If you have decided that you want to be a chef and that you wish to attend one of many culinary cooking schools , the next step is to figure out how to finance this goal. The costs of higher education have skyrocketed in the past twenty or thirty years, and these days almost every student leaves school with a large amount of student loan debt. Most likely the school councilors will advise you to take on some student loan debt for your financing of culinary school.

There are several rules of thumb to keep in mind. Try to get federal student loans, not private loans. In fact higher education students in all fields would do well to avoid private student loan debt. Federal loans have much better terms for borrowers. Next, only borrow at most one year of salary that you are likely to earn. This is difficult to know in the culinary field, because many culinary school grads start out with very low paying jobs. Lastly, when you start paying back the loan after graduation, make sure your payments do not exceed 10% of your monthly salary. More than that will probably put you onto a budget that is too tight and is impossible to maintain.