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39k a year tuition and about 18k a year to live off of.
Is 240k debt about the norm for graduating physicians? I ask because my school is cheaper than most, yet im still graduating with a lot of debt.
Also, if I got into family practice, will I not be able to pay this debt back?
thanks
The average cost of attendance at a public medical school is now 210K and at a private school is 280K. So, if you are doing it all on your own with no savings at all, yes it is normal.
However the median indebtedness is 168K at public schools and 190 K at private schools, reflecting the fact that a normal medical student comes from one of the top income brackets, and does not fund his medical education on his own. So in that sense no, it is not normal.
Source:
https://www.aamc.org/download/328322/data/statedebtreport.pdf
A family medicine doctor, assuming salaries stay an inflation adjusted constant (which may not be a good assumption!!) will make approximately 7 million of pretax dollars over the course of his career. That 240K will grow in medical school and residency to 400K, will cost 700K of post tax dollars to pay off, which translates to approximately 1 million of pretax dollars. That leaves you 6 million to live and retire on, nearly twice what an average white collar worker makes and nearly five times what an average American worker makes. So yes, you can pay it off and still live pretty well if our salaries don't tank. Of course, there were plenty of lawyers in the 90s who thought the same thing, and then the average salary in their profession decreased by an order of magnitude and they are now about to surpass chiropractors as the nation's most unemployed professionals.
If you do IBR, PSLF, or PAYE you pay back much, much less, but you need to trust those programs to be around for 25, 10, and 20 years respectively. You need to decide whether the potential to save 500K in pretax dollars is worth the stress that you might lose 2-3 million if the program doesn't come through after you let your debt baloon.
Finally remember that both your salary and expenses are strongly influenced by where you live. Doctors and oil industry roughnecks are the only jobs I know of where you actually make dramatically MORE by living in the ass end of nowhere where the cost of living is negligible, so our standard of living has a lot more variability than, say, engineering where the pay tends to scale directly with the cost of living rather than inversely. If you live in rural Nebraska as an FP you might have the potential to pass 10 million of lifetime earnings, in a neighborhood where 1 million can buy you a mansion to rival Versailles. If you set up shop in the nicer part of southern california you might make 5 million lifetime pretax in a neighborhood where a three bedroom home cost 500K.
