Your college degree will cost you $2m
What your career counselor didn’t tell you …
Published in
2 min readJun 10, 2017
I’ve always heard that college graduates make more money, so I wanted to crank the numbers myself. I pay for retirement software called WealthTrace, so I created two scenarios to see which person has more money when they retire.³ Let me present to you our two contestants …
Chivonn the Apprentice
- She graduates high school at 18 and goes straight into an apprenticeship that pays $15/hour for three months and then converts to a $50,000 job
- She saves 10% yearly into taxable investment that earns 8.5% per year
- Her pay increases by 3% per year with inflation
Mia the College Graduate
- She graduates high school at 18 and goes into college for four years, accruing $37,172 in student debt.¹
- She starts a job at 21 earning $70,000
- Because the average bachelor’s degree holder takes 21 years to pay off their loans,² she doesn’t start saving for retirement until age 42. It’s hard to save money when you have a $200+ monthly student loan payment.¹
The results are in!
At 65 years old, Chivonn the Apprentice will have $4,233,303 in her retirement account, compared to Mia the College Grad’s $2,221,511.
The Apprentice has $2,011,792 more than the College Graduate.
The reason is simple. Debt is brutally expensive because it keeps you from saving for retirement. And look at that final number at age 100: $9,879,095 vs $450,821. Insane.
If you want to exam the data yourself, just head over here.
I’m not the only person noticing this insanity …
