My husband and I got married when I was 31 and he was 32. We’d known each other for three years, been engaged for one. I was making $20,000 and my husband was finishing up a PhD after the funding had run out on his grant. We were broke, but not in debt. I got a second job, making minimum wage. He started teaching as an adjunct at a local college, and about 8 months later got a very good job in IT.
The first 3.5 years of our marriage we lived in a 2 br/1 bath apartment. It was older, kind of dingy, and definitely beige. Beige carpet, beige walls, lots and lots of beige. It was boring and sometimes the neighbors were noisy and it also cost way more than the tiny places I’d lived in as a single woman. But it didn’t cost that much, so we were stashing money away as fast as we could. We were growing our savings every month.
We finally lucked into an awesome little house (really did luck in, it was in a neighborhood a friend lived in, and she heard through the grapevine that a small builder had bought two houses and was flipping them) for a price of $130,000. We bought our house when we were in our mid-30s and paid it off in 14 years. We are now 48 and 49 and own the whole thing! (I’m still excited about it.)
You sir, are young, and have lots and lots of time to worry about getting a house. Even if you live in NJ, you don’t have to rush into the largest purchase of your life, while you are in HAIR ON FIRE debt. As others have said, if you dive into even more debt before you tackle those student loans, they’ll be like luggage you will drag around until you retire at the ripe old age of 70. That’s typical of the average American who says, “I’ll always be in debt…” but it doesn’t have to be that way.
You and your fiancée have the opportunity to spend the first few years of your lives busting it, to set yourself up for a future so bright you gotta wear shades, while rainbows and unicorns follow you around, announcing how awesome you are. Go cheap on the wedding, get some extra jobs, cut your expenses to nothing (no new cars, no cable, no fancy vacations, nothing but the basics) and get rid of those school loans. You can do it!
I actually look back on the “broke” years as sort of fun. We had a lot of potlucks, watched a lot of videos with our friends, played cards, went to the library, went home to my hometown for our vacations. The fact that we were together made it fun, and we’d never been rich (and didn’t expect to have the same standard of living that our parents did after 30-40 years in the workplace) so it didn’t feel like we were downtrodden. We do spend more money now, because we make more money now, and because even paid-for houses need upkeep, and because we can. But we still save a butt-load of cash every month, we still go to the library every week, we still don’t have cable, and we watch more movies on Netflix than at the theater.
Tackle the debt monster now, while you are young and strong and you won’t have to still be fighting it when you are older and tired!