Rehab Docs Pays Off Student Loans in 16 Months - MtoM Podcast #197

This is the White Coat Investor podcast, Milestones to Millionaire. Celebrating stories of success along the journey to financial freedom. This is Milestones to millionaire podcast number 197. RehabDoc pays off student loans in 16 months. One of the most underrated financial moves in medicine is working Locum Tenants. It pays significantly more on average, and you can work Locums full time or on the side of your full time. When you work with Comp Health, the number one staffing agency, they cover your housing and travel costs, which on top of higher pay really adds up. Locums also gives you more control of your career, allowing you to go where you want, when you want, with a schedule that works for you. It's the perfect way to get ahead financially while getting focused on what you love. Whether it's locum tenens or a regular permanent position. Build your career your way with the power of Comp Health. Learn more at Comp Health. All right, welcome back to the podcast. Lots of fun stuff going on here at wci. We recently finished our scholarship program, which is one of our biggest outreach things that we do. You can check out those winning essays that were submitted. There's 10 of them. They each got almost $6,000 cash for winning the contest. That's also a great way that we can help medical students become more financially literate because they find out about, you know, White Coat Investor through this scholarship thing. But a better way to make them financially literate is what we call our Champions program. And you can get more information about this@whitecoatinvestor.com Champion. What is the Champion program? It's a book giveaway. We're trying to give a copy of the White Coat Investors Guide for Students to every single first year medical and dental student in the country. Are we doing it for other professions this year, Megan? NPs, pharmacists, PAs can also qualify for this. Veterinarians. All right, so we're opening the doors this year. Obviously, the book is written primarily for medical students and dental students, but as you know, if you've been listening to this podcast for long, there's tons of overlap with everybody, and it's certainly applicable to a lot of those other professions. But what the Champions Program is is it is a champion in each first year class. Okay, what does a champion have to do? Not much. All they got to do is volunteer to be the champion. Right? Give us your mailing address and we're going to send you enough books to pass out to your entire class. Now you have to pass them out. You can't just put them on ebay, all right? You have to pass them out. If you do and you take a picture with some members of your class and send it to us, we'll send you some swag as well. And so you get to be the champion. And more importantly, you know what you're doing. Besides just being the guy who got everybody a free book that made them financially literate, you literally saved your classmates millions and millions of dollars. If becoming financially literate early in your career is worth, I don't know, $2 million, let's say multiply that by the number of people in your class, right? Let's say there's 100 people in your class. We're talking about $200 million in value you just created by volunteering to be the champion for your class. So, please, if nobody's volunteered yet for your class, whitecoatinvestor.com champion. I think in past years, we've gotten this book out to about 70% of the first years in the country as far as medical students go, and we'd like to beat that. This year. I'd like to get a heck of a lot closer to 100% than we're at right now. These books are totally free. We cover everything, but we can't afford to send them out one at a time. We got to send them out in bulk, and that's why we need a champion to help pass them out. So thank you, those of you who have volunteered and those of you who will volunteer. I think this program stays open through, like, March. And don't wait till the end, though. The sooner you get this stuff and pass it out, the more good it can do. Stick around. After the interview, we're going to talk for a minute about pessimism. This is something I've blogged about before. I think I published a blog on it a few weeks ago. But I think it's a really important subject and something that's really important to understand out there. So stick around. We'll talk about pessimism and why it's a problem. Our guest today on the Milestones podcast is Hunter. Hunter, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Tell us what you do for a living, how far you are out of training, and what part of the country you live in.

So I graduated from residency in 2022. I currently live in Texas, and I am a PM&R physician, and I do strictly inpatient rehab medicine.

Very cool. And what milestone are we celebrating with you today?

So I had finally paid off all my student loans just about two months ago, it was about $380,000. Just pocket change there.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You said you Left residency in 2022. You're a PM&R doc and you paid off $380,000 in student loans already?

Yeah. If you hate yourself enough and you work hard enough, you can accomplish pretty much anything. I've learned.

Well, I mean, I think most of us who've been through residency would attest to that. But you must have had a pretty similar life after residency. How much have you been working the last couple of years?

A lot. So it's kind of funny. So my story is a little unique. When I first graduated from residency, I took a 1099 position in, in Austin, Texas. And that job didn't really actually pan out. I was essentially just working part time and I was really struggling financially for a good while. And like, my student loan was like accruing so much interest, it was like outpacing what I was actually earning per month almost. So that really lit up a fire underneath me to really get my loans paid off as soon as possible. I switched jobs. I'm still 1099, and I took an inpatient rehab position. And with that job, what I had signed on for, I took on a little bit more than I initially bargained for. So what happened was, is that there were three full time physicians at this inpatient rehab center. One of them had quit or had left. And so then it came down to two. And so what ended up happening is that I was having to work every other weekend. I was working 11 days on, three days off, and I did that for about 16 months. And I was carrying a census of 16 to 25 patients every day, taking minimal vacation, and pretty much everything that I had, whether it was my sign on bonus, relocation bonus, I threw everything off my loans.

So how much were you making a month during those 16 months?

Quite a bit. So it wouldn't be unusual. If I was making $55,000 a month, that would be a good month. But definitely, on average, probably 40 or more.

So this is a 500, 600, $650,000 income you had for that period of time, which is gotta be what, double the average for PM&R at least?

Yeah. Correct. Yeah. So I knew that this was gonna be like a narrow window of time for me to take advantage of this. I knew this wasn't gonna be something that was forever. So I wanted to take advantage of it and just really hamper down on the loan situation, especially with my situation with My first job, I was very debt adverse.

Now, you mentioned the loans were growing rapidly. Is part of this time period was still during the student loan holiday. Were these not federal loans or are you just referring to the period after that holiday ended?

After the holiday ended, yeah. So that was very helpful. Yeah, I probably saved at least five figures during that timeframe, so that was really beneficial for me.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, tell us about your household. Are you single? Are you married? Are there kids?

So I have a spouse. She is a nurse anesthetist. Um, we don't have. We have one kid on the way, but me paying off my loans, that all came from my income alone. Um, so what she had offered to help pay it off, but I said, you know, I'll. I'll handle my loans. And how you can help contribute is like for saving for retirement. And so that's how we kind of like divided and conquered.

Okay. And then as far as living expenses, where were those coming from? Were those coming from her income or equally?

Both. So we split everything essentially like 50, 50, almost.

Okay. All right. And so, I mean, what's your lifestyle looked like over these 16 months? Are you basically living like a resident? Did you give yourself somewhat of a raise? Give us a sense what you're driving and where you live and how often you go out to eat and that kind of stuff.

Yeah, so I. Well, I still drive my car from high school, actually from. So I've had it for more than half of my life and I'll eventually upgrade now that I have more financial means to do so. But the car was running. It just needed me to get from point A to point B. So I didn't really have a strong urgency to change my car, essentially. And then in terms like of our lifestyle, we eat out occasionally and we're very. I'm very lucky. My wife, she likes to cook, and so she does pretty much all the grocery shopping. She does all the cooking. So that was a big help. She was able to help support me in that. And since I was working so much, I wasn't able to contribute as much in those regards.

Or go on expensive vacations.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I would visit. Like, we would have family reunions and stuff like that, but nothing very extravagant.

Now when I tell people to live like a resident, I'm mostly telling them about how to spend, not how to work. But obviously you can apply that to working as well. And you worked hard during those 16 months. Would you say you're working harder or less hard than you did as a resident?

Ooh yeah, I would. On average, I would say a lot more. Yeah, I was definitely working far more than what I did as a resident, at least in the PM&R residency program that I was in. Um, yeah, the amount of work that I was doing as an actual attending was far more.

So how long do you think you could work like that without burning out?

That's a really good question. So I did eventually hit a wall of burnout, and that was maybe probably around month 11 or 12, where me and my colleague, who I was alternating weekends with, like, we were both getting really stressed out. Like, it was just like, no longer really feasible do. But I. Some of the things that I'm very thankful for is that one, I really like the people that I work with. If I didn't like the people that I work with, I don't know if I could have be celebrating this milestone. So my CEO that I work with, you know, I. I could always come to him about problems that we were running into, like, hey, we're really burnt out. Like, we really need additional help. And it wasn't until both of us were on that same page that they started really hunting down for getting another physician on board to help lighten our load. And thankfully that's actually happened. We do have someone that's going to be starting next month, so that's been a big relief.

Awesome. You know, I'm kind of envisioning these conversations you had with your wife. How long have you been married now?

We just recently got married.

Oh. So it's relatively recent. Okay. And when she found out that this is what your plan was for your student loans, how did that conversation go?

So she was very supportive. This was a goal of mine. Like, I had this envisionment that I was going to pay off my student loans when I was, like, in medical school. I had this planned out that I wanted to be about debt free within about five years. That was like my aggressive goal of why I wanted to accomplish. And then when I was talking with my spouse, she was very supportive. She knew that this also wasn't going to be forever, that this was going to be a temporary moment in our lives and that we could really come out financially ahead once we have this behind us. So very fortunate that she and I are both, like, financially on the same wavelength.

Okay. There's somebody out there that's like, you were a couple of years ago, maybe three or four years ago, that's sitting on a big, huge pile of student loans. Maybe it's twice the average $400,000 what advice do you have for them?

So my advice would be, you need to create financial goals. You need to create some kind of roadmap to know how to get there. Right. So whether that it could be paying off your student debt, it could be aggressively saving for retirement or a down payment for a house. Whatever your financial situation might be, you need to figure out some kind of plan on how you can accomplish your goals. Right. What kind of income you need to make, your cost of living, all those things. You should probably start having that calculated out before you graduate from residency if you're really serious about it. Then the second part, which I would argue is a little bit harder because it's kind of self reflection, but it would be determining if your psychological tolerance is going to be congruent with your financial goals. Right. So if you are like, I really want to invest aggressively for retirement, that's fine. But if you're one of those people that checks your portfolio every day and you see it drop, you know, 3%, you're like, oh, I can't invest now. You know, stock markets in flames. You would probably be better off, you know, just paying off the debt or re reevaluating your financial goals. So understanding your risk tolerance is going to be really important to your goals there. And then like the things that you've, you've espoused multiple times in your show or in your book about living below your means. Yeah. You either have to make more money or spend less of it. That's pretty much how you're able to get to your goals. There's no easy way about it.

Yeah, it's just basic math in a lot of ways. All right, what's your next goal that you're going to be working on?

So my next goals are going to be learning to meet my financial goals in regards to saving for retirement. So I was trying to do both essentially at the same time, meeting the bare minimum threshold to make my retirement goals. So that's kind of my next thing that I'm looking at. So I play with retirement calculators multiple times to figure out what strategy I need to take in order to meet those goals.

Do you guys expect to increase your spending in the next few months now that this, now that this goal is met?

Well, since we have a child on the way, I do anticipate that that definitely happen for sure. So that was the other motivator, is I wanted to make sure that I had my student loans paid off before we tried buying a, you know, buying a mortgage and then having a Child. I knew I wouldn't be able to balance tackling all these financial responsibilities very well, and so I just want to focus on one and go from there.

Yeah. I love that you call it buying a mortgage instead of buying a house. I bet that's how a lot of people feel, especially if they've got a really big mortgage.

Yeah.

Very cool. Very cool. All right. Well, I think the hardest part for you is probably all the hard work you put in, but was there any period of time in that 16 months when you felt like you made a big financial sacrifice, you didn't buy something, you wanted to buy something like that that you felt was particularly difficult?

So I won't lie, there were a couple times when I had, like, a really long week when I was covering for one of my colleagues who took vacation and I was covering his census and my census at the same time and working two weekends back to back. It was like. It was a. So I did splurge here and there. I bought small things, keep myself sane during that time period. But for the most part, the thing that I value more than material things is the freedom to choose what I want to do in the future. So to me, having extra time to myself, I knew that was going to be the end goal. So if I look at a new job in the future, I'm not looking at what is the. Was the amount of income that I can expect to receive for that. It's like now I can. Now I can focus on the quality of my life a little bit easier now.

Yeah. Do you remember back in medical school when you were borrowing all this money? Was that stressful to you? Did you worry that this was not going to pay off at any point, that you were making a bad investment by borrowing, you know, 350 plus thousand dollars to pay for your education?

I knew it wouldn't be a bad investment. I just knew that it was going to take a lot of work to pay it off and that I was going to have to make some sacrifices coming out of residency in order to set myself up for financial success. I knew I wasn't going to be able to have everything I wanted right. Coming out of residency. So I knew that there were some sacrifices that were going to have to be made, and I was already calculating what I needed to do while as a med. Med student, how to get there. So it was a. It was a normal expectation for me.

Very cool. Well, Hunter, congratulations on your success. Thank you for coming on the podcast to share it with others and inspire them to do the Same. We're all very proud of you here at wci. So congratulations.

Thank you so much. So happy to be here.

All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview. It's always fun to have a good interview. In this case, it was a good example of living like a resident. Not only did they spend like a residential, I mean, her income was going toward retirement savings, his was going toward paying off loans. Obviously, there's a lot of income there when it's a CRNA plus a, you know, rehab doc working basically two jobs. But you know what? That's a lot of power you can harness, too, to take care of your financial goals. You can meet them very, very quickly when you're working that hard and spending that little. All right, I promised you at the beginning we were going to talk a little bit about pessimism. What do we mean about pessimism? Well, if you read blogs, if you read, you know, financial media, if you're on financial Twitter or TikTok or whatever, if you go to conferences, you will notice that the pessimists, the people who say things are going to go badly now or we're in for some rough times soon, sound smarter than the optimists. The pessimists have all kinds of great arguments about why things are going to be terrible in the future. And the optimists sound like Pollyanna. But the truth is the history of investing, and there's a book with this title, but the history of investing should be titled Triumph of the Optimus because the optimists win in the long run, because there's a lot of people going to work every day trying to make the world a better place, trying to make their own lives better, and they are gradually improving the world around them. Right. We think, especially during political season, that the world is a terrible place and everything's worse than it used to be. But let's really consider for a minute how things used to be. Let's go back, let's just say couple hundred years, right? A couple hundred years ago, the vast majority of people on this planet, including in the United States, lived in poverty. They spent most of their day just getting enough money or food to eat, right? When's the last time we worried about having enough food to eat? I don't care how unsuccessful you are financially, you're probably not worried about food. You can feed yourself just fine. But that's the way it was 200 years ago, right? A couple hundred years ago, before the invention of, really the railroad. The fastest. Well, I guess the telegraph, right? The fastest. The Information or anybody ever traveled for millennia was the speed of a horse. That's it. You know, ships went even slower than horses. If you need to send something across the world or you need to travel across the world, you know, it might be a different group of people that arrived there when you were done. It wasn't just a matter of taking years to get there. Half of you died on the way. And that's just the way the world was. Things are dramatically better today. And in most ways, things are dramatically better than even they were 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago. The world is improving, and being an optimist when it comes to investing usually leads to better returns, to better performance, especially in the long run. Yes, crazy things can happen in the short run, right? Stock market crashes happen, and sometimes one particular sector of the market is overbidden, right? Sometimes even bonds have a lousy year like 2022. But the truth is, most of the time, your investments increase in value. Most of the time, companies pay their dividends and bonds pay their interest and renters pay their rent. And it works out pretty well to be an investor. So don't put too much account into the pessimists. They're usually wrong, especially in the long run. And the history of the world and the history of the markets is one continual example of just how many times they've been wrong. We forget they're wrong, right? These pessimists, these perma bears, they're always saying pessimistic things, and eventually it seems like they're right because something bad happens, right? But that bad thing goes away in a year or two, and they're still wrong in the long run. So don't put too much emphasis into what you hear pessimists say on social media or in the regular media or in your personal life. Try to be an optimist throughout your life and you'll find a lot more success in your finances. Earlier we mentioned working locums with Comp Health, the number one staffing agency. But Comp Health isn't just a locums agency. Comp Health staffs regular permanent positions across the nation as well. They also offer telehealth, medical missions and more. That's what makes them unique. They can look at your situation and offer multiple solutions to build your career the way you want it and meet your financial goals. And they know their stuff, especially when it comes time to negotiate contracts, which they're willing to do for you. So whatever career move you're looking for, use the power of Comp Health to build your career your way. Learn more@comphealth.com also thanks for those of you out there who are sharing episodes with friends. Whether it's a milestones episode and that person's working on a similar milestone, thanks for sending them a link. Or if it's a regular episode and you just hear a question that you think applies for them. The only way to share this podcast with people is not just to put in five star reviews. That does help and we appreciate those, but just sharing it directly. This is a great deal. How the White Coat Investor community was built was just one white coat investor sharing stuff with another one. So send links to the episodes that you think your friends would really benefit from. Maybe they listen long term, maybe they just listen to that episode. But in a lot of ways you might save them tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars over the course of their career. And they will thank you for it later, I assure you. So thanks for those of you who are out there doing that. All right, we come to the end of another great episode. Thank you so much for listening. We're grateful you're here. Without an audience, there is no podcast. So you're an important part of this deal here. Thank you so much for being here and thank you for what you do in your daily life. As you know, I've had quite a few interactions with the with the medical professional medical profession in the last month and I'm very grateful for all the care I've received and I'll bet most of your patients are too. So thanks for what you do on a day to day basis even if nobody's told you. Thank you yet today. See you next time on the podcast. If you want to be on the Milestones podcast, you can get on it@whitecoatinvestor.com Milestones is where you apply. We'd love to have you on celebrate your milestones and encourage others to do the same. Thank you so much. See you next time. The hosts of the White Coat Investor are not licensed accountants, attorneys or financial advisors. This podcast is for your entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.