Re: Invest or pay off student loans?
You can't get better than 5% risk free, so if that is your criteria then pay off the student loans. risk-free is money markets or CD's. Best you can do with those right now is somewhere in the 3-4% range.
You don't need boku bucks to invest in bonds. You can invest in a bond mutual fund. Mutual funds do have minimum investments but most funds have minimums around $1000-$2500.
If you are saving towards a downpayment for a house in a few years then you would want to keep everything in something risk free or very low risk.
And finally, you will probably get a lot of advice to put your money in the stock market. For someone that really knows what they are doing then this is a good option. But you really need to educate yourself over a period of time. There are lots of people on this board who agonize over whether the optimum play on a certain 3/6 hand is to bet-fold or check-call, but then they go and put thousands of dollars into the stock market without really haveing a clue other than 'it's supposed to go up over time'.
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