管理你的债务水平

what I want to dig in a bit in this video is student student debt and I'll start off with some averages so at the time of making this video the average the average debt the average balance that an American student graduates with is $27,000 now this isn't necessarily the entire cost of their education they might have gotten help from other folks they might have had a work-study than maybe their parents helped out and maybe they got a scholarship from someone but this is the average student loan balance and once again just an average some people might have a lot more of than this some people might not have any student loan balance and the other average is is that the average term the average term for student loan so this is the time period over which you were expected to pay it off is 10 years and once again these might change over time but well use this as a reasonably good example to to frame our discussion and at the time of making this video and this is likely to change over time but the average interest rate interest rate is 6.8% at the time of making this video and if you take these inputs and there are student loan calculators payment calculators on the internet in fact you could even use mortgage calculators if you say it's a 10-year term you're borrowing $27,000 and it's a 6.8 percent interest rate and you you zero out all of the other assumptions then the payment that you would have this is obviously isn't a mortgage but it's the same idea you're borrowing some amount of money you have an interest rate and you want to pay the whole thing off out over some type of a term so if you were to input all of that into a kind of a loan payment calculator you would get the average monthly payment giving these given these assumptions are going to be three hundred and ten a little over three hundred and ten dollars per month and so let's just think a little bit about if we make these assumptions how easy or hard this might be to pay off and then we can start to stretch these assumptions a little bit what if your balance is four times this so I looked up some more averages so this is kind of what you have to pay this is the dead so let's think about let's think about income and expenses income and expenses so the average once again this is at the time of making this video I encourage you to look it up just to verify that the what the averages might be it whenever you happen to watch this but the average income for a college grad at the time of making this at the time I maybe I should write average salary average salary is $45,000 $45,000 and then I looked up the average paycheck average paycheck which they have as one thousand one thousand two hundred and ninety nine dollars and actually let's see if that actually makes sense so if I'm making if I'm making forty five thousand and if I assume I have bi-weekly paychecks so I'm gonna have 26 there's 52 weeks in a year so I'm gonna have a paycheck on half of them so I'm gonna have 26 paychecks in a year that means that I'm gonna my my pay my pay my salary before paying taxes and other things is going to be 1730 and so this actually makes sense because if you were to take let's see this looks like it's about let's see if we saved one thousand two hundred and whoops 1299 divided by 1730 it's about seventy-five percent so this is assuming that you're paying about 25% and of your your effective tax rate is about twenty-five percent and that includes your state your your and your federal income tax and your social security benefits and all of that and so this seems actually like the the numbers right over here makes sense but we have a few more averages so let's see this average paycheck and let's just translate everything to a monthly basis so this is going to be approximately this is going to be approximately twenty six hundred dollars a month is is let me this is your average take-home take-home pay so you're gonna have twenty six if you're making forty five thousand dollars and you have all these other assumptions that means that the average college grad has twenty six hundred dollars a month to pay all of their expenses and hopefully also have some savings so now let's think about the expense side of things so most people's larger expense is housing and the average rent at the time of making this video is 821 dollars now this is the average across the United States you could imagine if you're in a high rent place like New York or San Francisco and you're not living with three people in the same room you're gonna have to pay a lot more than this but let's just go with the averages so you have that rent right over there and now let's just make some other assumptions let's say transportation also tends to be a pretty significant expense let's say between your car and your and gas and maintenance you have to spend $300 a month in transportation and obviously you can tweak these assumptions if you think they're too high or too low or if you want to drive a fancy car or maybe you can use public transportation and this would be lower and then of course you have to feed yourself and so let's see let's say you spend a hundred dollars a week which isn't an exorbitant amount to spend on food so you could probably spend less if you cooked a lot but let's see four hundred dollars would be on the month per month out four weeks in a year so about four hundred four four weeks in a month so you gonna spend $400 a month on food and then let's see what does that leave you with so that leaves you with so twenty six hundred dollars - eight hundred and twenty one - $300 - $400 that leaves you with let's see that leaves you with one thousand seventy nine dollars that leaves you with one thousand seventy nine dollars now you might say hey this is this is pretty good I have a thousand seventy nine dollars but we have a couple of expenses that we haven't paid for yet we haven't paid our average student loan balance so let's subtract that out so my previous answer - three hundred and ten seventy two gets us seven hundred and sixty eight dollars anyway okay well that's pretty good I'm saving seven hundred sixty-eight dollars per month but of course we haven't put any fun in here you haven't gone to the movies yet you're going to a show or or hanging out with friends or whatever it might be and so if you put an entertainment budget in there and we could you know depends on I guess how much you like to party but let's say that that's just $200 a month $50 a week which sounds actually pretty economical so that gets you to 568 dollars so you still have some savings that's not bad especially early in your career if you're able to put some money aside this is pretty good now what I want to keep in mind is this is given these assumptions so now let's stretch these assumptions a little bit for example if instead of your student loan balance being 27,000 if your student loan balance is say four times that and it was a hundred and eight thousand a hundred and eight thousand dollars now all of a sudden this three hundred ten dollars isn't good is going to be four times as high as well so that's going to be approximately approximately one thousand two hundred and forty dollars and so if this was your student loan balance now all of a sudden this world looks a lot worse before having fun and before paying off your loans you only have a thousand seventy nine which is less than what you have to pay for your loans and now you might say oh maybe you know I make more money than that and that's definitely possible and especially as you get more and more experience and get more and more skills in the workforce your income could go more but you just have to keep in mind at the beach that you're gonna have to there's an expectation that you pay this if you're if your balance is 108 thousand dollars from the get-go from the get-go so it's not even where you're gonna get to it's where you are going to start you're gonna have to find a reasonable way to pay this amount the other things that you're going to have to really really think about are these assumptions right over here the average salary you might have a point in time where you're between jobs where you want to explore something so that that's a very important thing to take into consideration and of course what we already mentioned this rent number this rat number is an average for the nation but if you live in a in a urban area especially an expensive urban area your rent could be substantially substantially more than this and frankly all of your other expenses are probably going to be more than this and so you can see when you're a student loan when your debt becomes more and you know this is a debt number that definitely a lot of folks with debt numbers like this you have to feel comfortable that you're going to be in a situation upon graduation where you can make when you can make this type of payment after you're you're really your necessities after food and living and and and transportation so not saying student debt is good or bad I tend to think that an education is a very very good thing it's a very good investment it's one of the best assets that you can have but any asset you should always be thoughtful about how much you're going to pay for it and what type of a return you can get and whether you can pay for it and so hopefully this just gives you a little bit of a framework for thinking about that