What should I do with $10K student loan

[Dalanar]

I'm sitting at about $10K studen loan at 6% interest.  I plan to buy a house within the next two years, and possibly start looking/shopping beginning of 2015.   I have no other debt other than a credit card balance of $500.   I make about $75k.  My current savings is about $17k.  My scores are in my sig.  How much would it jump to if I were to reduce it to say $5K?  Also, is there any advantage as far as credit scores and home shopping are concerned for me to try to pay off my student loan or get it to within $1K before I start talking to banks about a mortgage --- or is $10k not that "big of a deal" relatively speaking?

Thanks!

[Luscher]

reducing the 10k to 5k won't give you a huge bump in score but it will save you a lot in interest over time. Normally I would say pay off the debt but if you really need to buy a house within the next 2 years you are going to need to get a down payment from somewhere and right now you already have 17k so you might want to use that + what you save in the next 2 years as a downpayment.

[Dalanar]

Thanks for the input.  Much appreciated!  I think I will keep at making decent-size payments on the loan (but not go crazy) and just try to add  to the future downpayment fund. 

[SCF]

I think that's a good plan.  You may also want to check out the Mortgage forums here, there is a lot of good advice about how to build positive credit history and get your profile and finances ready to apply.

[Luscher]

Yea, I'm normally always against people not paying off debt when possible but you really want as big as a down payment on a house as possible especially since that interest that will accrue over time will be much more then the little bit of interest coming from your student loans

[Dalanar]

Thank you.  I was leaning toward that direction, but now it's a no brainer after everyone's input.

[DrZoidberg]

What do you pay per month towards it? If you make $75k a year and have no other debt you can save for a house and pay that $10k off in 6-8 months. 

[Dalanar]

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@DrZoidberg wrote:

What do you pay per month towards it? If you make $75k a year and have no other debt you can save for a house and pay that $10k off in 6-8 months. 

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Sadly, I am not paying as much as I should, admittedly.  It's currently at $250/month, but I was planning to increase it to at least to $400 - $500 /month.   My problem is definitely eating out and random expenses that add up.    I do want to have as a big a downpayment as possible (goal: $50k), so I definitely will have to juggle the loan and the saving carefully. 

[Anonymous]

I have a friend who was in a similar boat. She had 25k in student loans, but is making pretty close to 100k (nurse). She bought a house through the FHA loan (3.5% downpayment), then refinanced into a conventional mortgage after she aggressively paid off her student loan. All within a year, I believe.