Life Incorporated
I spent the greater portion of my day today on the phone with various folks and sending emails. I was attempting to deal with the juggernaut that is Sallie Mae.
I had a mini-freak out session at one point today. I looked at my current student loan debt. To say that I was frightened would be a huge understatement. I almost pooped my pants. Then, I calculated what my loan payments would need to be and compared that against my hypothetical salary after residency. The numbers just don’t add up nicely. I will have to live like I am poor for a very long time in order to pay off my student loan debt. How did this happen? Isn’t medicine supposed to be a field where you make a decent salary? Maybe not anymore, and maybe not at the current tuition levels. I didn’t go into medicine for the money, but it would be nice to make a little bit, wouldn’t it? Anyway, I could write for hours on this subject, but I shall stop. And I will stop feeling sorry for myself. At least I will be doing something I love. The fact that I will not make much money doing so shouldn’t be so important. I need to get over it.
In other news, I went for another great run. I took my doggies to the park nearby and did a bunch of laps. It was a lovely 7-mile run, and my doggies had a blast trying to chase the squirrels. Tomorrow I have another residency interview, and then 2 more this week.
Enjoy the photos with this post. They were taken last year around this same time of the year. I miss you Laura, and I miss you hair!
My name is Kendra and I am a newly minted doctor about to begin my residency in Psychiatry at 
Don’t residents qualify for deferment? I can’t imagine starting to repay med school loans on a resident’s salary. Yikes!
Yes, for most of the loans, but they still collect interest. A resident friend of mine told me that she is accruing $600 a month in interest! Scary stuff!
Kendra:
I feel your pain on the student debt that we accrue. I also think it sometimes pushes people into fields of medicine that are more lucrative, rather than fields that may be more interesting to them personally, but in which they have no chance of paying back large sums of debt.
Perhaps this would be an area you could explore a bit on both your personal blog and your WebMD blog?
Deb
OMG!! That is SUPER scary!!!!!!!! I talked to a resident and she was like yah I haven’t touched my loans for 10years. Maybe after this fellowship I will start paying off. Going to an intl’ school is most def my fear because it can be a bite higher. If I were to get in the US it might be lower if a non-private school. The reality is that we will all be paying back all that money some how or another. I tell my mentor don’t buy stuff like you aren’t going to pay it back! All that stuff you have you will pay for it and that stuff will get old and loose it’s value. Maybe where ever you become an attending you can get a forgiveness of some short for some lows for working at a low-income community where no one wants to work.
I’ve been struggling to find a way to calculate an ER Doctor’s salary for weeks now. I’ve done everything short of marching into an ER, finding various doctors, and asking them.
I have 3 semesters of pre-med and undergrad left. I will have no debt when I’m done because well..I have a full time IT job. But I will have no savings either. The med schools I’m looking at will cost $35,000 per year or so.
Research has indicated that ER residents can expect to make $45K/year. After residency though, I have seen numbers between 150K/year and 400K/year…I can’t do any intelligent calculations with those numbers, so I’m wondering if you could provide a narrower range.
I’m 27 years old and trying to figure out if maybe I would be smarter just becoming a PA, but its not what I want. But I also don’t want to be broke for the next 15 years!
Sounds like time to work in rural area, take the NIH money for three or four years and than move!!!
$40,000; $50,000 on top of you make.
Well Rural is 30min from St. Louis or other medium size cities. It takes 30 min to go 10 miles in Chicago at times.
Good Luck
DAVE
its only going to get worse, not better with the current regime. medicare reimbursement is scheduled to take a hit soon…..more where that came from