A Master's abroad is a common enough path for Indian developers considering a career pivot or aiming for roles that specifically value the credential, and the financing decision, loan versus savings, deserves more thought than defaulting to whichever feels less scary in the moment.
The case for an education loan even if you can technically afford it from savings: keeping your savings intact as a safety buffer during a period of genuinely uncertain income, no salary while studying, an uncertain job search timeline after, is valuable insurance. Depleting your entire safety net to avoid interest payments can leave you financially fragile exactly when you have the least income stability, right when you might actually need that buffer most.
The case for using savings instead: if the loan amount is large relative to your expected post-degree salary, and interest accrues during your study period on many education loan structures, the total cost by the time you're repaying can be substantially higher than the sticker price suggested at the start. If your savings genuinely cover the cost without leaving you dangerously exposed to bad luck, avoiding that accumulated interest is a real, quantifiable saving.
A middle path a lot of developers land on: finance a portion through a loan, sized to preserve a meaningful emergency buffer in savings, rather than an all-or-nothing choice between the two. This keeps some safety net intact without taking on more debt than necessary.
Currency risk is a factor specific to studying abroad that's easy to underweight. If your loan is denominated differently from your eventual income currency, especially if you're planning to return to India for work, rupee movements against the currency you'll be earning and eventually repaying in can meaningfully change the real cost of the loan over its tenure, in either direction.
Post-degree job market uncertainty deserves honest weighting too, since the assumption that a master's guarantees a significantly higher salary immediately isn't always true, and sizing your loan and repayment plan around a realistic, not best-case, post-degree income scenario protects you from a rough transition period.
If financing part of this makes sense for you, it's worth comparing personal loan or education-specific loan products directly rather than assuming one is automatically the right structure, and checking your credit score beforehand, or a parent or co-applicant's, if that's part of the plan, tells you what terms you're actually likely to be offered.
