I stopped contributing to my 401K for the last three months in order to pay off credit card debt. I am 28 and have about 68K in my 401K. Was this a smart decision? I want to get out of debt as quickly as possible and I have no student loans or car debt.

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Presuming that you don't intend to double-up and pay yourself back, the money that you took out would be worth a whole heck of a lot more than the interest you'd pay in taking a little longer to pay off your debt with discretionary income. How much more depends on the exact amount, and time to retirement, but presuming you aren't 50 we are talking potentially 10's of thousands of dollars. If you do double up on your contributions and pay your 401k back in a reasonable amount of time, then it's safe to say that you will have lost significantly less in gains, than you otherwise would have paid in credit card debt.

Same premise, think of it as taking the money out of your 401k before you put it in there. If you can double up to repay the lost contributions over time then go ahead and focus on paying the debt instead of your 401k. If you can't double up your future contributions then (same amount as would have gone in as if you never stopped contributing), making contributions to your 401k now and taking longer to repay the debt is the better option. The potential gains on this amount is negligible, the key point is to make sure that the 6k is put back in your 401k, if not you will be severely impacting the long term growth of that account.

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