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....About your interest...I think you may have made a mistake with that calculation. I think you figured it as being 57% interest by mistake lol.
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No mistake. Compound interest spread over many years is a killer. Do a Google search on "Loan Calculators" and plug in some of your own numbers. Maybe it'll get people to think twice about financing flight training (or cars, boats, jet skis....).
SmitteyB, your final interest rate must be a little higher than 5.78%. Here are the results I got using your numbers in one of those on-line calculators:
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Loan Payments Calculator
Loan Balance: $48,500.00
Loan Interest Rate: 5.78%
Loan Term: 15 years
Minimum Payment: $50.00
Monthly Loan Payment: $403.53
Number of Payments: 180
Cumulative Payments: $72,634.95
Total Interest Paid: $24,134.95
Note: The monthly loan payment was calculated at 179 payments of $403.53 plus a final payment of $403.08 .
It is estimated that you will need an annual salary of at least $48,423.60 to be able to afford to repay this loan. This estimate assumes that 10% of your gross monthly income will devoted to repaying your student loans. If you use 15% of your gross monthly income to repay the loan, you will need an annual salary of only $32,282.40 , but you may experience some financial difficulty.
These results assume that the student is paying the interest charges on any unsubsidized loans and is not capitalizing the interest while in school. If the student is capitalizing the interest, the cumulative payments and total interest charges will be higher than shown here.
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Here's my source.
Here is another one:
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Number of Monthly Payments 180
Simple Interest Rate 5.78
Principal Amount of Loan $ 48,500
Your Monthly Payment Will Be $ 403.52
Your Total Interest Cost Will Be $ 24,135.11
Minimum annual salary to handle these payments: $ 60,529.00
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(anybody notice the recommended annual salaries to handle that amount of loan debt? Want to compare those numbers to CFI or first year F/O wages for fun?)
[/soap box]