Continuing with the series…
When talking with people (mostly those outside of the USA or Boomers) people think that USA citizens are just irresponsible with their money if they are in debt.
Possible, but there is also the other side of that. If you’ve been following along with this series, you understand why.
According to Forbes the average credit card debt per USA citizen is $6,455. Today, the average interest rate is 24.20%. If you wanted to take 3 years to pay that off, it would mean a monthly payment of $254.
What about college debt though? This is staggering. According to IPEDS, the average yearly costs for in-state, public college, with on-campus living, in the Midwest is $24,415. That increases to $33,744 for out-of-state tuition. This is an undergraduate degree, people! That means in 4 years the total amount of loans you would take out is $97,660 or $134,976.
If you want to talk about private colleges, the average is $45,057 per year and $180,228 for the 4 year degree.
At a 6.53% interest rate, that means people are looking at a monthly payment of $1,111 at the lowest (the $97,660 total) and $2,050 at the highest (the $180,228 total). Reminder, these are averages in the Midwest.
For this series we are going to take the average between the two and use $1,581 as the total monthly payment.
Please keep in mind, this series is using an apartment to rent not a mortgage of any kind. So there is room here to add in housing debt (if you would like to do further calculations on your own).
For this series though, our total is going to be the average monthly student loan payment and the average credit card debt payment mentioned above. Which is $1,581 and $254 respectively.
The total would then be $1,835 per month.
Now for the final calculation of this series!
The Average USA Salary $-7,768 – $1,835 = $-9,603
The Average Software Engineer Salary$-1,977 – $1,835 = $-3,812
Head on over to the final post to wrap everything up (and see the costs I didn’t include).
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