Should I take a personal loan for my postgraduate studies?
If you are eligible for FEE-HELP then this is by far the cheapest way of financing higher education in Australia. I would not take this personal loan. Let's look closer at your options. Currently, you are paying $1100 a month in rent, and you have all the money saved up that you need to be able to pay cash for school.  That's a good position to be in. You are proposing to take out a loan and buy an apartment.  Between your new mortgage and your new personal loan payment, you'll be paying $1500 a month, and that is before you pay for the extra expenses involved in owning, such as property taxes, insurance, etc.  Yes, you'll be gaining some equity in an apartment, but in the short term over the next two years, you'll be spending more money, and in the first two years of a 30 year mortgage, almost all of your payment is interest anyway.  In two years from now, you'll have a master's degree and hopefully be able to make more income.  Will you want to get a new job?  Will you be moving to a new city?  Maybe, maybe not.  By refraining from purchasing the apartment now, you are able to save up more cash over the next two years and you won't have an apartment tying you down.  With the money you save by not taking the personal loan, you'll have enough cash for a down payment for an apartment wherever your new master's degree takes you. As mentioned in the comments, there are costs associated with owning & living in an apartment. First you have to pay maintenance charges on a monthly basis and perhaps also property tax. Find out the overall outgoings when you live in that apartment & add the EMI payments to the bank, it should not be way higher than your current rent. As an advantage you are getting an asset when you buy an apartment & rent is a complete loss, ast least financial terms. So, real estate is in general a good idea over paying rent. As for the loan part, personal loans are by far the most expensive of loans as they are in general unsecured loans (but do check with your bank). One way is to try and get a student loan, which should be cheaper. If you can borrow from family that is the best option, you could return the money with perhaps bank fixed deposit rates, it is better to pay family interest than bank. If none of the options are workable, then personal loan is something you need to look at with a clear goal to pay it off as soon as possible and try to take it in stages, as an when you require it and if possible avoid taking all the 15,000/- at once. I would delay purchase of a condo or apartment until you have at a minimum, 6 months of living expenses including mortgage set aside in other investments that could be liquidated.  If you lost your source of income though disability or layoff or an unexpected termination of a grant, you need to have that cushion or a significant other whose salary can sustain payments.   You could lose a lot if you either cannot make the payments and/or the value to the apartment dips greatly.  Many folks in the recent housing bubble and Great Recession learned this the hard way.  Many lost their entire investment by not being able to make payments AND seeing their house lose 1/3 of its value.
Fantastic question to be asking at the age of 22! A very wise man suggested to me the following with regard to your net income I've purposely not included saving a sum of money for a house deposit, as this is very much cultural and lots of EU countries have a low rate of home ownership. On the education versus entrepreneur question. I don't think these are mutually exclusive. I am a big advocate of education (I have a B.Eng) but have following working in the real world for a number of years have started an IT business in data analytics. My business partner and I saw a gap in the market and have exploited it. I continue to educate myself now in short courses on running business, data analytics and investment. My business partner did things the otherway around, starting the company first, then getting an M.Sc. Other posters have suggested that investing your money personally is a bad idea. I think it is a very good idea to take control of your own destiny and choose how you will invest your money.   I would say similarly that giving your money to someone else who will sometimes lose you money and will charge you for the privilege is a bad idea. Also putting your money in a box under your bed or in the bank and receive interest that is less than inflation are bad ideas. You need to choose where to invest your money otherwise you will gain no advantage from the savings and inflation will erode your buying power. I would suggest that you educate yourself in the investment options that are available to you and those that suit you personality and life circumstances. Here are some notes on learning about stock market trading/investing if you choose to take that direction along with some books for self learning. "You are not ""the economy"". The economy is just the aggregate of what is going on with everyone else. You should make the decision based on your own situation now and projected into the future as best you can. Loan rates ARE at historical lows, so it is a great time to take a loan if you actually need one for some reason. However, I wouldn't go looking for a loan just because the rates are low for the same reason it doesn't make sense to buy maternity clothes if you are a single guy just because they are on sale." I'm surprised no one has picked up on this, but the student loan is an exception to the rule. It's inflation bound (for now), you only have to pay it back as a percentage of your salary if you earn over £15k (11% on any amount over that I believe), you don't have to pay it if you lose your job, and it doesn't affect your ability to get credit (except that your repayments will be taken into account).   My advice, which is slightly different to the above, is: if you have any shares that have lost more than 10% since you bought them and aren't currently recovering, sell them and pay off your debts with those. The rest is down to you - are they making more than 10% a year? If they are, don't sell them. If your dividends are covering your payments, carry on as you are. Otherwise it's down to you. "While I haven't experienced being ""grad student poor"" myself (I went to grad school at night and worked full-time), I would shoot for 10-20% per month ($150-$300).  This depends of course on how much you currently have in savings.  If it isn't much, you might want to attempt a higher savings percentage (30-40%). If you can move to a less-expensive place, do that as soon as you can.  It's your largest expense; any place you can spend less on than $900 creates instance savings without having to sacrifice what you categorize as living expenses." "No you should not borrow money at 44.9%.  I would recommend not borrowing money except for a home with a healthy deposit (called down payment outside UK). in December 2016, i had financial crisis So that was like 12 days ago.  You make it sound like the crisis was a total random event, that you did nothing to cause it. Financial crises are rarely without fault.  Common causes are failure to understand risk, borrowing too much, insuring too little, improper maintenance, improper reserves, improper planning, etc...  Taking a good step or two back and really understanding the cause of your financial crisis and how it could be avoided in the future is very useful.  Talk to someone who is actually wealthy about how you could have behaved differently to avoid the ""crisis"". There are some small set of crises that are no fault of your own.  However in those cases the recipe to recovery is patience.  Attempting to recover in 12 days is a recipe for further disaster. Your willingness to consider borrowing at 44% suggests this crisis was self-inflicted.  It also indicates you need a whole lot more education in personal finance.  This is reinforced by your insatiable desire for a high credit score.  Credit score is no indication of wealth, and is meaningless until you desire to borrow money.  From what I read, you should not be borrowing money. When the time comes for you to buy a home with a mortgage, its fairly easy to have a high enough credit score to borrow at a good rate.  You get there by paying your bills on time and having a sufficient deposit.    Don't chase a high credit score at the expense of building real wealth." At your age, the only place you are going to get a loan is from relatives. If you can't... Go to next year's conference. Missing it this year might feel like a disaster, but it really, really isn't. most of the people who lurk in money.se will probably tell you to spend as little as possible on a car, but that is a really personal decision. since you live with your parents, you can probably afford to waste a lot of money on a car. on the other hand, you already have a large income so you don't really have the normal graduate excuses for deferring student loans and retirement savings. for the sake of other people in a less comfortable position, here is a more general algorithm for making the decision: You should pay for school with cash. If you take out a loan, you are not really saving money; you are borrowing money. I do not think you will come out ahead borrowing a down payment at student loan rates. In USA, if you take a personal loan, you will probably get rates between 8-19%. It is better that you take a loan in India, as home loan rates are about 10.25%(10.15% is the lowest offered by SBI).  This might not be part of the answer, but it is safer to hold USD than Indian rupees as India is inflating so much that the value of the rupee is always going lower(See 1970 when you could buy 1 dollar for 7 rupees). There might be price fluctuations where the rupee gains against the dollar, but in the long run, I think the dollar has much more value(Just a personal opinion). And since you are taking a home loan, I am assuming it will be somewhere between 10-20 years. So, you would actually save a lot more on the depreciating rupee, than you would pay interest. Yes, if you can get a home loan in USA at around 4%, it would definitely be worth considering, but I doubt they will do that since they would not know the actual value of the property. Coming to answer your question, getting a personal loan for 75k without keeping any security is highly unlikely. What you can do since you have a good credit score, is get a line of credit for 20-25k as a backup, and use that money to pay your EMI only when absolutely required. That way, you build your credit in the United States, and have a backup for around 2 years in India in case you fail to pay up. Moreover, Line of credits charge you interest only on the amount, you use. Cheers! It depends. If cost of tuition + income forgone during studying years is less than your lifelong discounted incremental cash flows you receive thanks to your education, then it is not worth it.  If your studies are, say, 150K, and you forego another 60K/y during 4 years of university, you will need to make roughly 39K ***more*** per year until you retire than you otherwise would have, or more, for your degree to be worth it. I don't see that as very realistic scenario for 90% of the people who get degrees.   Obviously cheaper/more expensive degrees, different discount rate assumptions, and different salaries before/during/after university are different from person to person. That's why everyone has to make their own calculation and then decide whether or not to make such a risky investment in themselves. Does that justify the purpose? That is for individual Banks to decide. No bank would pay for daily expenditure if you are saying primary salary you are spending on eduction. So your declaration is right. You are looking at funding your eduction via loan and you are earning enough for living and paying of the loan. I noticed that a lot of lenders do not lend to applicants whose purpose is to finance the tuition for post-secondary education This could be because the lenders have seen larger percentage defaults when people opt for such loans. It could be due to mix of factors like the the drag this would cause to an individual who may not benefit enough in terms of higher salary to repay the loan, or moves out of country getting a better job. If it is education loan, have you looked at getting scholarships or student loans. Could you perhaps expand on your reasoning behind wanting to take a loan in the first place? Why would you even consider taking a loan for as much as £7,500 (or even much less) if you aren't planning on buying / investing in anything in particular, and you're not in a bad financial situation? If your account never drops below a hundred or two pounds, why would you need to loan money? Just get yourself a credit card, for those times when you might find yourself without money for a short while. But really, it sounds to me like you should be able to set aside a small sum of money every month and create your own savings buffer to cover these situations. It's not a question with a single right answer.  Other answers have addressed some aspects, my case may provide some guidance as to one way of looking at some of the issues. When I had student loans, the interest rate was RPI¹ and I could get more than that as the return on a savings account.  At the time I could get a whole year's worth of loan at the start of the year, save it, and draw from the savings, partly because I had a little working capital saved already.  Importantly in my case, the loans were use-it-or-lose-it: if I didn't take the loan out by about halfway through each academic year, it was no longer available to me. The difference in interest rates was probably similar to what you can get with a careful choice of savings account and 0% on the loan (I did this in the 90s when interest rates were higher). Over a four year degree the interest I earned this way added up to no more than about £100, which went someway towards offsetting the fact I would be paying interest after graduation. If you can clear the loan before you pay any interest it would give you a return, but a small one that could easily be eroded by rate changes or errors on your part (like not keeping on top of the paperwork).  It still may be beneficial to take out the loans depending on your capital needs -- in my case it made buying a house after graduating much easier, as we still had money for the deposit (downpayment) and student loan rates were much lower than mortgage rates (100% mortgages were also available then, but expensive). ¹ RPI stands for retail price index, a measure of inflation. I think most people have already answered this one pretty well.  (It's usually worth it, as long as you pay it off before the interest kicks in, and you don't get hit with any fees.) I just wanted to add one thing that no one else has pointed out:  Applying for the loan usually counts as a hard pull on your credit history.  It also changes your Debt-to-income ratio (DTI).  This can negatively impact your credit score. Usually, the credit score impact for these (relatively) small loans isn't that much.  And your score will rebound over time.  However, if it makes your score drop below a certain threshold, (e.g. FICO dips below 700), it could trip you up if you are also applying for other sources of credit in the immediate future. Not a big deal, but it is something to keep in mind. When is the right time to buy a new/emerging technology? When it's trading at a discount that allows you to make your money back and then some. The way you presented it, it is of course impossible to say. You have to look at exactly how much cheaper and efficient it will be, and how long that will take. Time too has a cost, and being invested has opportunity cost, so the returns must not only arrive in expected quantity but also arrive on time. Since you tagged this investing, you should look at the financial forecasts of the business, likely future price trajectories, growth opportunity and so on, and buy if you expect a return commensurate with the risk, and if the risk is tolerable to you. If you are new to investment, I would say avoid Musk, there's too much hype and speculation and their valuations are off the charts. You can't make any sensible analysis with so much emotion running wild. Find a more obscure, boring company that has a sound business plan and a good product you think is worth a try. If you read about it on mainstream news every day you can be sure it's sucker bait. Also, my impression that these panels are actually really expensive and have a snowball's chance in Arizona (heh) in a free market. Recently the market has been manipulated through green energy subsidies of a government with a strong environmentalist voter base. This has recently changed, in case you haven't heard. So the future of solar panels is looking a bit uncertain. I am thinking about buying solar panels for my roof. That's not an investment question, it's a shopping question. Do you actually need a new roof? If no, I'd say don't bother. Last I checked the payoff is very small and it takes over a decade to break even, unless you live in a desert next to the Mexican border. Many places never break even. Electricity is cheap in the United States. If you need a new roof anyway, I suppose look at the difference. If it's about the same you might as well, although it's guaranteed to be more hassle for you with the panels. Waiting makes no sense if you need a new roof, because who knows how long that will take and you need a roof now. If a solar roof appeals to you and you would enjoy having one for the price available, go ahead and get one. Don't do it for the money because there's just too much uncertainty there, and it doesn't scale at all. If you do end up making money, good for you, but that's just a small, unexpected bonus on top of the utility of the product itself.