How much debt is it okay to go in?

The reason we think no cosigner is very specific: you’ve been asked innumerable times and never answered.

Furthermore, it looks like I would be able to work if I attended LSE. They estimate the cost of living to be around $15,000 and tuition is about $25,000, so the total cost of attendance would be about $120,000. What do you think?

Here we go again with LSE and big loans. You want our endorsement and we do not endorse this.

Find the colleges you can afford. Colleges with a business program. The end.

No college automatically gives you better chances of getting into the lucrative side of finance or IB. This rests on you. If you get distracted, in college, by this fret or that, you won’t be focused in the right ways. “Perfect” doesn’t matter. Your own productivity does.

Nope. It isn’t, unless you’re doing actual phlebotomy-type activities. It’s community service, not clinical experience.

RE: premed/chem to med school career pathway. Medical school is never a sure thing–even for academically able students. 75% of freshmen pre-med never even apply to med school because they get weeded out along the way or find shorter, easier paths to earn a living. Among those that apply to med school, 60% get NO acceptances, include 15% of students who are in the top 7% stats-wise.

In addition to delaying your entry into your adult career by 7-12 years, you’ll also finished med school in significant debt. (National average debt for medical education alone is $190K if you attend a public med school and $215K if you attend a private one. BTW, that average skews low due to the 18% of students who graduate with zero debt due to financing by the Bank of Mom & Dad.)

Do not take more loans than you can pay back. For certain. It’s simple math.

60k is 5k/month, roughly 3500 after taxes, less if there are additional local taxes or healthcare costs, etc.

Other threads show what college grads are paying in rent in Boston, NYC and other major cities. $2000 would be lucky, including utilities, transportation, etc. That leaves you 1500 to live on. You want $1300 of that to go for college loans?

Mybe you make more. But I don;t see you playing with the real numbers.

Sure, it’s community service, but community service plays a big role in healthcare. I know I don’t have a whole lot of experience in healthcare, but honestly the kids I know who are in medical school right now weren’t much different at my age. And it looks like you’re arguing that medical school is a bad idea for anybody—is that really true?
Lastly, med school was one option out of many, not sure why you’re fixating on that before it’s been decided that Madison is the only choice.

Obviously the numbers are going to be higher if you plan on paying back your loans in one year. If that is possible, however, wouldn’t it make LSE more appealing?

Best of luck!

You are spinning your wheels at this point, asking the same questions and not paying any attention to the answers.

Given your “pay back in one year” statement, I assume you’re either not at all serious about anything on this thread or you really aren’t doing the basic math.

To pay back 120k in one year, you would need to earn more than 160k (bcause of taxes.) Right now, like many kids, you think you have huge earnings potential based on your retail jobs and investing. You will NOT walk into a 160k job. Not even from Harvard or Stanford.

Worse. You still have to pay rent, food, etc. So that job would need to be much more pay.

Are you really serious?

Pre-med and medicine is not a career path I’d recommend for most people. It’s a very long and challenging path with a high potential for failure. It requires tremendous time, dedication, effort and sacrifice. Not to mention a willingness to take on substantial debt.

There’s saying about medicine: if there is anything else you can see yourself doing as a career–do that other thing.

And I know that medicine requires a substantial commitment to community service. I have two kiddos who are young physicians in residency. (And earning peanuts while working 60-80 hours/week.)

The career outlook for BA/BS level chem majors is not strong and the median starting salary is <$40K

https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/careers/salaries/secure/salaries/new-graduates-2014-revised.pdf

(NOTE: data includes salary info for chemical engineers which skews average starting salaries higher.)

@lookingforward said:

60k is 5k/month, roughly 3500 after taxes.

That’s 12 months—1 year. That’s not my figure, that’s @lookingforward’s. I personally was surprised to hear that @lookingforward set it all to 1 year of payments.

Now with the 120k number…where are you getting that from? I’d need 60k in loans, it seemed like you understood that earlier.

So @missbwith2boys, “my” “pay back in one year” statement isn’t mine…I was looking at the numbers @lookingforward, who seems to know everything, gave me.

Of course medicine isn’t an easy route, but it pays off in the end, don’t you agree? And well yeah, a bachelors degree in chemistry may not be the most lucrative…but throw in a PhD and it makes a pretty big difference.

OP, you said, " the numbers are going to be higher if you plan on paying back your loans in one year." I showed those numbers.

120k is a 1300/month payment for ten…long…years.

You are the one who noted 120k. 15k + 25k x 3 years. If you invest 60k, you can run the numbers same as me, google student loan repayment calculator.

@dhdiaksndbs : “…but throw in a PhD and it makes a pretty big difference.”

Do you understand how long it takes one to earn a PhD ?

Do you understand how hard it is to get funding for a PhD ?

120k would be the total cost. I do have money saved, yes? So 60k, the number you quoted earlier, would be the amount of loans I’d need to take out. Say I can put away 20k each year, like I’ve been doing recently, into the debt. By the time I graduate, there’d only be interest left to pay. And that’s not even taking into account the ~20k I’ll set aside this year. So taking that into account, I’d be debt free by the time I graduate.

  1. do you know costs and stats required for UWisconsin and Carlson at UMN?
  2. The 15k out quoted are your parents l contribution per years right? Are you expected to contributed 5k from your annual income? How much have you saved or can you use? What’s your actual budget, the 15k you quoted or something else? How do you know you’d graduate debt free from UWisconsin?
  3. LSE is going to be very expensive due to cost of living in London (halls for freshers run from $8,000 to $18,000 a year just for housing - transportation and food is additional.) In addition, will you have the minimum requirement of BC Calc with a 5 ? Equally recruited in the UK if you want to work in the City, you have Warwick, which should be cheaper. However, Brexit is throwing a huge wrench in proceedings and many companies are heading to Frankfurt, Paris, plus obviously Dublin and the Netherlands.
  4. Wisconsin is a very good flagship, strong in many, many, many fields. If you have doubts about its business school, you have tuition reciprocity with Carlson. Apply now, apply to honors, and once that’s done, focus on other possibilities, one of which should be IUKelley.
  5. a cost benefit analysis should clearly show you that the debt you’ve talked about isn’t a good choice compared to Wisconsin/UMN. Your odds of pulling off what you want to do are actually greater from either university than from one of the universities you listed before. Being debt free and with a highly respected degree in finance is better than being in debt with a highly respected degree that’s only very marginally better in terms of recruiting than the former degree.
  6. PHD in anything is not the path to making money or stability. (You could end up working for $12,000 a year as a adjunct.) It CAN be a worthwhile pursuit but if your main motivation is a misguided estimation that UWisconsin is better at Chemistry than at Business, you’re probably in the wrong track.
  7. what about Babson or Bentley?

Here’s some more advice. A $100k a year Wall Street job coming out of an elite school sounds nice. Subtract the cost of living from that and you get around $60k. Now add $200k in student loans on top of that, and that’s going to be your new career. That’s assuming your parents are crazy enough to co-sign that kind of debt over to you. London? Forget it. You can’t afford to go there. There’s no such job so lucrative that it justifies spending $200k on a bachelors degree. Even if you get in, you’re in a completely saturated market, which makes career and salary growth very difficult. Most end up changing careers.

OP, you are significantly undervaluing Wisconsin. Go to Wisconsin, major in Econ, take a lot of math, take advantage of opportunities for internships. Invest the money you save and continue beating the market. Graduate debt free and with enough savings for grad school at UPenn or wherever. Chances are, by that time your interests will have changed or, if you really are ‘best of the best’ material, you’ll be the brightest light on the tree at Wisconsin and will have all kinds of opportunities. Frankly, no investment bank is going to be impressed by a candidate who went into significant debt because s/he thought studying at one of the best flagships in the country wasn’t ‘worthwhile’.

Read post 111. I answered your question.