I like to tell people that the only people who should be investing in the stock market are those for whom single-digit differences in yield are meaningful. Prac

I like to tell people that the only people who should be investing in the stock market are those for whom single-digit differences in yield are meaningful. Practically speaking, this means at dollar values of $1MM and up. If you don't have that kind of capital then you need either leverage or time. The only two financial investments ordinary mortals should be making are a retirement portfolio and buying a house. The house makes sense because it's an accessible form of leverage and the retirement portfolio makes sense because of the time scale involved makes the return on investment vs just putting it under the mattress meaningful. Otherwise it's just not worth your time. Obviously you can do active trading on the market and make more money with less capital but that's not investment. Similarly, you can use the same logic to determine that paying 20% interest on small amounts of money, i.e. under $10k, just isn't worth worrying about in the grand scheme of things. It's like $300/month. I'm not going to waste sleep over that. I mean, I'll happily take it if someone's giving it for free, otherwise it's just another bill. And I've already got lots of other bills in the range of $1-300 a month. I'd rather have the things I bought with the $10k right now than to save up for them, just to save a few hundred per month. The problem comes in when you're spending that money on stuff that's not providing meaningful quality of life benefits. That's a leak in your bucket. Whereas $10k in debt in a life that's working is more like poking holes in an airship. You'd need a whole lot of them to bring it down.