Saving 140k with part time studies

Today is the day I breakeven with my university degree school fees. A follow up of my post about my investment in education here as well as increasing the ROI of my education here.

I wasn't that smart nor hardworking during poly days so I couldn't enter a local university.

Guess it turned out as a blessing in disguise.

During my national service, I was fortunately to get a stay out unit so I maximised my time by going to driving lessons as well as university night classes (UWA by PSB Academy), while juggling NS related duties (I remember I started with 10 duties a month @_@).

So as NS was ending, I spent the last few months clearing my off and leave, while kept going for interviews and landed my first job at a Cancer Institute at a local hospital, working to pay off my school fees.

My school fees totaled to about 40k.

Let's start off with how I calculate my breakeven period

I prefer to use a conservative method of calculating my breakeven by calculating how much I saved a month, instead of pure gross salary.

Do note that for simplicity, all earnings here here unless stated is post CPF deductions without income tax.

At that time, I saved 1.4k a month, with a take home salary 2.4k/month (on average) as I was eager to recover the cost of my education.

This calculates to about 36k p.a. gross income, about 24k p.a. net income, representing a Return on Investment of about 60% (the pros of salaried employees ;) ).

So calculating from my first job as a degree holder (May 2014, I graduated in Apr 2014), is about 29 months, which means it ends Feb 2017 (I excluded bonuses as they may be spent for one time expenses but ended up I managed to save two months of bonus and 1.4k from AWS in anyway).

I worked at that job for a year, ending up with about 12/29 months left.

After encashing 2 weeks of leave, 11/29 months left.

I jumped on an opportunity when an ex-colleague of mine introduced me to pharmaceutical manufacturing positions. So I left, going from research as a degree holder, straight to the industry, instead of going a big loop. 

As I had to worked on shift, this increased my monthly salary by about 33%, resulting in a take home pay of 3.42k/month (basic is lower at 2.4k/month). The bonus+AWS was estimated to be 2.5 months in total. (There is OT pay, unlike my prior job as well as for Masters/PhD, but for simplicity I will exclude that in the calculations)

This resulted in saving 2.1k a month (about 50% increase), so we get about 47k gross p.a., estimated 31k net p.a., resulting in about 77.5% ROI!

I started shift only in Sep 2015,so for my first month of work there, I saved 1.8k, and paired with 6 months of shift and prorated AWS. I have finally breakeven!

Breakeven 12 months ahead of schedule! :D

Now let's look at Saving 100k by Part Time Studies

Taking FRANK OCBC Education Standard 7 year Loan effective rate 5.29% p.a.:

In addition, studying full time, would have made me lose an average of $2066/mth, which totals to about 109.9k for 3.5 years, with 3 months bonus+AWS.

This is excluding about 18.7k in employers' contribution to my CPF!

And adding the interest for 7 years, this becomes a total sum of 141.8k!

That's almost 150k!

So have any of you tried seeing how much you save studying part time?