WCI #429: Impact of the Big Beautiful Bill on Student Loans

This is the White Coat Investor podcast where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. We've been helping doctors and other high income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011.

This is White Coat Investor podcast number 429, the Big Beautiful Bill Update. Today's episode is brought to us by SoFi, the folks who help you get your money right. Paying off student debt quickly and getting your finances back on track isn't easy. That's where SoFi can help. They have exclusive low rates designed to help medical residents refinance student loans that could end up saving you thousands of dollars, helping you get out of student debt sooner. SoFi also offers the ability to lower your payments to just $100 a month while you're still in residency. If you're already out of residency, SoFi's got you covered there too. For more information, go to sofi.com whitecoatinvestor SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi Bank NA member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891 all right, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks. For those of you out there, for what you're doing, what you're doing matters. It's important work you do and that's why we're here to serve you at the White Coat Investor. Now, I know a big chunk of our audience is doctors. I think it's about 75% physicians and their trainees, another 10% dentists and their trainees, and the rest are other high income professionals of various types or business owners or whatever.

Whatever you're doing out there, you're getting.

Paid pretty well or you anticipate to soon get paid pretty well. That's why you listen to this podcast and that's usually because you're doing really important work. Work that matters. You know, it was interesting. My physical therapist texted me this last week and said, your insurance company is done paying for your physical therapy. They're only going to pay for 20 visits.

And I reassured him that, you know.

What, I have a high deductible health plan. I've basically been paying cash the whole time anyway, so. So whatever the cash price is, I'm still coming to see you. And it's because the work he does.

Is important and it matters.

It makes a difference in my life.

And I know that's the case for all of you out there and the work you're doing for your patients or clients or whatever it is that you do.

We're going to talk a lot today.

About medical school, medical students, student loans and debts.

We do something here at the White Coat Investor we've been doing for many years to directly reduce the indebtedness of medical students, medical and other professional students.

You can actually apply no matter what professional school you're in, as long as it's a brick and mortar school.

But we give a scholarship. We give out 10 of these scholarships every year, thousands of dollars, and students can apply for this through the end of August. Rules and details of applying can be found@whitecoatinvestor.com scholarship we're just going to have one big category this year. We're hoping people will put a financial spread spin on their essays that they submit to apply for this scholarship. But we had over 1,000 applicants last year. We expect more than 1,000 applicants this year and we could use some help judging. If you'd like to be a judge for the White Coat Investor scholarship, email scholarshipinvestor.com just put volunteer judge in the title and you'll have to read a few essays, like 10 essays come September and help us decide which ones are going to be the winning ones. So thank you. If you're willing to do that, please volunteer. All right, I need some more help as well. I'm getting emails from people all the time about I need some help evaluating my practice and what to do with it, whether to buy this practice, how much I should pay for it, how much I should sell my practice for. You know, this is more than an employment contract kind of thing. They're looking for consultants. They're looking for somebody who can really get in there, that they can pay thousands of dollars to, to really analyze things over and get some professional help with it. And people are asking for referrals to these folks. Well, here's the problem. I don't have anybody to refer them to. We don't have a list of these folks, but we think it might be worthwhile creating one. So if you've worked with somebody selling your practice, buying a practice, you know, really found somebody that could really consult on practice management kind of issues, we would like to know about them. If you can send us an email, editoritecoatinvestor.com is fine. Let us know about them. Especially if you had a really great experience and you'd recommend them to other White Coat investors.

And we'll see if we can develop.

That sort of a resource for those of you out there who could really use this.

Because it's getting to the point where I'm starting to get embarrassed that I Can't refer people anywhere. And I just don't know anybody doing this work that's really good at it.

Okay. The title of this episode referred to the Big Beautiful Bill. And I am recording this on July 9th. It's a busy time of the summer. This is literally the one day in between two week long trips. I have just got back late last night from Lake Powell, spent a week down there in a houseboat. I'm leaving literally 6am tomorrow morning to go to Oregon.

Gonna spend some time out in Oregon.

At a cabin on a lake, as well as go float the Rogue River.

So.

So looking forward to that. That's our main river trip this summer, and so we're thrilled to do it.

But it makes for a very compressed timeline.

In fact, I was sitting on the.

Houseboat when the Big Beautiful Bill passed.

It was signed into law by President.

Trump on July 4th. There's apparently a flyover in Washington, D.C. there's not a flyover at the lake.

There was a helicopter flying ridiculously low that I saw at one point. But there was no military flyover at the lake when it passed. But we realized, well, we got to get a blog post out by early next week.

And so over the 4th of July weekend, that's when both Andrew and I wrote our part to that blog post. If you saw that, that ran on the blog. And so it's a busy time. But this is probably the most significant.

Piece of legislation that has come out.

Since 2018, the tax cuts and Jobs Act. President Obama famously said elections have consequences.

Now, he was talking about when the Patient Protection Affordable Care act was being passed.

But it's true, elections have consequences. And when Americans decide on Election Day to give the House and the Senate and the White House to a single political party, that usually results in some pretty big deal legislation being passed in the next few months afterward.

Right.

So we're talking about, you know, Obamacare, right. The Patient Protection Affordable Care Act, Big deal came out in 2009. Guess who controlled the House and the Senate and the White House? The Democrats did. Same thing when the Tax Cuts and.

Jobs act came out. I guess that was 2017, not 2018.

Right.

President Trump was elected 2016. The House and Senate were both controlled by Republicans. And we got the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. And now a lot of the things in that act were set to expire.

At the end of 2025.

And so this was something that a lot of Republicans ran on this issue. They're like, we're gonna extend, you know, these tax brackets that are temporary, set to expire at the end of this year, but only if you elect us into office. And, well, for various reasons, they were elected into office.

And so one of the big things they wanted to do was to extend these tax cuts. And indeed, the Big Beautiful Bill act.

As it's been called, did extend these tax cuts. So this is politics, right? I don't want to get too much into politics on the podcast. It's kind of impossible with this subject not to get into it a little bit. Politics begins when you get to a place where reasonable people can disagree.

Right?

That's what politics is.

And when they disagree, well, they go.

Well, what's the majority say? And you go with what the majority says. And that's kind of how we get to a place like this. So your thoughts about this legislation are probably highly flavored by your own political views. If you are a hardcore MAGA American who's out there campaigning for President Trump, you're probably thrilled with most of what has occurred with this legislation. If you are a, whatever, far left spectrum kind of person, you're probably upset with a whole lot of what's in this legislation. But the truth is, everybody's helped a little bit by this and everybody's hurt a little bit by this. It's such a huge piece of legislation. It's going to affect us in so many different areas of our lives. There's probably something positive in it for you, and there's probably something negative in.

It for you as well.

So let's talk a little bit about what happened. You know, what this, what this act says, what's changing, and I'm not going to do it all myself. We're going to bring Andrew Paulson from studentloanadvice.com in here to talk about the student loan changes because they are significant. We've had lots of changes in student.

Loan management in the last five years. This is the biggest one by far. And while I appreciate the fact that.

We'Re likely to have student loan management stability for the next three and a half plus years, these changes are not all good for docs, especially those who.

Are just starting into the medical system pipeline now.

It is a dramatically less generous student.

Loan picture they are facing than what people that started med school a decade ago have ended up with. And so we'll get into those details as well.

Okay, big picture, the first part is the extension of these tax breaks that came out in 2017.

Right.

These were very helpful for doctors.

Right.

They generally lowered your tax bracket. Some of you might Be too young to really remember when the top tax bracket was 39.6%. Well, since 2017, it's been 37%. No matter how much you earn, you don't have to pay more than that in federal income taxes. Now, 37% is still a big chunk of what you're earning, but it's less than 39.6%. Now. At that same time, in 2017, the corporate tax rate was lowered to 21%. That part was permanent. But the new brackets that were new in 2017 were not permanent. They were going to expire at the end of 2025. And so they were extended as part.

Of the big beautiful bill.

The other thing that was extended was the equalizer. The equalizer between C corporations and pass through entities like S corporations and partnerships and sole proprietorships. The equalizer was the section 199A deduction or the QBI Qualified Business Income deduction. Super complicated.

Right?

But now it's permanent. It was going to expire at the.

End of 2025 as well.

So basically, you can take a deduction of 20% of your qualified business income that's limited by, you know, 50%, by a factor of 50% of what you're.

Paying in salaries to your employees, et cetera.

So there's all these different factors that go into it, but the bottom line is it's still there. It wasn't going to be there after the end of 2025. So for businesses like the white coat investor, taxes were going to go up substantially. This is our biggest tax deduction is the 199A deduction. It's a huge deduction for us, and so we're thrilled to see that be extended. Okay. The higher estate tax exemption limits also extended.

Right.

They were going to be cut in half at the end of 2025.

Right.

So people were starting to wonder, do I got to do a whole bunch of estate planning stuff? Because, you know, I don't have an estate tax problem if it's really $15 million or $14 million or whatever per spouse. But I do if it's half that, well, they were extended and actually increased a little bit. They're $15 million per spouse this year. So $30 million for a married couple still portable between them, and it's still indexed to inflation. So it's going to continue to go up every year. What that means is most white coat investors are not gonna have an estate tax problem unless this is changed by future legislation. And so that's a nice thing to.

Not have to worry about.

Now, of course, there's still state, the state tax limits and there's a few states we talked about on the podcast last time that have lower limits than.

The federal limits, in which case you might have to do some estate planning.

To try to reduce your state taxes.

But that was basically extended, so that was great as well.

Okay. Another big thing that people have been talking about in the news for the last few months is the SALT deduction.

Right.

State and local tax. Now, ever since the Tax Cuts and Jobs act came out in 2017, basically higher earners have not been able to take as a deduction on their schedule A all of the state income tax they pay.

Right.

If they paid 20 or 30 or $40,000 in state income tax and they pay, you know, another $20,000 in mortgages and, or not mortgage, sorry, property tax, you know, you're limited. $10,000 is all you could deduct. Well, they increased that. It can now be as high as $40,000 and that actually increases by 1% a year through 2029 before that is.

Set to expire as well.

The downside is that it starts phasing out at an income of $500,000. Now, lots of white coat investors have a modified adjusted gross income of less than $500,000. But if you're one of those with more than $500,000, you're. You're going to face a phase out of that $40,000amount. It might phase out all the way back to $10,000 a year. I tried to look up the details today of how exactly that phase out works and how high your income can be before it hits $10,000 a year. I think I'm going to have to read the actual legislation to find that answer. I have not yet found it.

It's not out there in easily accessible format, anything I can Google, but it phases out.

Interestingly, it's $500,000 if you're single. It's $500,000 if you'RE married filing jointly. But it's only half that if you're doing married filing single. So keep that in mind. Okay. Bonus depreciation is back.

Right.

So all these business expenses that a couple of years ago, two, three, four years ago, you were able to write off 100% of the business expense that year.

Right.

You're able to just expense it instead of depreciate it. That's back. It's now permanent. So that's pretty cool. That's a pro business move. Makes it easier to start and maintain and Grow your business. So that's a pretty fun thing. Okay, there are a whole bunch of changes to international income taxes. Now, most people do not have to pay any of this because they don't.

Have any international income. I'm not just talking about, you know.

The dividends from your total international stock.

Market fund or something.

I'm talking about you actually go work overseas or you have rental properties overseas.

Or that sort of stuff.

I'm not going to go through all these in details. There's a whole bunch of them. But if you have international income, it's worth looking into seeing if there's any.

Changes to how your income taxes are going to be affected by those changes.

Guess what else is back? Not just bonus depreciation, but opportunity Zones are back. Opportunity Zones are a type of real estate private real estate investment fund that tried to boost investment in downtrodden areas by giving people a break on their capital gains taxes. And so they're also aimed a little bit more this time at rural areas. And so maybe that will provide some.

Benefit in growing some of the rural areas in our country as well.

So worth looking at. Again, if you have a bunch of capital gains, you're trying to minimize the effect of those on and you're not, don't want to do an exchange, a 1031 exchange or something, you might want.

To look into Opportunity zones. Looks like there's going to be new opportunity zone funds coming out with private real estate companies.

Okay. So those are the main tax extensions. And they're mostly good for white coat investors because you're white coat investors because you have high income.

Right.

You're a high income professional. And when tax cuts happen, they go to the people that pay taxes. And you know, that's generally high earners. So the tax cuts are coming to you. Most of those are just extensions of the tax cuts that started in 2017. So it doesn't feel like a tax cut, but I assure you, compared to the alternative, it's a tax cut. Okay. Lots of new tax changes, too. The standard deduction went up even for 2025. It's now $15,750 this year and $31,500 if you're married filing jointly. There's a cool thing. It's like a bonus deduction for the elderly. Basically, their standard deduction just went up by like $6,000.

Okay.

This was sold as like eliminate the tax on Social Security thing. Well, it doesn't really have anything to do with that.

It's just like an extra deduction if you're elderly.

So if you're a retiree and you qualify for this, great for you. It's an offsetting age and income based deduction.

Note that it phases out at an income of $75,000. Okay.

So if you did a really great job saving retirement, you have all kinds of retirement income.

You're probably not getting this.

Okay, child tax credit went up a little bit. It's up to $2200. 1700 of it is refundable. Still starts phasing out at the same modified adjusted gross income as before, which is 200,000 single, 400,000 married, filing jointly. I know many of you out there are high enough income folks that you don't get a child tax credit. But for those who can get their.

Income down low enough, it's a little.

Better than it was. Okay. This next thing's had a lot of press on it. Tax free tips and overtime. And so I got questions about this. People like, okay, how can we start converting our income to tips, you know, and how can we start getting paid for overtime? Because lots of us are working far more than 40 hours a week. Well, a few things to know about this. Number one, it's temporary. It's only going to last through 2028, and it phases out at higher incomes. $150,000 single, $300,000 married, filing jointly.

Right.

So that's going to take out a lot of white coat investors. But basically up to $25,000 you made in tips and up to $12,500 in overtime pay gets an above the line deduction now. So you basically don't pay cash, don't pay taxes on it. I'm not sure that's going to make a huge difference in the tips world. Let's be honest. A lot of people getting cash tips are reporting those tips already. So I don't know that this is going to really change how they're being taxed.

It'll just make it legal what they're doing. At any rate, it would be cool if some of resident pay could be.

Recognized for what it is, which is.

Overtime work and residents could get a tax break. But I don't know if that's going to change. I think if you're on salary, this is probably not going to affect you much. Okay.

Another thing out there, the administration really wanted to support us auto companies. And so there's a new auto loan interest deduction, right up to $10,000 in auto loan interest on newly purchased cars. You can deduct that through 2028. So it's only temporary and it's limited to cars whose final assembly was in the United States of America. So there has to be a brand new car, has to have its final assembly here, and then you can get up to $10,000 in your auto loan interest deducted.

Well, it's still kind of dumb, in my opinion, to buy brand new cars on credit.

It's slightly less dumb now just because your effective interest rate is going to.

Be a little bit lower. Please don't use this as an excuse to go buy a depreciating asset that you can't really afford and put it all on credit.

I'm not a fan of this big.

Change, as you can tell, but whatever, right?

It'll be interesting to see which brands.

Actually qualify for the final assembly in the US it's probably not just Chevy and Ford and Chrysler. It's probably Toyota. And anybody else will start assembling, doing.

The final assembly, whatever that means. The last bolt you put in.

I don't know what the rules are going to be on final assembly, more of that.

Maybe it happens in the US and.

Brings a little bit of manufacturing back here. I think that's the hope of the administration.

Okay, cool new thing coming out the Trump account. And I'm still wrapping my head around these.

All right.

But basically, when your baby's born, they're going to get a baby bonus, $1,000 credit into a Trump account.

Okay. And you know, you can contribute another.

$5,000 into it if you want, and that money can be used for school and small business expenses or a first home. Now, there were a lot of changes at the very end with exactly how.

These are going to work.

So I'm going to wrap my head.

Around all the changes.

Initially, it looked like you're going to have to have all the money out by 31, but it sounds like now it might be a little more like a traditional ira. But as I look at it, I'm having a hard time seeing a huge advantage using them for education. Anything better than a 529, and I'm not seeing it necessarily as being any more flexible than a UTMA account. So it's a lot of complexity. Certainly get your $1,000 might as well, right. It's free money, obviously coming from the taxpayer, but I don't know that I'm.

Going to end up recommending people contribute much more to it than that $1,000. I think you're probably going to be better off. 529 is for education, utmas for everything else.

But if it gets more people saving.

And investing from birth is probably a good thing.

Okay. University endowments, like some of the most famous universities in our country are going to have a pretty significant tax on their endowments, whereas these used to be considered the same as charities. So I'm sure that feels a bit confiscatory, you know, the confiscating money from.

These big famous universities and maybe that will trickle down to docs that work for them, I don't know.

Apparently there was an excise tax established.

By that 2017 legislation, the tax Cuts and Jobs Act. But this increases the tax rate on it substantially.

It does make me worry.

Right.

What else are they going to go after when it comes to endowments? Are they going to start taxing churches for instance, and things that you thought were operated in a non profit environment? Maybe they're not.

So non profit if Congress decides to change the rules.

So keep an eye on that bottom.

Line, the new taxes. Not a lot of huge changes for white coat investors.

There are a few.

Here's another one, right. 529 money. You can use 20,000 a year now for K12 education instead of just $10,000 a year.

Right.

It's a small thing, but maybe you can take advantage of that one. But lots of the tax changes were not incredibly huge.

The main change was they extended the.

Tax breaks that were put in place in 2017.

Okay. Another big thing that happened in this legislation was lots of changes to health care. For the most part, these are bad for doctors.

Right.

Because they involve ways people pay doctors. Right. We're talking Medicaid, we're talking chip, we're talking Medicare, we're talking ACA plans. Basically all the changes make them less generous. So there's going to be more uninsured.

Patients than there was before.

But just to give you an idea of some of the changes here, one.

Of which is like work requirement isn't.

The right phrase for it.

It's a community engagement requirement.

To get Medicaid or CHIP. If you're 19 plus and you don't have a hardship event, you got to spend 80 plus hours a month either working or in school or doing community service or you're not going to have your Medicaid. If you're a parent with dependent children, you can be exempted, but that's again.

Up to your state.

So bottom line, Medicaid, CHIP are going to be a little bit less generous. Patients you may have now that were on Medicaid may not qualify as a general rule. The current administration is A little bit more anti immigrant than the last administration. So non citizens, some non citizens can't enroll in Medicaid, CHIP or Medicare anymore. They can't get premium subsidies on their ACA plans. Technically, undocumented immigrants have never been eligible for these. But these changes can affect many people for lack of a better term that are legal immigrants.

Again, fewer of your patients are going to have a third party payer to pay you for them.

Medicaid and CHIP eligibility is now every six months. The determinations for eligibility have to take place every six months. Medicaid payments are being cut to entities providing family planning, reproductive health or abortion services. No surprise. When the right side of the political aisle gets in charge of healthcare, you're going to see a pretty significant anti abortion bias there. So for better or worse, wherever you fall on that issue, you'll see this is very positive or very negative.

But Medicaid is not going to be paying it anymore.

Cost sharing on Medicaid is going to be $35 copays.

No more $3 co pays.

You know, I'd see four patients in a room in the ER all with the same cold. And almost always you knew if there.

Were four patients in that room that they were covered by Medicaid.

Because everyone else has a huge er, you know, copay. They're not going to go to the ER for something small. But when your co pay is 3.

Bucks or whatever it is for Medicaid in your state, well there's not much.

Of a disincentive to do that.

Well now it's up to 35 bucks.

So that may mean you see fewer patients like that. Medicaid payments are now capped at Medicare limits for non ACA expansion states. It's 110% of Medicaid limits.

But this might be an issue.

There are some Medicaid direct payment programs. They can be grandfathered into the higher rates. That might delay this for a few years.

But there is.

The temporary doc fix went through for 2026 is a 2.5% Medicare fee schedule increase is not indexed to inflation like all the other Medicare fixes. It's just a one time thing. Hopefully they do it again next year. You never know with Congress though. They can always decide not to. But there was a doc fix in.

This that was like the only semi good news available in the healthcare section of this bill.

Orphan drugs are exempted from Medicare negotiation, which means they can still be really expensive. The idea is to incentivize drug companies to make them. The downside is once they make them. None of the patients can afford them.

At least not your Medicare patients.

There's a rural health transformation program that's put in place. You may want to look into that. If you're in a rural area, your hospital, you as a provider might be able to get some of that 50 billion that's been set aside for to help with this program. It's worth looking into if you practice in a rural area. Some other Biden era healthcare rules that were passed have been delayed until 2034. These are rules like minimum staffing in long term care facilities.

I think the idea was to delay them long enough to maybe get rid of them entirely but apparently they weren't popular with the new administration and now they've been delayed since Congress has dictated they will be delayed.

Oh, here's one that's kind of positive. Direct primary care payments. Now an eligible HSA expense. Didn't used to be. I can't believe I didn't realize that.

It used to be an eligible HSA expense but now they are.

Insurance companies can also pay for your telehealth they want to before a high.

Deductible health plan deductible is met. So that's a little bit positive as well.

So some of these changes might help docs a little. But mostly these changes are bad for doctors. Right. Fewer people on Medicaid and CHIP estimates are that something like 10 to 17 million of the 72 million people on Medicaid right now are going to lose it. So that's going to increase the number of uninsured aka self pay patients by my calculation by about 50%. So all the good stuff that happened when the Affordable Care act came out and there are a whole bunch of people that didn't have coverage that then had coverage. It's kind of the opposite happening now.

And I suspect that's going to reduce.

Physician incomes, particularly emergency docs and others.

Who have a lot of self payment type patients.

Okay, let's get Andrew on here. He's going to talk about the part you guys have all been waiting for which is all these changes to how.

Paying for medical school is going to work. It's going to be substantially different. So I'll let Tim give you the.

Give you the updates.

Well thank you Jim. It's great, great to be back on, on the pod talking about some of the matters in the student loan world. So there's a lot going on right now in the student loan space. We'll talk a little bit about, you know, how saved the interest is turning On. But even before that, what has the one big beautiful Bill act done to really shake up student loan programs? And there are some huge changes that you need to be aware of, especially if you are starting medical school or dental school or some other expensive graduate or professional degree program in the fall of 2026 or later. So the big first thing that is happening is there are some new caps in how much you can borrow for your education. For graduate school, the maximum amount that you can borrow currently is, as part of this new ruling, is $100,000 for your entire program. So that is about 20,500 is the maximum that you can borrow per year for graduate school, for professional school. If you're starting your medical school or your dental school or law school in fall of 2026 or beyond, you, you can only borrow $200,000 federally. Now, okay, that is $50,000 per year. Previously, you could borrow up to the cost of attendance. If it was going to be $100,000 for your dental school. For your first year of dental school, you could borrow all of that federally. Well, now you're only going to be able to borrow $50,000 federally, and that's because they have discontinued the direct plus graduate program. And frankly, they've just put in this lower. You are probably going to need to look for some alternative source of financing your education, such as private student loans, institutional student loans. Maybe some people are going to end up working a little bit more before they end up matriculating into their graduate or professional degree programs. Okay, so that's a really, really big change that you need to be aware of. If you're currently in school and you're right now or you start this fall, you are not going to be impacted by these changes. If you're in your professional DEGR program, you'll be grandfathered into kind of the old rules for another three additional years. Okay, so what does this mean for borrowers? Well, hopefully this means that there is going to be some cuts in tuition, but I don't think we're going to see that in the short term. And I don't think that people are going to stop going to these graduate programs and professional degree programs. They're going to continue. And so jury's out, really on what's going to happen with tuition as it's been going up, you know, 5, 6, 7% per year, which seems like forever at this point. So with more loans needing to be taken out privately, there's going to be a lot of nuance in what the interest rates are. But As a general rule of thumb, private student loans or those institutional student loans do not have as much flexibility as federal student loans. There is no income driven repayment, there is no public service loan forgiveness on private student loans. Generally you, you have to pay back whatever was borrowed obviously. Plus the interest, interest rates are all over the place. I was just talking to a, someone who's starting their medical school right away and they're going to borrow 11% on private student loans. But I also worked with another client that had a co signer, their parents were able to co sign and they got 3.75% in interest rates. So there is a huge array in variance in terms of what the interest rates are. But if you don't have a cosigner, there's a good chance it's going to end up being double digit interest rates that you're going to be borrowing for your private student loans. Now ideally there is, you know, perhaps there's going to be some institutional loans that are offered by your, at your school. But sometimes those institutional loans are riddled with all sorts of red tape and you have to practice in primary care in this specific state and if you do not, then they're going to charge you a whole bunch of extra interest and the interest rate is going to go from 5% that a lot of the institutional loans are up to. You know, I've seen as high as 15%. Okay. So I would tend to say continue to borrow federally what you can and then look for the best options for private loans here going forward. So another thing that is relevant to these changes are with less loans federal for your borrowing, PSLF's going to become less of a factor. So currently with the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, whatever the outstanding loan balance is that you have have, after 10 years of working in public service and making payments on one of those income driven plans, they forgive it tax free. And I've had clients as high as $750,000 have their loans forgiven through PSLF. Well, that's no longer going to be the case for those that are starting medical school in and dental school in the fall of 2026 and beyond. Because you're not going to have 400 grand that you're going to be able to borrow federally, you're going to be borrowing $200,000, right? You're going to have 200,000 federal and maybe $200,000 private. What that's going to lead to is perhaps less doctors are going to end up working in public service, less doctors are going to end up going for the PSLF program because sometimes when you're taking a job that is in the public sector, public space, public sector, you may be taking a little bit of a pay cut.

Right.

Or maybe they don't come with as many benefits. Right. But now what we're going to see is there will still be doctors that will pursue pslf. I think a lot of those in primary care will still. She'll pursue PSLEF, pediatrics, pediatrics, subspecialties, and also those that train for 7, 8, 9 years because usually all the time in training is going to end up qualifying. But for a lot of you thinking emergency medicine or psychiatry in three or four years and then you're out of training and you got a very good salary, that's going to be a really hard position that you're going to be placed in. Should you do pslf, get half your loans forgiven and then refinance the rest, or do you just take a private practice job and refinance everything? Okay, so I think that refinancing is probably going to become a lot more relevant for, I mean, almost everybody that's starting their education next year because you're probably going to be able to get better terms on those private loans once you have some income as a resident and then also when you move into practice. So another key thing that you need to be aware of is they're overhauling the repayment programs. So we'll start with what does this mean for those of you that are still in school, that are still borrowing? And then we'll also talk about those of you that are existing borrowers. So if you're still in school and you're borrowing and you take out a loan on July 1, 20, 26 or later, the only repayment programs that are going to be available to you are standard repayment and the repayment Assistance Plan, an income driven repayment program. Well, the standard repayment plan, it's like 10 years, 15 years, 20, 25 years based on your overall loan balance, if you owe more than six figures, you, your fixed payment schedule will be over a 25 year period of time, which is currently known as the extended repayment program for those of you that are currently enrolled in repayment. Now, the standard repayment program doesn't qualify for the public service loan forgiveness for you. And usually if you're just going to pay these off and you're not going to pursue some forgiveness program, you're probably better off refinancing your loans and getting them out of the federal system. Now what about this repayment assistance plan. So this WRAP plan is a, you know, it's good and it's bad. It's also a payment program that is based on income and it's 10% of your adjusted gross income, which is actually a big change from the older income driven repayment programs that were a percentage of discretionary income. So discretionary income simply means that they take your adjusted gross income and then they, they, they include this poverty line deduction which is just based on your household size is set by the HHS and it helps lower your payments a little bit as household is larger. So typically if you're married, if you have a fair amount of children, your payments are going to be a little bit cheaper than if you were single or if you're married without kids. And the WRAP plan also has a nice feature that is similar to the previously the saved program. And what was the repay plan before it got its fee facelift? And that is if your monthly payment is not enough to cover the unpaid interest, the unpaid interest is waived. So if you're in residency, if you are an early career attending, know that your loan balance would never go higher in the WRAP plan, which is a nice feature. However, in addition to that, it also pays $50 per month towards the loan balance to bring it down every single month. So know that if you are in the WRAP plan, it does give you the ability to, you know, the balance won't go any higher and frankly it'll actually get a little bit lower. Now it also does qualify for the PSLF program if you're working in a qualifying institution. But the long term forgiveness tracker, what we call IDR forgiveness here, is over 30 years. That is a really, really long period of time. And I know for some of you out there you'll need to use this. But for most doctors, I really don't like doing the 25, 30 year track because then you're going to be carrying your loans until you're in your 60s, right? And maybe by the time your kids are in college. I just don't love having that idea. And as well that this is up for interpretation and modification. There can be so many changes over 25 or 30 years. There's a lot less changes that usually occur over a 10 year period of time on something like PSLF. So it's over 30 years. The taxable forgiveness track, it also allows for the exclusion of spousal income if you file taxes separately. So if you have a spouse that is also earning money and you're trying to keep your payments Lower, you can exclude your spouse's income through filing separately. And some of the previous versions of some of the bills that were circulating, this was the initial one version by the House before it went to the Senate. And the Senate then changed it back to allow for the exclusion of spousal income. It was going to include spousal income regardless of tax filing status. Nice to see that cleared up. Now what about the repayment options eligible for existing borrowers? Well, we currently have four different IDR plans, Save Pay, IBR and icr. Those four payment programs are going to be consolidated into the Income Based repayment plan. Okay. And they're going to allow you to apply for the repayment assistance plan RAP plan, but that's not going to be available at least until July 1, 2026. Maybe it's a little bit later, maybe it's a little bit earlier, but that's the current timeline that we are seeing from the Department of Education. So if you're on PAY or if you're on icr, you could stay on those payment programs. But just know that over time you're going to get moved into either the IBR or the WRAP plan. If you're on the income based repayment plan, there is two versions you would meet the criteria for old IBR or what is 15% of discretionary income if you took out a loan before July 1, 2014. If you took out your first loan from July 1, 2014 up to June 30 of 2026, you would be eligible for the new IBR plan. New IBR is 10% of discretionary income, which is the same as the pay program and pretty similar to the RAP. So if you're trying to figure out which payment program you should go on to, I would think maybe it's PAY or it's new ibr. If you meet the criteria for new ibr. If you're in the boat where you're only eligible for the old IBR plan, know that you're going to have to really run the numbers. Old IBR versus rap. One other little key component with the Income Based repayment program is they're dropping the financial hardship requirement to enroll into this. So that means they're going to allow you to enroll into it at any income, which is a nice feature that they have allowed for. Okay. So yeah, that's where we're at as far as repayment programs and the SAVE program. Currently we know that everybody was in kind of a one year forbearance where you haven't been getting credit towards loan forgiveness. But you haven't had any interest on the loans. Well, that is stopping on August 1st. They're turning on the interest again and over the next three years the SAVE program will go away. But, but remember, it's also under this lawsuit. It's currently enjoined by the courts and they're still debating what to do with it. But bottom line, it doesn't look good for the SAVE program. And if you're doing a loan forgiveness program, I don't know that you want to continue to wait out save because there's just no guarantee that you're going to be able to get credit for the months that we're in this save legal forbearance even through the buyback program that is severely backlogged. It's about two years delayed right now. So if you're in that that situation and you're trying to get the clock moving again for loan forgiveness, maybe you look to IBR or PAY or icr, one of those to get the ball rolling again. If you're in the camp of no payments due or frankly you're thinking about not doing loan forgiveness, might be a good time to look to refinance your your federal loans to private. Just had a client get 3.8% on a five year term dropping her interest rates from about seven and a half percent to 3.8%. I can save you a ton of money if you're just going to end up paying these off. So maybe it's time to get them out of the and refinance them as rates have recently gotten a little bit better. Okay, so don't know exactly when SAVE is going to be eliminated, but it could certainly be over the next year's time. So one other thing, you know, a couple other things to kind of consider is that the deferment and the forbearance rules are going to get tightened up. So currently you could have about three years of forbearances and then you could consolidate your loans and reset those three years of forbearances and you can't have them consecutively. This could be cumulatively over a three year period of time. Well, what they're going to do is they're going to shorten it. So you can only have nine months of forbearance over a 24 month period of time. So really what we're seeing is they're really trying to get people back into repayment and not have you in periods of time where you're not making payments on the loans. So one other point Is that with Parent Plus Loans, if you have Parent plus loans or if you're borrowing them on behalf of your children, know that you used to be able to borrow whatever your child needed for their education. Usually they were used for undergraduate because undergrad has lower federal limits than they do for the graduate and professional degree levels. But for Parent plus loans, you can take out about $65,000 per child that used to be capped or used to have no cap there. And the other thing too is that if you want to be eligible for income driven repayment programs, I would make sure you are consolidating your loans before summer 2026 and getting into the income Contingent repayment program. Because once that ICR plan goes away, my understanding is that Parent plus loans will not have access to income driven options. They're going to have access probably to that standard 25 year plan and then refinancing. So things are definitely going to get a little bit tighter for Parent plus borrowers. But, you know, the big takeaway here is continue to stay informed on these changes. And it appears we've got a framework for the next couple of years what this administration's looking to do as far as getting things back into repayment. Good luck to you.

Okay, hope that was helpful to you. We're going to continue to produce content about this. We are updating our current student loan content as quickly as we can. Please have patience with us.

Right.

We've been teaching how to manage your student loans for the last 15 years in books, online courses, on this podcast, on the blog, email, newsletters. Everything's got to be updated, everything changed. So you probably need a student loan plan. If you don't have one, you need one before, but even if you have one, it might need updates now. Lots of people are going to be grandfathered in and can still follow the same plan they've been following.

Not everybody. You know, one of the big groups.

Of people that are affected are those.

Who are going for pay.

You know, this type of IDR forgiveness. They're hoping to get that at 20 years. That part's going away.

They're having to go for a plan.

That doesn't give it until 25 or even 30 years. One doc wrote in and said that makes a difference of $300,000 to me.

So those folks are not grandfathered in. This is one downside of relying on.

The government to take care of your student loans. Is there is some legislative risk there. This is why we've been telling you for years about public service loan forgiveness, which really wasn't changed much. But about Public Service Loan forgiveness have a PSLF side fund in case your career plans change or in case there's legislative or executive change that affects your decision. So those folks relying on IDR forgiveness, you may want a new plan.

It may be worth running the numbers. Highly recommend booking a Consult with Andrew studentloanadvice.com is where you can do that.

All right. Our questions today are very relevant to.

The subject we've been talking about. This one comes from a future med student and let's take a listen to it.

Hey Dr. Dali, thanks for everything you do. I've been listening to your podcast since high school and I found it to be super helpful. I'm a Canadian undergraduate student applying to do med schools in the US this coming cycle. The tuition fees as well as the estimated cost of living for the schools that I'm applying to in the US would total between 520 to $550,000 Canadian, which equates to $380 to $400,000 US dollars for the degree. This includes interest accrual up to graduation as I do not qualify for financial aid. As a Canadian, I would love to do the HPSP scholarship from all aspects, but it doesn't seem as though I'm eligible for it as a Canadian citizen. My question is do you think that this is still a wise investment given the large financial cost? And do you have any advice or insight into my situation? Thanks.

I just had this discussion at Lake Powell on a houseboat this week.

One of our friends is starting med school. Started the week I'm recording this two days before I recorded this podcast. Started med school at a do school.

I asked her how much are you borrowing? She said $46,000 this semester.

It's a relatively new school. It doesn't yet qualify for federal student loans. So these are private loans. I asked her what her interest rate was.11%.

So the plan right now, at least until her third or fourth year when supposedly the school is going to qualify for federal loans.

The plan right now is to borrow $92,000 ish a year at 11%. Now at 11%, your debt is doubling.

Or so every six years or so. Six to seven years, six and a half years. Your debt's doubling, right? So her debt will double that Ms. One debt is going to double before she ever starts making attending money. I mean, it's not that hard to run the numbers out and realize that.

She'S going to owe seven or eight hundred thousand dollars by the time she.

Comes out of medical school substantially more than this questionnaire. So is medical school still worth it? Well, I think it is compared to lots of professions where the cost of entry is pretty high, sometimes close to what it costs to get into medicine, but they have much lower income. It's a very bimodal distribution of incomes.

In law, for instance, you either get.

Into big law and you make something like $200,000 while working as many hours as residents do, or you end up with some other job where you're making $50,000 and got to figure out a way to pay off your $200,000 in student loans.

Pharmacy is not that awesome of a ratio.

Veterinarians can have a terrible ratio. Sometimes their debts are as large as that of us in medicine, and income can often be much lower. So compared to all those, I think medicine's still your best bet. And I think it's still worth it. I think it's still a good investment. Even if you have to pay every dime of the cost of your education with borrowed money, I think it's worth it. Is it worth it? 11%. It's probably even still worth it if.

You'Re paying at 11%.

But it is not nearly as attractive as it was a few weeks ago before this legislation passed.

Right.

Because now, you know, at least people starting med school now, they're only going to be able to borrow up to $200,000 federally.

And after that, they'd be borrowing, you.

Know, with private loans, 50 grand a year, federal. And after that, it's private. And so there's going to be a resurgence of the private lending market, which basically just disappeared the last decade or so.

Right.

Why would anybody take out a private loan when they can just take out as much federal loan as they can possibly need? Of course, nobody was doing that. The federal loans qualify for IDR programs. They qualify for pslf.

Right.

And sometimes payments just go to zero percent and zero payment due for three and a half years when there's a pandemic. I mean, who wouldn't want to just use federal loans? Well, whether it's the right policy or not, we can debate that at some other point. That's not what this podcast is all about.

It's not about debating political policy.

It's about helping you take what's put.

In place and implementing it in your life.

But I think it's still worth it. But you need a plan to take care of the cost of your education, and that plan needs to actually make sense now. Public service loan forgiveness is not gone. It's still there.

Right.

And while people who do very short residencies, maybe they're not going to get enough forgiveness, it's worth hassling with it, the amount of federal loans they have. But for lots of people, it's still going to make sense to go for public service loan forgiveness on that $200,000 and whatever it grows to portion of your debt, okay? You will pay more of it down.

Under the new IDR plans than you would have under the old ones, especially when there's student loan holidays.

But it's probably still worth it for lots of docs, especially if you're not paid that much. You spend a long time in training. All these factors that make it more beneficial to you. It's still going to make sense. There's still going to be lots of.

People going for public service loan forgiveness.

But it's not nearly as good as it was. It's not nearly as good of an option. So what does that bring us to? Well, that brings us to the old option, the option that many of us have used. The option that works very reliably, which is to live like a resident for a few years after you finish training and write five figure checks every month to your lender. I assure you, if you send your lender $10,000 or $20,000 a month, your student loans are going to go away very quickly. If you owe $200,000 and you're sending them $15,000 a month, right. Your loans are going to be gone in less than a year and a half. If you owe $400,000 and you're sending them $10,000 a month, they still go away in less than four years or so with interest, right? This works. It works. If you can keep your lifestyle down and keep your earnings up, you can get your student loans paid off in less than five years. Now, in some of these other situations, for example, my friend who's going to medical school expects to be owing, I don't know, $700,000 when she gets done with her training. That is going to be a lot of debt to pay off. But you also got to keep in mind you can't compare debt now that you're going to be paying off later to salaries now, right? If we went back 10 years ago and look what the average doc was making, it was substantially less than the average doc is making now. I wrote about this in my first book. I called it the Big Squeeze because the fear was that physician incomes were dropping. Well, they didn't drop, they went up.

Over the last 10 years.

So while the average physician income today is about 375, that's probably not what it's going to be when she gets out of medical school. It might be 450. And who knows what specialty she's going to choose and what kind of practice.

Environment she's going to choose.

And maybe she's making significantly more than that. Right. So she comes out and she owes $700,000 and she makes $600,000 a year.

Yeah.

You can pay that off by living like a resident.

Right.

Send the lender $20,000 a month.

Right.

You send them $20,000 a month and you pay off your $700,000 in student loans in what, 35 months or something like that.

You know, a little more than that.

With interest, but certainly still less than five years. You can have paid off school and.

Be done and move on with life.

And there's an awful lot you can do once you free up that 10 or 15 or $20,000 a month that.

You'Re sending to that lender.

Now, what you can't do, of course, is have this be your plan. Borrow $700,000 from medical school and then end up in a specialty that makes not that much money and take a job within that specialty that makes far less than the average in that specialty and expect this to work out. You cannot borrow $700,000 and then take a job that doesn't qualify for PSLF, that pays 160 and expect this to work out. Well, you know, I emphasize this to her. I'm like, you're not going to be able to go on the parent track for a few years.

Right?

You're going to have to have nanny.

If you want to have kids. You're going to have to have, you.

Know, a stay home spouse or some sort of plan because you can't put off kids until you have all these loans paid off.

That's going to, you know, you're going.

To have biological problems having kids at that point. So you've got to have them as you go along.

And you got to have a plan.

To deal with that that allows you.

To continue to work full time because.

You'Re only going to be able to pay these things off if you work full time, whether you're going for PSLF or whether you're living like a resident and paying them off yourself. You're going to need to work full time for a few years after you finish your training in order to get.

Them taken care of.

So yes, I think medical school is still worth it financially, even if You're Canadian and going to a do school here in the US and it's going to cost you $400,000. If you will live like a resident. Afterward, you can pay off that $400,000 in student loans. You don't have to do it forever. You only have to do it for a few years, but it's still worth it financially. It's a little less of a good.

Deal now than it was a few weeks ago.

All right. Our quote of the day today comes from Maya Angelou, who said, success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. And it's important to keep that in mind as we talk about all the financial ramifications of our careers, that finances aren't necessarily the most important part.

So let's keep that in mind.

Okay, let's talk to another medical student, this one at the far end of medical school.

Hi Dr. Dali. I'm a fourth year medical student who's getting ready to match later this year. My wife and I got married earlier in the year and have started having monthly meetings to discuss our financial plan. She currently works as an ER nurse and we had discussed the possibility of writing a prenuptial agreement to delineate financial obligations in our marriage. We ultimately decided to forego a prenuptial agreement prior to getting married, given that our incomes will be similar while I complete my training. Our plan is to revisit this topic in a few years to discuss a post nuptial agreement. So far, this has been a very open and healthy discussion. I was wondering if you have any recommendations regarding this process. I would like to protect my future asset allocation and the unlikely scenario of divorce, but I also want to build wealth alongside my wife, together as a team. My wife deserves to be recognized for her support through my training, but I owe it to myself to protect a portion of the assets I may acquire in the future. Do you have any suggestions on terms that may allow us to achieve these goals? Thank you so much.

Great question. Let's talk a little bit about prenups and postnups and marriage and divorce and all these fun subjects to talk about. If you thought it was hard to write a prenup, imagine how hard a postnup is going to be. This is definitely something far easier to do at the beginning. I think if you thought it was really required, I'm not sure your approach is the one I would take. That said, if you ask an attorney.

This question, they will point out, well, we all have a prenup, but the.

Prenup is written by the state. So if you don't like the one the state has written, then you ought to write a different one, and hopefully you can both agree on it. And the easiest time to do that is when you both love each other so much that you want to spend the rest of your lives together. So if you don't like the state plan, then write your own plan. Now, if you're getting young, you're getting married, and you're young, and you're both broke or pretty darn close to it, I don't know that the state's prenup is terribly unfair, right? You may feel it is, and it's.

Worth getting your own prenup.

Great.

Get your own prenup.

But when you start out broke and you work together on building wealth, and then something happens and you break up later, well, about half the wealth and about half the income ought to go to each of you. And that's just the way it works in most states when they work it out. So you can do a prenup if you want. But in that situation, I would not argue it's totally mandatory to have a prenup. Now, I think there are times when it is mandatory, right? You're getting married later and one of you is a DECA millionaire, and the other one's broke. A prenup's probably a really good idea if there's kids coming into the marriage, right? Somebody else's kids, and you want your kids to be taken care of in the event of a divorce and that sort of thing. You need a prenup in those situations. I think it's pretty darn mandatory in.

Those kinds of things.

It may or may not be mandatory if you're coming from wealthy parents, right? They may be able to achieve what they hope to in protecting assets from a divorcing spouse, using a trust of some kind. But it's definitely worth considering a prenup.

In that sort of a situation.

But when you're both young and broke, one of you is a nurse, and.

The other one of you is borrowing a bunch of money for medical school. I don't know that it's the most mandatory thing in the world. We didn't get one. And if we ended up splitting up.

We'D split the assets in half, and we'd split the income in some way.

And we'd end up both being just fine, it turns out, because we've been successful enough that we could both live.

Just fine off half of what we have built together. That is the Benefit of working together.

With somebody else to build wealth.

When you look at studies, married people have more wealth than single people, have more wealth than divorced people. That divorce process is just really expensive. Not only is there all the hassle and the worry and the fighting that reduces your ability to make income, but you got to pay the attorneys a whole bunch of money, right? And then of course, when you get divorced, your assets and your income are cut in half. There's also the pre divorce period where you're like, ah, half this money isn't even mine. I'm just going to go spend it. Everything's 50% off. And so I think a lot of wealth disappears in that year or two as the divorce is coming up. It's just not a great thing financially to get divorced. So, you know, your best asset protection move, as I've always said, is date night. Keep that marriage together financially. That's going to be the best move most of the time. Obviously, if you're married to some terrible spendthrift, that might not be the case.

But most of the time, if you can work it out, it's going to.

Work out better for you financially. All right, so how do you go get a postnup? I don't know that I have recommendations for it. You go see an attorney. You should each have your own attorney that just represents you. You ought to look at what the state would do if you got divorced without any sort of prenup or post nup and see what changes you want to make to that. Negotiate back and forth until you're both happy. Sign it and file it away and hopefully you'll never need to use it. If nothing else, one good thing about talking about prenups and postnups is it gets rid of all these surprises that some people run into, financial surprises. When they get married and they find out their spouse has $250,000 in student loans or $80,000 in credit cards or is just really irresponsible about money. It forces you to have the financial conversations I think people ought to have.

Before they get married.

And if it accomplishes that, well, great.

But I think that's the process I'd go through if I try to do a postnup. We've never tried to do that ourselves.

So I'm sure somebody who has will write in and we'll give an update to this discussion in a later podcast.

And if they have great recommendations for.

How to get a postnup, we'll add that segment to a future podcast. Okay, I want to talk for A minute about something that's really important, which is that you get paid what you're worth. This is a real problem in White Coat Investor land. I am shocked at the breadth, the range of income in any given specialty of people working about the same amount of time. I know pediatricians making seven figures. I know pediatricians making five figures. Okay? It's a huge range. And a lot of you are not being paid what you should be getting paid. And it's just a lot easier to build wealth and pay off debt and reach your financial goals and support others and give to your favorite charities when you're actually making more money. And so I want to make sure that you don't. Not necessarily being paid too much. I just want you to be paid what you're worth. So one of the services we have had here at the White Coat Investor for a long time is a referral program to people who will review your contract. Now, if you go to the website and you go to the recommended tab and you go down to contract review, you will see a number of companies there that we have listed that will help you to evaluate your contracts.

Right.

Whether they're partnership contracts or whether they are employment contracts. You know, we've got companies like Resolve and Contract RX and Contract diagnostics, physician agreements, etc. All right, these people all pay us, of course, right?

They're advertisers of the program, but they.

Only charge a few hundred dollars. A few hundred dollars to make sure you're not getting underpaid by 50 grand.

Right.

It doesn't take that much for them to really earn their money back for you. So I think pretty much everybody signing a physician employment contract needs to hire one of these companies, have your contract review, know what every term in there means, know what the going rate is for you, because.

Right.

They're doing this for people all the time. They can give you the information, let you know what you're actually worth, and maybe give you some suggestions on how to negotiate or what negotiations, you know, or even negotiate for you if you want. So we had Kyle Claassen with Resolve.

On here a few weeks ago, and.

I got an email afterward, said I recently used Resolve after hearing about them on your podcast. And that was the best value for money that I've ever spent. I'm talking like 50x what I paid them with just my base salary. I would have never negotiated for that increase if I did not have them on my side providing the data and reassuring me that there is a way to negotiate while being very cordial polite and professional. Thank you once again for all that you do. I mean, can you get a better testimonial than that? 50 times what they paid just in their base salary, right? If you want to hire Resolve, you can go to whitecoatinvestor.com resolve. We got several other companies there we think of just as highly. Check those out on the recommended page. But get your contracts reviewed for crying out loud. Get paid what you're worth. The rest of your personal finances go a lot better if you're not being underpaid. So make sure you're being paid fairly. Especially now that you know things like the student loan environment worsening a little bit. You know, it becomes more and more.

Important than ever that doctors are being paid fairly for the work they're doing.

Okay, so I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast and this is such an appropriate sponsor for today's podcast. SOFI could help medical residents like you save thousands of dollars with exclusive rates and flexible terms for refinancing your student loans. Visit sofi.comwhitecoatinvestor to see all the promotions and offers they've got waiting for you. One more time that sofi.com whitecoatinvestor SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi Bank NA member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891 okay, don't forget about the scholarship. If you're a professional student enrolled full time, you can apply through the end of August. Go to whitecoatinvestor.comscholarship if you were willing to help us judge. Email scholarshipinvestor.com we could definitely use a few more judges. Thanks. For those of you leaving 5 star reviews and telling your friends about the podcast, we had one come in from physician scientist from Massachusetts who said my Constant Companion since 2017. When I discovered the WCI podcast, I was toward the end of paying off my medical school loans and since that time I've read the books, followed blog posts and listened to most podcasts during workouts and car rides. I paid off all my student loans in 2019 and was fortunate to be featured on a Milestone a Millionaire episode. The learnings have provided far reaching effects since that time. I began funding my kids 529s, bought a car with cash, self funded. My spouse's mid career degree in law rolled over four 401ks, served as the executrix for my parents estate including probate, reviewed for the White Coat Investor Scholarship. Thanks for doing that by the way and invested in a second mountain home for our ski and hiking adventures. The knowledge from this community has given me confidence to take charge of my financial situation, make small but continuous improvements. Thank you for being an amazing resource.

Five stars.

It's a nice note, but most importantly, putting those in helps other people find this podcast and we can help them in these awesome ways that makes their lives better. I truly believe docs with their financial ducks in a row are better docs. They're less worried about making the Tesla.

Payment at the end of the month.

Or paying off their student loans. They can concentrate on their patients. They can concentrate on their families. They can concentrate on their own wellness. They're not working so much that they're burned out and giving bad patients patient care and dropping out of the profession. You're going to be a better doctor if you take care of your finances. Please do something small this week.

Make them just a little bit better.

One step at a time. You've got this. Keep your head up, shoulders back. We'll be here to help you all along the way.

See you next time on the White Coat Investor Podcast.

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.