Is all of dental education about to pop? We have a literal FOR PROFIT dental school opening up in California that answers to its shareholders.
www.studentloanplanner.com
This article mentions an assumption that the orthodontist saves 150k/year starting at age 29.Here is an article that compares the cost of education and the ROI for an engineer and for an orthodontist. The author of this article assumed that an engineer can save $20k/year starting at 22 (right after college)….and the orthodontist has $1 million student loan debt and can save $150k/year starting at 29 (right after ortho residency). If the orthodontist pays back the student loans aggressively (in 10 years), it takes the orthodontist 16 years (or when they both turn 45) to catch up to an engineer.
Guide to Orthodontist Student Loans: Why Owning is the Way to Go
Orthodontists frequently graduate with over $500,000 in student loan debt. Here's how orthodontists can maximize their salary and pay off their student loans.
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Agreed. It is not simple to save that much per year. But it can be done. If you have a successful practice ..... you will be looking for any tax saving strategies to offest your tax penalty. Some what old fashioned, but early on .... I set up a profit sharing plan for myself and my staff administered by a 3rd party. It allowed me to put away pre-tax a large amount of money every year. I did this for many years. It makes up the bulk of my retirement assets.
Yes, I made around $260-270k after I finished my ortho training at 29. Right after graduation, I worked 23 days/month for 3 different companies:
Yeah, you don’t just put the money in the bank and collect a minuscule amount of interest every month. I saved just enough for 3-6 month living expenses. Whatever I made in excess every month went toward things like 401k, college saving for the kids, down payments for a house (and then for other investment properties), and paying down the debts. So I had pretty much been living paycheck to paycheck until February of this year, when I finally paid off my last debt, the home mortgage.
I see scary threads like all doom and gloom about ortho, then I read posts like yours. Thinking OMS vs ortho right now. I'm doing Army first. Ortho sounds great, but, I don't want to get messed up with new grads being pumped out like crazy.
Just be like 3/4 of my military friends and do endo when you get out. Hard to commoditize endo, as has happened to ortho. Trust me, you'll see plenty of endo on sick call in the military...
Endo makes fat money...and fanfreakingtastic time off. It rivals OMFS pretty well in the money department from what I hear.
Haha! Isn't endo literally able to choose how many days they work a month? I've heard OMFS can do that banging out production at corporate.
All the big name specialties do well. You just have to figure out what you like (hate) most
I get told this a lot. I get the impression that dentists as a WHOLE seriously keep quiet about what the REAL salaries are. I feel like dentists are making boat loads of cash and they don't want people to truly know.
It doesn't take much to think doing a root canal or removing a third molar, considering the cost of each, taking rough consideration of taxes and overhead into account, and seeing that this dentistry concept makes large sums of cheddar well above a 300k average salary that gets mentioned.
I'm still in school so I really don't know anything about CE. How can CE be as good as actually attending a residency at a hospital for OMS?
I also want to point out, I worked as an assistant in both an ortho office and a general office that did clear aligners. The quality of the clear aligner therapy at the general office was not even close to that at the ortho office. CE courses do not give you the amount of information needed on tooth movement and physics etc that is needed to have really successful clear aligner therapy.
Yep. I think ortho diagnosis can be hard enough with a residency let alone just taking CE. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Would you send your family there for ortho tx?
Comment on pay: I guess that depends on where you are? In SoCal I make a tad over $900 per day working as a GP before bonus. I've only been out of school for a few years. I guess my bargaining chip is that I see a lot of peds patients that the other docs don't want to see... But, I am making pretty close (or more in one case) to my classmates that have their ortho certificates.
Yeah, I was talking about the average pays of GPs vs orthos. Some associate GPs get paid based on the % of the production and make over $1000 a day. Some orthos at the Corp get the guaranteed daily pay + bonus (base on production or number of starts) and make over $2k a day. The workload and stress level are much lower for an orthodontist. That’s why many of them work past their retirement age….and it’s not because they need the money. It’s something for them to do to keep them busy. Many people feel depressed after they retire because they run out of things to do.
Maybe it's my smaller sample size but the four ortho offices in my area have huge workloads and I'm close with each of them and those orthodontists are very stressed.
It’s good that all of the ortho offices in your area are busy. I wish I have this huge workload problem at my own offices so I don’t need to work part time at the corp to fill my 5 day/wk work schedule. It’s actually more stressful when your office doesn’t have enough patients. The amount of work in ortho depends on how you book your patients. Some orthodontists want to take it easy and only see 20-30 patients a day. That would be too slow and too boring for me….. I want to see 60-90 patients a day. When I was younger (in my mid 30s), I saw 100+ patients a day. The stress level decreases over time as you gain more clinical experience and treat enough complicated cases. When I was a recent grad, I was so slow and stressed out all the time due to the high volume of patients that I had to see at the corp office. Now with the experience, everything becomes so easy. I have to bring my laptop to entertain myself because the workload at the corp is very light, especially in the morning when most of my teenaged patients are at schools. It’s much busier at my own office because I book the same amount of patients in 4 hours, instead of 8 hours.
Plenty of Hands On workshops and CE that get you comfortable. Its up to you to research, study and practice. Some providers need to be babysat in hospital residency or if you want to become full on OMFS. Every provider is different and risk profile is also different. I started placing implants after my first hands-on Implant course and I have been doing them for years. Same for ortho, and I do bracket and wire. If GPs realized how easy ortho is the whole Ortho field would be out of business. I think GPs should be doing the easy-medium difficulty cases for Ortho. Just like Endo and Oral Surgery. Just refer to Ortho the really hard cases just like you do for other specialists.
No, but most people DO, which is my point. Most of the public is unsuspecting and they pay for treatment behind Invisilign and ClearCorrect...etc.
I feel this is why ortho is taught at the theoretical level only in dental school. They keep the practical aspect hidden, only to be unlocked for those in residency.
It’s good that you enjoy doing ortho and have the experienced assistants to help you. It wouldn’t be fun if you have to do most of the work yourself. It’s good that your patients are willing to put $1500 for down payment. Most of my patients don’t have that kind of money in the bank. Many of them are living paycheck to paycheck. My offices would have a hard time getting the new patients to accept treatments, if we required such large down payment amount. And the referring GPs would stop sending their patients to my office if most of the patients, whom they refer to, couldn’t afford ortho tx at my office.
Don’t feel sorry for these specialists. They make a lot for each procedure that they perform. My wife’s co-resident used fly to Las Vegas (from San Diego) and he placed a ton of implants and performed other perio-related procedures when he was there 2-3 days a month. For those 2-3 days in Vegas, he made close to what my wife made in a month in CA. Everything in life is a trade off. You have to give up something (borrowing more loans for residency trainings, begging the GPs for referrals, flying in from another state) in order to gain something.
I charge much cheaper than the local guys but I do require a bigger down payment. Everything IS a trade off indeed. I find that if you dont have $1000-1500 to put towards braces then you are not really serious about them. Most ortho assistants will know how to position brackets, usually the orthodontist will go and refine position before curing but a good assistant will take you over 95% to finish line. Thats how you can do 15-20 starts in 1 day. I used to work at a practice that the Orthodontist used to do 30-40 Medicaid cases starts every day....he was sitting at his desk all day. You sir are living the deam!
GP owners in other states probably make a lot more. But here in CA, if a GP owner can net around $1200-1300 a day (or having a consistent gross production of $2400-2600 a day), he/she is considered to be a very successful dentist. If he/she works 22 days/month, his net annual income should be around $325-350k/year. If a dentist owner can net that much, then having a student loan debt of $500-600k shouldn’t be a big issue. He/she should be able to catch up to an engineer, who has zero debt and a 4-year head start, in a few years.
As you said, as long as the GP delivers on the “social six,” most patients won’t care about anything else in their treatment. This mentality fosters a race to the bottom, unfortunately. That said, I’d personally prefer my kids be seen by an ortho rather than GP. But that’s because I appreciate what a trained ortho can do. Maybe if I ever move to AZ or CA I’ll have to look you up or a certain @charlestweed.
Ortho is NOT different. This is the same delusion all specialists have about their area. Endodontists swear that all teeth not done under a microscope and under rubberdam will fail. Periodontists/OS swear that they have to place all implants for them to be successful and have long term prognosis.
This made me laugh
While of course there are variations in skill levels, and graduating from residency doesn't make you a master, this is my opinion:
Some of your points are correct. There are bad and good everywhere regardless if generalist or specialist. But common sense should prevail here. You can't argue that those who became specialists worked a "little harder" in dental school to obtain the necessary credentials to attend a residency. You can't argue that most specialists attended 2-3 years of accredited education taught by mostly board certified academicians. You can't argue that ALL specialists do ONE thing. All the time. Every day. Every hour.
Those are some pretty conservative numbers man. Those numbers mean less than 2 crowns a day. IMHO, $2600 production per day is very far from the very successful land, especially as an owner.
I know you are in northern California. Maybe you can charge higher tx fees up there. Perhaps, it’s less saturated up there. But here in SoCal, if you charge your patient $1300 a crown and you sucessfully convince him/her to accept the tx, you must be a very good business person. That’s because there are a lot of offices (private and Corp offices) in the area that are willing to do a crown for much less. There are certain insurance plans that don't pay you that much for a crown.
Don't live in California
Nah, there are so many good things in CA that many Californians cannot give up. There’s no point of making a lot of money if you don’t spend your money…if you have to live in a place where you don’t enjoy living there 365 days/year.
housely.com
Second thatNah, there are so many good things in CA that many Californians cannot give up. There’s no point of making a lot of money if you don’t spend your money…if you have to live in a place where you don’t enjoy living there 365 days/year.
10 Major Advantages to Living in California
Here are some great reasons to live in California. I'm sure our East Coast friends will agree with us this Winter.
SF Bay Area is pretty saturated. I have clients in SoCal that do very well, however, it's a different market, I agree.
