Hello PF-
Wife and I are both 23. I am active duty Army and my wife currently works a medical tech job. My wife wants to go back to school for an RN to BSN program, which will total about 2.5 more years of full time school total. I know there is a military spouse scholarship for about 4K, we will also look into more scholarships but I would assume that we would have to pay the rest ourselves. I am also in school and filling out the FAFSA didn’t do anything for me. We both have good-excellent credit. She is looking to start summer quarter.
Current financial picture: My salary is about 55k/year and my wife’s is about 30k. She will have to cut her hours when going back to school, not sure by how much yet. Only debt is about 12k on an auto loan @5.99%. Only have about 5k in an emergency fund.
Assuming we get a decent interest rate on student loans, should we pay that down first/save cash for a few months to pay for part of school up front? Pay down the auto loan or let it run its course? Build up the e-fund to 10-15k? Should we both contribute 15% to retirement because the only debt we have is relatively low interest? Or should we only contribute enough for a match and put that extra money towards debt/e-fund? Right now, there’s typically about 2.5k-3k left over at the end of the month after budgeting.
Submitted April 27, 2019 at 08:34AM by Peashooter4187 http://bit.ly/2GPWYv3
