I'll try to make this as short as possible - but I'll give a quick background.
I'm 31, wife is 29. Our total income before tax is about 250k. 3.5 years ago I had 205k in student debt. Currently I have about 70k with an average rate of 6.1% and am on schedule to payoff the balance no longer than 18 months from now. This will free up approx 4,000 to 4,500 dollars per month with these loans gone. I've calculated the the interest charges on the remaining balance will be in the range of $4,000 over the next 18 months. Paying down this balance is our goal and we will be free to invest much more after.
In the past few months I've really committed myself to learning all I can about where my money is going and what it is doing. Vanguard will be a big player in our future investing/saving. I currently have an account open with Schwab (Individual and IRA) and my wife and I have our own respective 401k's which we both max out every year. The problem is money that we have with "A family friend" who is a FA with Morgan Stanley. This person was recommended to us by my inlaws as someone the family has worked with for several years. I now view this recommendation as a poor one as we started working with this individual before I started educating myself and reading MMM.
The money we have with this person is approx 16k in an individual acct and 27k in a rollover IRA from my wife's previous 401k. The investment recommendations made by this person were centered around Blackrock funds. They had a 5.25% front load and an expense ratio of about 1.2%. I believed that because of my inlaws position that the load fees would be waived and our expense to work with this person were limited. Basically I didn't pay a bit of attention to it and just blindly trusted them. The returns on these investments have only been in the range of 1% since we started working with Morgan Stanley 3 years ago. What I would like to do is take the 16k from the individual acct and use it towards student loans. Potentially reducing the payoff timeline by 4 months. Then transfer my wife's IRA to Vanguard. If I would have been more MMM aware we could have saved all the load fees that we were charged when her 401k rolled into the IRA (approx $1300).
So is there any reason to not do what I've outlined, or a better way to do things. What is everyone's thought on using the 16k to payoff loans?
We've got 50k cash in a high yield savings, 77k in my 401k, 20k in Schwab between my IRA and individual acct. My wife has >10k in her new 401k.
Thanks for any advice you can give. This is my first post and I'm pumped!