I am pursuing a Masters and working part time… So my total loans are going to be $75,000 for a public school including everything and minor financial aid (hoping for 3k in pell grants a year).
Is that normal?
How Much Do You All Have in Student Loans? Is 75k for Masters High?
Normal
I got my MS in 1.5 years. I took out about 30k to do it. Also, I worked for 1 year duing the 1.5 years and made about 35k. So the total cost was techincally 65k. The .5 I did not work, my arents sent me $, and that was about $6.
So total was 71k
Could I have been more frugal? Yes. I could have only taken out debt in the fisrt semester I was not working, and the money I made the rest of the way, could have covered my expenses.
My parttime work paid about $21/hr. So I was kind of spoiled.
Forever:
Reckon about this for a following. It’s like asking “Would paying $80,000 for a Land Rover” be too much?
Yes, it certainly would, if you have no savings, and you work part-time at McDonalds.
Yes, it probably would, if you have a small savings, but you have a honestly low paying job and a lot of other bills to pay.
No, it’s probably well within your budget if you’re a cardiologist, and you make $350,000 a year in income.
Educational loans work the same way. Can you meet the deprivation of $75,000 in debt? Yes, if you’re preparing for a career that’s going to pay you the kind of salary that will allow you to meet the deprivation of your monthly payment.
Here’s the rule of thumb – your monthly payment obligation should never exceed 15% of your income. A simpler (but a small less accurate) version of the same rule says that you shouldn’t borrow more than your FIRST year’s salary.
I can’t predict exactly what the interest rate on your loans are going to be, but for the sake of a quick estimate, let’s guesstimate that they’re all the Stafford loan rate of a fixed 6.8%.
If you borrow $75,000 for 10 years at 6.8% interest, your monthly payment will be $863.10.
Using that rule of thumb that I mentioned above (15%), you’d need to earn about $69,000 to comfortably meet the deprivation of that kind of payment. When I say you need to earn $69,000, I don’t mean “after a few years of working” – I mean you’ll need to earn $69,000 a year straight away, because you’ll have to start building those $863 payments six months after you end school. You don’t get to wait until your salary goes up.
If you’re working on a masters in computer science, probability are relatively excellent that you force find a $69,000 job, straight out of college. If you’re working on a master’s in science education – it’s not impossible to believe that you’ll find a job that pays that well, but it’s not particularly likely, either.
The rule is this – borrow responsibly – always have a significance of what you owe, and what your payments are going to be – and never take more than you need. To be very honest, $75,000 in student loans IS a lot of money to owe for education, and you’ll have to find a high paying job in order to meet the deprivation of that.
If you want to “check” yourself against mean, the mean undergrad leaves school with about $21,000 in student loan debt. I’d reckon that tacking $54,000 on top of that mean in the course of completing a master’s would be much higher than is typical.
Good luck to you – I hope this information – though somewhat pessimistic – helped you with your thought.
except u get a job coming out of college building $ 90k…..that is a lot of money that u will be paying off for a very long time…and a part-time job is just not going to cut it…3k in pell grants is nothing compared to 75k in loans….whoa!!