Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

How cool are you and your wife with living like students, deferring a home purchase, and deferring children? If not, the entrepreneurial path could be really hard. Entrepreneurship probably means avoiding further big obligations.

Next factor, what's your monthly debt payment, how much can your wife earn, and how cheaply can you live?

Entrepreneurship is usually light on cash income. I'm embarrassed to say that it took me 10 years of entrepreneurship before I got my first payout that could cancel out your debt. I'm probably in the slow class, and you'll probably not be as much of a dunce as me. But to be on the safe side, is your wife cool with enduring 10 years of uncertainty before buying a house and having kids?

You could pay that down more deterministically by finding a job in finance or another high-income / lower upside field. Really depends on what is right for you. I'm an advocate for the entrepreneurial path, and wish you the best of luck with it. Just make sure you and your wife understand the potential sacrifices.

Our expenses (car, phone, food, fuel, medicine, toiletries, etc.) are $1600 a month without the loan and credit payments (living with the folks). My student loan payment (most of it from b-school) is $1200 and the credit cards are $300 a month. Her student loan (also most of it from grad school) is $1000 a month. Note that we could do income based repayment where the loan payments are lower (it's 15% of your income above the poverty level, which I think is around $11,000 dollars). The balance is forgiven after 25 years of payments.

Her income is virtually non-existent right now.

We don't mind deferring a home purchase for the next few years (though we would like to move to Boston in a few years [which has a high cost of living]) and we can't have children for medical reasons.

As for finance jobs or other high-income jobs I have been under the impression that these are hard to come by if you're not near the top of the MBA class (my GPA 3.44/4.0), haven't done an internship, and don't get hired shortly after you graduate. Let me know if I'm wrong about this though.

you should do the income based repayment right away. it will take some of the stress off.

"How cool are you and your wife with living like students, deferring a home purchase, and deferring children?"

This is what the changes in higher education costs are really about. Serfdom as a blue collar laborer, or serfdom as a white collar professional.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com