Personally, unless your hypothetical 2% debt was ridiculously small (in which case I’d pay it off just to remove it from the list of debts), it would be at the back of the line behind everything with a higher rate.

“But the real problem to me is: are you really fine paying on money, albeit borrowed at an ultra cheap rate of 2-4%, for a degree you earned 30 years ago, in a field you might not have worked in for 15 of those years?”

with:

“Debt is debt – an obligation to pay something to someone. What the debt was taken on for initially is really immaterial, and the quicker I can get it out of my life, the better.”

In other words, say you are a lawyer deciding whether to pay down your 2% student loan debt (for your psych degree) or your 6% student loan debt (for your law degree). Would you really repay the 2% debt first because you aren’t making money as a psychologist? That is what your first quote suggests. Or would you repay the 6% debt because it has the higher interest rate, regardless of why it was incurred (as your second quote suggests)?

If you bought a house in metro New York, much of California, perhaps Washington, DC, London (England), etc. … then you have made far more in gains than you could possibly have paid in interest even with one of those awful “sub-prime” mortgages. If you delayed repayment to fund your business, and your business is successful, then almost any student loan and mortgage is cheaper than a bank would have charged you.

Most people — other than trust-fund brats — don’t have much choice in matters of credit.