Has anyone calculated how long it would take to pay off 300,000 dollars of debt if you where a family physician only making 100k-160k a year? Taking into mind that with interest on top of that you are probably looking more at 350-400k debt and owning a house and everything?
You've started your own answer. While not a perfect way (doesn't take into account compounding interest, payment plan, etc) to figure it out by any means: take a guesstimate of the principal + interest as your starting total. Arbitrarily choose a number between $100k-160k/year and call it your income. Take off about 40% for taxes and call that your take-home pay. Figure out how much money you'll want to live off of in a year (mortgage, car, insurance, food, investment/retirement, discretionary, etc) and subtract that from your THP. Call this new figure "money for student loans per year."
Now:
(guesstimate of principal + interest)/"money for student loans per year"= years for repayment
You can also utilize an online student loan repayment calculator, of which there are countless to choose from.
I am also wondering about this. Can someone please provide insight on how viable this is as someone practicing family medicine? Maybe some current students can give an idea?
It's viable but you can clearly understand why people want to specialize in something other than PC. Right now, a few things that PCs have in their favor is that: you can set up shop in an under-served area (not every place is necessarily a crap hole in the middle of BFE) and have significant chunks of your loans paid off per year (how much depends on the specific state); there's ample employment with "non-profit" organizations available, and with a lot of hospitals getting in on owning PC offices, you can work at one of their offices for ten years and have whatever outstanding student loans you have forgiven (I'm assuming they haven't specifically written physicians out of this forgiveness option and then you just have to hope that they don't nix it in the coming years); some practices/organizations offer student-loan repayment as an incentive for joining them.
Ultimately, make sure you keep up to date with what's going on politically when it comes to student loans (particularly for graduate students; in the past year or two Congress has really decided to increase the weight of the yoke that grad students will be lugging around by doing things like eliminating the subsidized Stafford loan for us), healthcare, physician reimbursements, tort reform, etc., because the decisions those in charge today make will ultimately be what we all get to deal with down the road. When you catch wind of something that sounds like it's going to be screwing you over with student loans or your future income (or conversely, when it sounds like it's going to really benefit you)- contact your representatives and senators in Congress, sign petitions, and do anything else within your power to get your opinion out there.