Mimiyan

Aloha -
I'm 26 turn 27 next January.
I have a question to you, like I work right now it's better to start now with a loan of 60K or wait 30 yo to be able to start with a very little loan like 10K?
Do it's the same to start at 26 or 30 for seniority honestly?

TiredSoul

This industry is volatile and cyclical.
It’s very hard to predict how long every cycle will last and where we currently are in the high.
Between the economic events of 9-11 and 2008 we had 7 years which each took 3-4 years to recover from.

1500 hrs for a Regional job will take you approximately 3 years. That may just puts you at the end of a good cycle or the end of a bad depending when you start training.
After the 3 years for the 1500hrs it will take another 2-3 years before you start making decent money. That’s 6 years total and very hard to predict where the industry will be.
Yea the Regionals now have flow and signing bonuses. Don’t count on a signing bonus to pay off your loan, that’s gambling.

In short try and do this with minimum debt and preferable you keep your day job.
Get rid of all debt and start saving.

kevbo

Even better, keep your day job and find a cheaper hobby. You are a day late and a dollar short to ever expect much from an aviation career.

rickair7777

Kevbo can always be relied on to share the most negative extreme. But there's a grain of truth, in that some people will not progress to majors, or get stuck in a bad place with a lot of seniority at a dead-end or bankrupt employer. So there's risk for sure.

But given the known retirements and your age (still pretty young) your potential opportunity is better than most of us who are older ever had. But we are getting to the point where you want to pull out all stops to catch the retirement wave. It would be ideal not to have debt, but it would be a reasonable risk to incur debt now to avoid missing significant retirement-induced seniority opportunity.

TiredSoul

Observation from the sidelines here:

People always start training when the market is good while they should start training when the market is bad as you have about a 5-7 year lead time.

Its a very basic economic principle and you see this in markets like pork and agave.
But it always means there’s a surplus at the end of the good wave prior to the market tanking.

Aka you need to be in the first hiring wave after a recession not in the last one just prior.
Mahalo.