Originally Posted by
Sliceback
The sooner you get your licenses and ratings the sooner you can start getting paid to fly. Instead of getting 100-250 hrs a year learning you'll suddenly be logging 500-1000 hrs a year. Spend the money to ACCELERATE your career. If you spend $50,000 in one year it might gain you an additional year at the end of your career. That's worth $200,000 to $400,000 as well as more money every year when you're at a major airline since you might be hired several months, or years, sooner.
Sometimes debt makes sense.
Whether or not this is good advice depends on the hiring conditions...you DO NOT want to get stuck as a regional FO with big loan payments. I saw that play out for years between 2001 and about 2012. People's entire lives revolved around servicing their debt. One young lady I knew resorted to stripping (and then some) on her days off.
That said, the current hiring climate would probably justify taking on debt as sliceback described. But take into account the interest paid over the length of the loan. If it's a $50K loan but will cost $100K in interest over 30 years then it's a pretty weak justification to incur that risk just to make $200K at age 64.
I would say balance the length of the delay vs. the cost of the loan. I wouldn't incur a multi-year delay right now to avoid a reasonable debt load.