I've dont the math. If you take a ~24 yr old and send him to an avg cost med school and give him a salary of 200k after a 4 yr residency the doc comes out ahead before the age of 40. If you live as frugally you will retire earlier as a doc.
EDIT: Unless you mean retire by age 39. I guess the PA could do that and live in poverty for the rest of their life.
You don't understand how to retire early. You live in poverty
now so that you can be relatively well off later.
Last year, average physician assistant student loan debt was roughly 60k. Average physician debt was roughly 200k. Now, male physician assistants make an average of
$116,575 in 2013 (the most recent year for which I can find reliable data), with some areas of practice earning more (urgent care paid $130,000, on average). You can graduate as a PA at 24 (or 22 if you do a bachelor's program). Now, let's run the numbers of how quickly you could retire. Maxing out your 401k, you end up with $80,000, after taxes and deductions. You have already saved $18,000, and throw $33,000 at your student loan debt for the first two years, and an additional $5,500 at a Roth IRA. During these two years, you also deposit $6,500 in investments, and live off of the remaining $35,000. After years 1 and 2, you apply the full $33,000 you were putting into student loans into your investment account, netting you $23,500 in tax-sheltered investments and $39,500 in taxable investments each year. At the end of year two, you will have $51,225.64 saved and zero debt at 26 years of age. Continue this for the next 13 years, and you end up with $1,733,256.72 at 39 years of age. If you hold off for a few more years, however, and decide to retire at 45, you'll have $3,423,472.40. At a 4% withdrawal rate (the rate that allows you to withdraw safely with a nest egg that never depletes and also corrects itself for inflation) you will end up with a yearly pre-tax income of $136,938.89, which is taxed at the capital gains rate of 15%, netting you an inflation-adjusted salary of $116,398 for the rest of your life for doing precisely dick.
Let's look at the physician side of things. An internist makes an average of $185,000 before tax (all numbers used are from 2013, for consistency, since it is the last year for which reliable data for both physicians and physician assistants is available and minimized speculation). Their debt on graduation is an average of 200k. The earliest an internal medicine residency would be completed would be 29. Since interest will be accruing on the physician's debt during residency, we're looking at $245,000 of debt post-residency if they have an optimistic 7% interest rate (everything is unsubsidized nowadays, yay). Now, you will be ineligible for Roth contributions, so the first few years, you're just going to contribute to a 401k. After taxes, benefits, and 401k contributions, our physician earns $116,015.97. Let's say he lives the same standard of living as our hypothetical PA. This gives him $81,015.97 to throw at his debt. His yearly interest is, however, much higher. It takes him three and a half years to get his debt squared away, all while having only saved $63,000 at 32.5 years of age. Now, he's got a lot of catching up to do if he wants to retire early like our PA. At 39 years of age, maxing out his 401k and putting 81k into investments each year for the remaining 6.5 years, our physician has only amassed $917,631.23. At 12 years, still living like a pauper and investing heavily, he has only amassed $2,350,933.35. At 48 years of age, our physician, after all of his hard work, has managed to amass a nest egg of $3,398,323.66, slightly less than his already retired PA colleague, and all with much more work and time invested.