments already and you just didn't list them, then my advice would be different though.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 19:55
|
|
