George, its always nice to hear about folks like you, as so many these days think its all about running to the nearest bank manager with a brilliant buisiness plan.....himself.
Amassing money has never been easy, but with determination and hard work it can be done for a hell of a lot less than being upto your eyeballs in debt.
If I were to employ people in this industry, then personally I would go for those who have raised cash by showing determination and commitment through a bit of lateral thinking and hard work, anybody can go out and raise money through loans and frankly I dont feel that much sorry for those who make the decision at taking on almost impossible amounts of debt on the pretence that they will find themselves in the RHS of a jet the next month after completing their training.
It would be nice if it were like that, but you are all entering the reality of the aviation world...theres many in it who will take all they can from you and the other half that's worth working for are hard to open that door.
Those who are contemplating a career change in their lives, think hard how quickly you think you are going to find yourself in employment and quite frankly in the current market I would advocate using this industry downtime to get lateral thinking to raise the cash, after all once you start training then you can bowl the training over in relative short time.
By the way to answer the original question, my training owed me 30k, and I still had another 10k in my back pocket at the end of my 3 yrs hard work.......its nice to know that I wont be paying some bloody bank thousands in interest over the next 10-15 yrs.
It can be done surprisingly easily with a little thought and hard work, but then hey we are now in a "want it now"society!