What if I told you that paying off all your debt might actually be slowing down your path

to financial independence? Today, we're diving into the controversial idea that not all debt

is bad debt and why keeping some debt might be the smartest move.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen,

and with me as always is my holds some debt co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here.

Borrowing off of your intro. You've also got a mortgage these days, I believe, and finally

have some debt back in your life. I sure do. We recently had Erica on the podcast, actually this Tuesday, and we heard her story about going

from $90,000 in debt to a net worth of $2.5 million.

It took her and her husband five years to pay off that debt, and during that time, they

weren't investing outside of a 401k match.

So today we're going to talk about each of our personal stances on debt and we're going to

frame the discussion around folks who have student loan debt or maybe some car debt and those

types of things and the nuances of personal situations where I might say don't pay off that

debt and go invest aggressively and when I might say on the same debt, pay it off and make that your priority. It depends on the person in the context of their situation. I think this will be a fun one. And I look forward to any feedback or thoughts here in the comments. Yep. You can email Scott at biggerpocketsmoney.com or Mindy at biggerpocketsmoney.com or leave a comment below.

Let's just introduce the concept here. Mindy, what do you think about having debt in a general

sense during your fire journey? Do you currently have any debt? Did you have any as you were

building your wealth? What did that look like? So, Scott, I have never had debt outside of my mortgage on whatever

house I was living in. I didn't have any student loan debts. My parents paid for my college,

which was the gift that it was so valuable for me to come out of college without student loan

debts. How about you? I'm very similar. My parents paid for college. Thank you very much, mom and dad, for that. That's a wonderful gift. And all of my debt has been mortgages on real

estate intended to be used as investments, with the exception of a 1.99% car loan for my 2014

then new Toyota Corolla that I paid off over five years. Okay, so is debt,

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