Student Loan finally paid off! Put extra into pension?

Don’t really have anyone IRL who’d care or be willing to discuss, so sharing here.

I’ve just made a final lump sum payment and cleared the remaining £4.6k on my student loan. It’s taken just over 10 years since graduating, and it’s a quiet relief to see it gone.

This also means I’m now debt free aside from the mortgage, which is a first for me and the only other outstanding debt is my partners student loan which should be paid off in the next ~2-3 years.

We are fairly ok on our current take-home so do these next steps make sense or is there something better I could do?

  • I’ll use one or two month of the extra take-home to do something nice with my wife and kid.
  • After that, the full amount will go into my pension so my take-home pay stays roughly the same - I think this is a 9% increase to pension payment but I already add in 9% that is matched by company to 10.5% which is the max.

I can only change my pension amount once per quarter, so probably start in April, so got a few months to get advice and think about other options so please let me know if there are better options. Probably relevant salary ~£76k, take home with student loan £3.7k/m, save approx £7-800 a month, as a family we have 6-9m emergency fund .

Posted Jan 7, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

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