The best time to start saving for retirement is as soon as possible.

By saving in your early 20s, you give your nest egg extratime to grow, potentially shaving years off how long you needto work.

But before setting aside money for retirement,most feel the need to retire student loan debt.

That’s easy to say but harder to do for millennials exitingcollege these days.

Many are in the same boat as Nolan Grace, a 24-year-old whograduated from Purdue University with “very significant” loans.“It’s the biggest weight on my life right now,” he says.

Luckily, Grace works for anemployer—Austin-based software-services company BP3Global Inc.—that helps him with loan payments in an increasinglypopular way.

BP3 uses a platform called Student Loan Genius to let it matchas much as $100 per month in Grace’s debt payments, one ofseveral companies offering similar benefits.

Employees who work for Student Loan Genius customers havemore than $61,000 in student loan debt on average, and theirmonthly payments are usually more than $500 a month.

“We really like the effect it has on our ability torecruit,” BP3 Chief Executive Officer Scott Francis says. Heexplains that the benefit tends to get much more attentionfrom college students than the company’s health-care and retirementofferings. And on Wednesday, Student Loan Geniusis unveiling a novel product that may attract evenmore debt-laden graduates.

CEO Tony Aguilar helped start Student Loan Genius in 2013,building up its customer base to include 45companies. He’s been pushing for Congress to pass a bill thatwould allow employer matches to student loan payments to bepretax.

But in the meantime, his company came up with a way to sync theexisting 401(k) program with college loan bills. That way, youngpeople don’t lose the opportunity for a tax-deferred match ifthey’ve chosen to pay down debt rather than save forretirement.

“Not only are we helping the student loan problem, we’re helpingpeople save as well,” he says.

Aguilar, 31, graduated from college with more than $100,000 instudent loans. He says he knows as well as anyone how the problemis holding back an entire generation.

What’s more, helping millennials pay down student debt wouldhave the added benefit of stabilizing, and fueling, theeconomy, he contends.

More millennials than ever face a barrier to saving. U.S.educational debt rose to $1.2 trillion last year, six times morethan in 2003, and the average recent college student has $31,000 indebt.

These statistics put at risk the retirement prospects formillions of Americans, according to the Center for RetirementResearch at Boston College. In a study last month, the centerestimated that recent growth in student debt couldincrease the number of Americans facing inadequate retirementincome by 4.6 percentage points.

Such higher debt loads make it harder to buy a home orcontribute to retirement plans.

A January report by Facebook Inc., which analyzed public postsand polled thousands of users anonymously, found that only 13percent of people age 21–34 see being able to retire as thedefinition of financial success. The No. 1 indicator offinancial success to them is being debt-free.

How can you stay focused on the faraway dream of retirementwhen you’re obsessing over meeting this month’s debt payment?Aguilar says the way is to link the two.

His new benefit platform will let companies syncretirement savings and student debt payments, so employees who makea monthly student loan payment would automatically get a matching,pretax employer contribution to their 401(k).

Since 401(k) contributions are pretax, the money goes furtherthan just matching the employee’s monthly loan payment, whichis after-tax.

Ultimately, it’s up to employers to decide how tostructure the benefit—do they want to encourage retirementplanning, or student loan payments? Both? And how much do they wantto devote to each?

The 401(k) benefit program would need to navigate theknotty rules the federal government imposes on retirement plans,says Marcia Wagner, managing director of the Wagner Law Group inBoston.

So-called nondiscrimination tests prevent highly paid employeesfrom getting too much extra benefit out of 401(k) planscompared with lower-paid workers.

Student Loan Genius says such rules won’t be a problem,because those with student loans tend to be closer to the bottom ofthe pay scale, and the benefit should spur more younger, lower-paidemployees to participate in retirement plans.

Alicia Munnell, a Boston College professor who’s the director ofthe Center for Retirement Research, says linking student loanpayments and retirement contributions is a “nice idea.”

“If every company offered this type of benefit, it would helpdebt-laden college graduates get an earlier start on retirementsaving,” she says. “But every company won’t.”

The best way to help young people save for retirement would beimproving how 401(k) plans are designed, Munnell says, byadding features (which workers can always opt out of) thatautomatically enroll them and automatically raise the contributionrate over time.

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