Time Value of Money. Read up on it. You can always earn more money, you can't get the time back. Forget about being debt free right now. Invest heavily, keep some set aside for emergencies. Your interest rates on your loans are so low that you can earn more interest on investing. Also, if you have the cash flow look for something that you can invest in that will pay for itself over time or even pay you back (rental property, a business, etc). Make sure you are setting aside enough for retirement. Look at the 401k and IRA maximums and strive to pay those things up as much as possible. You'll be glad you did later.
I started off trying to pay things down and quickly wised up. Do set up automatic payments for the things you are investing and saving in. That way discipline is not in the mix as an "X factor". Read a few books: "The Automatic Millionaire", "Rich Dad, Poor Dad", "The Richest Man in Babylon" are on my recommended list.
Dave Ramsey gets mentioned all the time. He's good and his methods are sound. But he is really for people that have no monetary discipline or knowledge whatsoever. Once you get your spending under control I question what he does because it is soooooooo conservative that I do not believe it will get anyone ahead much.
Also, write a budget, then track your spending and figure out where all your money goes. Typically younger folks (myself included) spend far too much on eating out. Enjoy yourself but do it in moderation. Every dollar spent is a dollar you don't have later.
With regard to cars new is rarely better unless the depreciation on what you are buying is less than normal. Usually vehicles that are one or two years old will have substantially lower purchase prices so even if the rate is not rock-bottom on a loan your total cash outlay is lower and they are generally reliable enough nowadays to far outlast the loan. I bought my Nissan brand new in 2001 and later vowed to never buy another fresh off the lot.
In all this do not forget to save money for things in the mid-term future. Lots of people have some emergency cash and retirement savings. But what about things in the middle? What if you don't want to work until 67 or whenever the heck the government allows you to draw social security and your IRA/401k savings? I like what I do but working full time for another 30 years is not really what I would like to do. If I want to retire in my late 50s then I need non-retirement investments to carry me through those years. I started working on that a few years back.
We have a new kid working for us, started this summer fresh out of school. Between myself and my boss we are trying to teach him all about time value of money and how to make smart investments to beat the system. He's 23, he has his whole life ahead of him. He has a decent job starting out and was going to start ramming money into his student loans. I showed him with some fairly easy TMV calculations that paying his student loans off early was going to cost him over a third of a million dollars in his retirement years, all while ham-stringing his finances for the next five years he was planning to pay his loans off. We worked on him for about two weeks and blew his mind. He gets it now (I think) and is starting to draw up how he wants to run his finances.
Either way, good luck and don't stress too much about it. Read, learn, ask. Lots of people are willing to give advice; just do your own research to make sure you can determine what is good and what is bad advice for your situation.
