MtoM #109 - Geriatrician Pays Off Student Loans

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This is Milestones to Millionaire podcast number 109. Geriatrician pays off $130,000 in student loans. As a white coat, you have valuable knowledge. Various companies want that knowledge, and they're willing to pay you for it. That's why we put together a list of recommendations for companies that pay you to take surveys. If you're looking for a profitable side gig for not too much effort, getting paid for surveys could be the perfect solution for you. You can make extra money, start a Solo 401, and use your medical knowledge to impact new products. One of the WCI columnists makes an extra $30,000 a year just doing these surveys. Sign up today and use a fraction of your downtime to make extra cash. Go to whitecoatinvestor.com mdsurveys you can do this, and the White Coat Investor can help. All right, we have got a fantastic guest for you today. Let's get him on the line. Our guest on the podcast today is Tyson. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Jim. It's good to be here.

Now, I just had a chance to get to know you a little bit, but our listeners don't know you from Adam. So tell us what you do for a living, how far you are out of training, and what part of the country you're in.

Yeah, I'm a geriatrician, internal medicine, trained with additional qualifications in geriatrics in the state of Texas, where I graduated medical school and did training kind of all over the country, but finally made it back.

And how far out are you?

I graduated medical school in 2014, graduated fellowship in 2018.

Okay, so since 2018. So that puts you about four years out or so. Right. Okay. And tell us about what milestone we're celebrating today. What have you done?

So I have paid off all my loans around 130,000 with the interest added that accrued over time. But I also did a net worth calculation, and my wife and I are worth 350, which I didn't see coming.

You know, the average person your age has something like $20,000 saved up. So a net worth of 350,000 is very impressive, as is paying off student loans in just four years. How much did you have when you came out of medical school?

So I was pretty fortunate. I graduated with around $120,000 when I left medical school, and the total payments were around 130,000.

$130,000. Well, I think we Know why the total payments were only $10,000 higher than what you borrowed. You essentially almost the entire time you were paying back your student loans were under the COVID 19 relief. It sounds like all but that first year, year and a half or so, right?

Yep. I made a plan once I left fellowship to pay them all in two years. And then lo and behold, I started my first job September of 2019. Or sorry, 2018. September 2018. Worked a year and a half and then the COVID relief kind of hit. And at that point I was just going through my emails from my fed loan to see how routine the payments were in March 2020. There's a payment and then there's not. There's not another payment till September 2020. It was, it was kind of nice. Took a little bit of the pressure off of the, the need to pay from a financial standpoint, but the psychological need was still there every month, I can tell you that.

Yeah. Did your income take a hit?

Not at my job. So I will also say about two months after Covid started, I was one of probably the unsatisfied physicians at my job and I left, moved from Denver, Colorado to Texas to teach at my medical school where I graduated and took a clinical position here as well. So my salary took a hit. I was getting paid around 210 at my first job in Denver and I took a salary reduction to 196 when I moved to Texas. Overall my take home pay stayed about the same with the reduction in state taxes. And really we rented for a while so there was no property tax for a few months.

Now you've mentioned a spouse. Tell us about your spouse. Spouse, working spouse, not working spouse, taking care of kids. What's going on there?

Yes, my spouse is working. So we met in high school and we got married right after college and she graduated with her rn, bsn, went to work for a couple years for a hospice company when I was in my first two years of med school. She really helped pay quite a bit, even just living expenses. So we didn't have to take the maximum full amount for loans, which even in Texas is pretty low relative to the rest of the country. We were fortunate in that regard. And then she has been working as a neonatal ICU nurse for, for 11 years now. She calls herself the crusty unit nurse at this point.

It's amazing how young a nurse can be and be crusty, huh?

Yeah.

Well, this is pretty cool. You mentioned a plan that you had a plan to pay off your student loans in a couple of Years. What did your wife think when you rolled this plan out coming out of your fellowship? And you're like, we're going to pay this off in two years, you know, even though, you know, I mean, I know what nurses make, and you were making about 200 hundred ish. You know, it's not that much income. And you're going to send half of it, it sounds like, to the student loan folks.

Yeah.

Well, what you think about that plan? How'd that conversation go?

It was. It was interesting. You know, I took a note from the first book you published. When you take your first job as an attending, rent for six months. If you really love it, then purchase a home. And so we were like, okay, we're going to save for a down payment. We're going to pay loans off. And she said, how are we going to do that? And I said, like, you won't believe how much I get paid now to do the same thing I was doing in fellowship. So it. It took some conversations, but she was 100% behind getting the loans paid off. That was a pretty easy sell.

Are you guys natural savers or spenders?

I would say we're. We're natural savers. She looks at. She looked at me when I told her I was a natural sh. Saver, and she was. She said, I don't. I don't know about that, but I think we are natural savers.

Yeah. What do you like to spend money on?

So our hobbies include camping, so backpacking, camping supplies. REI is a playground, and I can get lost in there for hours. So I try not to go to our local rei, even though now that we're back in Texas, there's really nothing to do.

You can go to Enchanted Rock, right? I mean, there's got to be something. You can go down to Big Bend or. What else you got out there? What are those mountains in the west out by El Paso?

Least visited national park in the country, Guadalupe Mountains.

Yeah, Guadalupe. Yep.

And we have been to Enchanted Rock. We got. Got away for a night down there, and it's really pretty. I highly recommend it. Even if you live in Park City, Utah, there's something to offer.

Yeah, I know some people go out to Arkansas as well, and I found some pretty cool hiking and stuff out in Arkansas as well. But. But you're right. I mean, I've got family members in Texas, and they get a plane on it. They get on a plane a lot to do. Cool outdoorsy stuff. It's just part of the cost of being in Texas is they Fly out to Utah or Colorado or California or Oregon, you know, two or three times a year. And that's just part of the lifestyle of being down there. They happen to work in oil, so they're a little more Texas centric, I think, than somebody in medicine might be. All right, so what do you think now that you paid off your student loans? I mean, did it turn out to be easier or harder than you thought it was?

It was easier than I thought it was going to be. I'm looking at the list of loans on my second screen here and I have my first bill from my Fed loan that I'm going to throw into the shred box after this interview. And I added it all back up just to confirm that it wasn't my imagination that I owed somebody more than a hundred thousand dollars. And it still blows my mind that as a fellow graduating into a relatively low paying medical field, we were able to pay this off. Essentially we could have paid it off in the two years no problem had we not had the whole worldwide pandemic. But yeah, it was living saving like a resident. Still just. It works.

Yeah. How's it feel to have them gone?

It is, it's pretty incredible. Looking at it again, you know, my. When I paid him off, I met with a buddy a couple months after because I paid him off in November, met this friend and who's also a physician in January, and I told him I paid him off. He said, what did you do? And I said, well, I kind of felt like I had them paid off a year and a half ago, so it wasn't super exciting. But now looking at it and looking at the numbers again, it's such a relief and it is exciting to anyone. I recommend celebrating that in some way if you can.

It sounds like you kept them federal. Correct. Now, we've had a few guests on this podcast that refinanced, you know, one in February of 2020 before all their federal loans went to 0% no payments. How did you feel when that announcement came out? You know, President Trump declares it an emergency, you know, in the middle of WC icon in 2020 is when it occurred. So I can remember exactly when it was. And you're like, man, I'm glad I didn't refinance. Did you have any feelings like that?

Yeah, I felt good at that time. I felt validated, like, okay, you know, I was scared to refinance it. Honestly, it was why I didn't. I wasn't sure if I would do it correctly, if I would get everything all the numbers in the right spot with the number of loans that I have. So I didn't. And for the first year in residency, I paid the standard payment just based on the amount owed, not any income based repayment. Because again, I was scared. I was like, I don't know if I'm going to do this right. I just want to, I don't want to go to jail because I didn't pay my loans.

It sounds really hard as a resident to make standard payments. Were you feeling pretty poor?

Yes. So we, we rented a little house for as cheap as we could and I told my wife, I was like, hey, like we're, we're going to be paying quite a bit for these loans. And she understood. And for the first year, or I guess for six months, because I didn't start making my first payment till November, December of 2014. And you do your income based repayment in November, or at least that's when I did it the next year. So for about six months we made the standard payments and then switched to the income based. I don't, I don't know if that's correct. I just remember getting a letter saying, hey, you qualify for income based repayments in November of 2015. And so that's when I made the switch. It was a lot to pay for that six months.

Yeah, I bet it was. Now, somewhere out there, there is a geriatrician or a pediatrician or a PM&R doc or a family doc or a preventive medicine doc, a relatively lower paid physician coming out of residency this summer that wants to be like you, wants to be done with their student loans in less than five years. What advice do you have for them?

I would say kind of echo what you've said all along. Live like a resident with your first job. I think it is a good idea to rent a home in your area for six months before you make a major purchase so that you can save up for a down payment if you need to. And you can continue to just hammer away on those loans however you like to do it. The snowball, the avalanche. Pick a method, stick with it, and before you know it, your monthly disposable income doesn't just creep up, it explodes up and you don't even realize it.

Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Well, Tyson, in four years you paid off $130,000 in student loans. You built a net worth of $350,000 on a geriatrician income. Congratulations to you and your wife on your success. It's very inspiring and thank you so much for coming on the Milestones podcast to help others to do the same.

Thank you, Jim.

All right. Feedback we get a lot about this podcast is bring on people that have lower incomes. We don't wanna only hear about people that are making $800,000 a year. Well, there's a good example. Somebody that doesn't have the highest income in medicine still pays off student loans in less than four years. In fact, sounds like they were on track to do it in less than two years and kind of deliberately delayed that just a little bit. Let's talk for a minute about student loans and management of those right now. Right. As I record this, student loans are still at 0%. There's still no payments due. That's going to change at some point this summer. I don't think that forgiveness program, for lack of a better term, the Biden forgiveness program of $10,000 to $20,000 is probably going to make it through the courts. I think it probably is not. So I would not necessarily count on that. But 0% sure is nice. So I think everyone who's been hanging on to federal loans at 0% for a while, you're going to have a decision to make very soon, you know, this summer, maybe a little bit afterward, of whether to refinance those student loans or not. And I think that it's a little bit hard, this idea of moral hazard, which is an economic term. I'm not saying people are immoral, but moral hazard of wondering, well, is the government going to do something else or is there going to be another pandemic and there's going to be 0% in student loans or another forgiveness program. Maybe I shouldn't refinance my student loans because of that. Well, the right answer is usually to play the game according to the rules currently in place. Occasionally you will be disadvantaged for having done that. You know, like those people I talked about that refinance their student loans in February of 2020. Right. They were obviously disadvantaged about that. Didn't feel very great about it. But most of the time, that's the right answer. If you're paying off your student loans, the right answer is usually to refinance them, but you have to check the rates. Rates have gone up a whole bunch in the last year. And so if you've got 6.8% loans and you can only refinance them to 5.9%, maybe it's not so bad staying in the federal program. The other hand, if you can get 3.5%, that's probably worth giving up some of the protections of federal student loans, and the only way you can find out is to go and see what rates you can get. We keep a list of the best student loan refinancing companies. Just go to the recommended tab under whitecoatinvestor.com, the first link there is student loan refinancing. See what you can get. Look at three or four companies, see what rates you can get, and see if that's an attractive deal for you. Now, obviously, if you're going for public service loan forgiveness, you don't want to refinance your student loans. Most of the time, if you're in residency, the only student loans you want to refinance are your private ones. There's a couple of companies that'll let you refinance with just $100 a month payments. You can afford that in residency and probably should refinance private student loans as an intern. You know, same time you're getting disability and life insurance and that sort of a thing. But for your federal loans, most people wait until they're a senior resident, see what kind of job they're headed for. If it's going to qualify for pslf, they stay in the federal loan programs. If it's not going to qualify for pslf, they usually refinance their loans at that point. Hope that's helpful to you and we appreciate you listening to the podcast today. As a white coat, you have valuable knowledge. Various companies want that knowledge and they're willing to pay you for it. That's why we put together a list of recommendations for companies that pay you to take surveys. If you're looking for a profitable side gig for not too much effort, getting paid for surveys could be the perfect solution for you. You can make extra money, start a Solo 401, and use your medical knowledge to impact new products. One of the WCI columnists makes an extra $30,000 a year just doing these surveys. Sign up today and use a fraction of your downtime to make extra cash. Go to whitecoatinvestor.com mdsurveys you can do this and the White Coat Investor can help. If you'd like to come on this podcast, you can apply whitecoatinvestor.com Milestones 1. We'd love to celebrate any milestone you've reached with you and use it to inspire others to do the same. Till our next episode. Keep your head up, shoulders back. You've got this and we can help. We'll see you next time. The hosts of the White Code Investor.

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