30 years old, wife, 2 kids under 3 yrs, need financial advice

I am 30 years old and starting med school this fall. I have a wife of 6 years and two little girls under the age of 3.

I am estimating graduating from my state's med school with $270,000 in debt. I have zero debt at this time. I do not own a home. I have $8,000 in savings. My wife is a homemaker and does not work.

Do any residents or attendings have any tips for me as far as managing my personal finances? Items I am particularly interested in are:

-Can I finance this entriley with the Federal Gov't or will I have to get private loans for some of it?
-How to defer loan repayment and interest accruals for as long as possible.
-Can my children qualify for Medicaid?
-Can my wife be covered under Medicaid if we have additional children during medical school?

Other important points are: I am not interested in military service.

If any one has any thoughts or tips from your experiences I would love to hear it.

Thanks!

Moving to the Financial Aid forum.

coffeesnob81 said:

I am 30 years old and starting med school this fall. I have a wife of 6 years and two little girls under the age of 3.

I am estimating graduating from my state's med school with $270,000 in debt. I have zero debt at this time. I do not own a home. I have $8,000 in savings. My wife is a homemaker and does not work.

Do any residents or attendings have any tips for me as far as managing my personal finances? Items I am particularly interested in are:

-Can I finance this entriley with the Federal Gov't or will I have to get private loans for some of it? Look up stafford loans limits x med school (higher than grad school). You will still have to get additional loans like grad plus
-How to defer loan repayment and interest accruals for as long as possible. you defer throughout residency, interest will accrue throughout this time as well, no way to prevent that unless you get some kind of loans directly from your institution
-Can my children qualify for Medicaid? Probably yes, every state is different though, look it up online. You will qualify x help with utilities as well
-Can my wife be covered under Medicaid if we have additional children during medical school? Don't know, keep in mind that most physicians do not accept Medicaid due to its nonexistent reimbursements

Other important points are: I am not interested in military service.

If any one has any thoughts or tips from your experiences I would love to hear it.

Thanks!

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I strongly advise your SO find some kind of job or you guys will be struggling really badly, in addition to the strain med school places on you and your family. Also, ask your school x institutional and or alumni loans. Congrats on starting med school

Thanks for the response Plauto. Yes, my wife is looking for some part time contract work. I had not thought about getting loans directly from the school. I will check that out.

If your wife can work some, that will help a lot.
You will probably need some private loans to help pay your expenses.
I'm graduating now and looking at the mountain of debt and repayment options.

You may also need some extra funds during residency.

OP, yes it is possible to get by on just the federal loans in that situation, but it is very tight. I am in a similar situation, and have one other classmate like that as well. The big budget killers for us have been/will be health insurance (>$7K per year for my family, not including co-pays), rent/utilities, and food.

If you take out the max federal loans (Stafford + Grad Plus up to COA) it is about 30k per year allowed for cost of living at my school, others will vary a bit. If you can get cheap health insurance somehow that will help a lot. If you have any way of staying with family or some way of decreasing housing costs that helps a lot. We do all our shopping at super Target, and our idea of going out is to go to Steak and Shake on a weekend when kids meals are free.

Obviously income helps, as many will point out, but my wife chose to stay at home and we've been able to make it work. However, we've had to make a lot of sacrifices and get some help from family along the way.

I have heard of people using Medicaid or other local low income health insurance options. If you don't have any income and few assets they might qualify. It does highly limit your choices in providers though.

Good luck, and feel free to send a PM if you want more details.

coffeesnob81 said:

I am 30 years old and starting med school this fall. I have a wife of 6 years and two little girls under the age of 3.

I am estimating graduating from my state's med school with $270,000 in debt. I have zero debt at this time. I do not own a home. I have $8,000 in savings. My wife is a homemaker and does not work.

Do any residents or attendings have any tips for me as far as managing my personal finances? Items I am particularly interested in are:

-Can I finance this entriley with the Federal Gov't or will I have to get private loans for some of it?
-How to defer loan repayment and interest accruals for as long as possible.
-Can my children qualify for Medicaid?
-Can my wife be covered under Medicaid if we have additional children during medical school?

Other important points are: I am not interested in military service.

If any one has any thoughts or tips from your experiences I would love to hear it.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

You should be able to finance everything through the school/gov so you should be able to avoid private loans.

You can forbear payments (deferment is no longer an option) for your entire residency, but the interest will capitalize.

You and your whole family should qualify for medicaid depending on which state you will be in and I strongly recommend enrolling. It will save you $40K+ not including interest over the 4 years. Your kids should qualify regardless and your wife should qualify if she is pregnant. Yes, it does limit your physician pool and some doc's treat you like a second class citizen infected with HIV and Hep C, but IMO, it's worth the cost savings. The upside is that most OB's and pediatricians see a lot of medicaid pt's so they are less likely to discriminate. I wouldn't feel bad about being on medicaid, it was intended for people like you to assist people TEMPORARILY through a financial hardship. Keep in mind that if your wife does work, it may prohibit you from qualifying depending on her income, so calculate the risks/benefits thoroughly. You might even qualify for food stamps. Almost every student that had kids in my class was on food stamps and medicaid. It was actually encouraged by my financial aid office.



Wise choice to avoid the military unless you have a strong desire to serve.


Best of luck, it's doable. Just do your best to be as frugal as possible. Cook meals from scratch, avoid eating out, shop at goodwill/garage sales for kids clothes.

Another reason for your SO to get a job is that you can deduct many costs (tuition, student interest, etc) against earned income but if you don't have earned income, you can't. If your SO made a small amount of money, it's possible that earned income credit + tuition credit + student loan interest deduction + child care deduction would net you $ back from the federal government. It's worth looking into.

Can you get help from family? I'm thinking of your poor wife, living super-frugally for 5+ years with 2 kids and maybe also working outside your home to help out. That's a tough stretch and that can be tough on marriages. Yes, it's nice not to have too much debt, but there are things more important than money.

With the amount of loans that you anticipate having, keep in mind that there are loan forgiveness programs for all your federal loans. Try to avoid institutional loans if possible as these will not qualify. There is public service loan forgiveness that forgives loans after 10 years. Hopefully the program will still be around when you graduate.

You can always consolidate loans in the end to be eligible for the PSLF no matter what the origin.

Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts. My wife and I have read your responses and we have learned a thing or to. I now have a second round of questions that I am going to post as a new thread. Thanks again!

Take out as little as possible and get started on getting your 10 years of qualifying payments during residency so you can get the remainder forgiven. Do not go into forbearance during residency.