I find myself a bit bemused that the article specifically mentions student debt as an example of something that people can refinance but don't. I hadn't ever ha

I find myself a bit bemused that the article specifically mentions student debt as an example of something that people can refinance but don't. I hadn't ever had any student debt until marriage, but since then (and until recently) my wife and I have been working through a great deal of it together. As someone who has worked through paying down a large amount of student debt, I can tell you that student debt is very difficult to refinance. Our student debt balance was much higher than the median, but I believe that our experience with refinancing was very typical: we couldn't refinance our student debt at an interest rate that was even remotely attractive. We reacted to the dearth of refinancing options by deciding to eliminate our debt as quickly as possible, and when we first got married we dumped about $35k into debt reduction. We chose to go after the high interest rate first, which was also the largest loan. Had we gone after the smallest loans first we could have paid off several of them instead of merely making a (significant) dent in the higher rate loans, and this is where the psychology comes in. Dumping a ton of money into a debt without changing anything but your principle balance is discouraging. It was for us, and it is for nearly everyone else too. Personal finance counselors like Dave Ramsey actually instruct people to intentionally pursue the smallest debts first because the feeling of momentum helps most people to maintain dedication to getting out of debt, which in many cases will more than offset the difference in interest rates (paying down faster due to more resolve = less interest overall). We sold stuff and skimped like crazy people and we killed our debt, but it's a very common thing for people to run out of determination before they run out of debt. Since that's such a common problem, I'd say that it's not necessarily a bad thing that people pay debt in a financially non-optimal way if the method is at least psychologically optimized.