A doctor with $370k in student loans walks through how to pay it off, starting with tracking daily interest costs and prioritizing loans by interest rate. The strategy turns a crushing number into a manageable daily target.
Well, what advice do you have for somebody that's just like, you kind of maybe just ignored everything during residency and is just now having a financial awakening as they're leaving residency?
You don't dream about things. You visualize things. And the difference is that when you're dreaming, you're just thinking about the endpoint, but when you visualize, you actually see all of the little details that you're going to have to do to get to that endpoint. I actually made a large Excel spreadsheet with each loan, how much principal, how much daily interest it was costing me, and how much monthly interest it was costing me. So it was costing me fifty dollars every day, up to fifteen hundred dollars a month just in interest. And that's money that's just wasted. And so that really gave me the motivation. And then I could see each loan and what I had to do first. So I tried to attack them in order of the highest interest down to the lower. And as I took each one out, then I could recalculate and say, hey, now I'm only paying $25 a day. I'm only paying 10. And so it just made it even more, even fun, almost, to get rid of them.
Physician Takes a Youth Sports Team to the State Championship - MtoM Podcast #236
