Ya, I understand what you are saying, but the money is not just for myself. My uncle died a few years ago, and we are not a very rich family, so I took it onto myself to help pay for his children's educations in whatever way I can. I was really close to my uncle, so this is very important to me. I also need to help pay for my sister's education and also not try to torture my dad with debt problems. I want to make sure that he retires by the time he is 65, so I need to be able to support my parents also when I get a job, in addition to paying off debts. I hope I made myself more clear. Sorry for the long reply, but I did not want to come off as a money-*****.
Wanting to be financially secure is perfectly fine, but medicine, especially neruo and CT surgery, is not that straight forward. If you want to make good money quickly, dentistry, pharmacy or business (assuming you go to a prestigious undergrad), is a better option. Assuming you get into med school on the first try, it'll be 16 yearrs before you make an attending salary, i.e. you sister would need to be 1-4 years old right now if you planned to be able to pay for any part of her education; you father would have to ne, at max, 49 years old right now. FYI, integrated CT is 6 years
You can look at FREIDA training stastics to see how much a resident gets paid. Unfortuantely for NS, most of the programs don't list that much information. One NS program, a community program in AZ, gives a salary for PGY1 (your first year of residency), of $46,550, and during the last year of residency you'll be paid $61,505. Some schools also give housing stipends (usually in expensive cities, like SF, NYC, and Boston), but they're only a few hundrer dollars a month. In NS, you'll probably unable to moonlight at all because you'll be working 80 hours a week (the cap on how many hours a week a resident can work), so you'll be inelidgible to moonlight (at least at your own institution).
Once you're an attending, you'll make a very competitive salary, but realize the cost of medical education is out-pacing the growth in physician salaries. This means you'll most likely have more debt relative to your starting salary than someone who is about to start a NS residency. So not only will you have a huge amount of student loans after med school, assuming you live in a state outside the south, you'll be paying a small fortune, even if you are in-state. Being OOS or going to a private school looks even more dire. Even today, if you do income base requirement, which requires you to pay 15% of your pretax income towards your loans (technically, you deduct a poverty level amount, about 15k, from your salary, so if you made 50k, you would have to pay 15% OF 35K). However, all loans originating after 2014 will only require a 10% payment. So, assuming cost of attendance outpaces salaries, including salaries of residents, by the time you start residency, 10% of your income will be unable to pay-off the interest your loans accrue each year, meaning your loans continue to grow and grow.
Now, by the time your an attending, after working 80-hour work weeks for the past 7 years, you're going to finally want to afford nice things AND pay-off your student loans. 400-500k is a lot of money, but although it might seem otherwise right now, it'll take a lot of courage/drive to help your family as much as you seem to want to right now.
Also, in above post, I mentioned that NS and CT are not lifestyle specialties, they are lifestyles. I remember hearing a joke a few years ago that Duke's NS program bills itself as having a 120% divorce rate. All the CT and NS I have known work hard--really, really hard. They have spouses of steel, and their children realize that mommy or daddy will probably not be at the Little League Game or be able to help them with thei science fair project. The ones who are able to do all of this have a spouse, personal assistant, and blackberry of solid steel: learning to find time for your family when you are a NS or CT is difficult, and not all people master it. One of my best friends from undergrad will be applying to integrated CT residencies this up-coming cycle, and she's admitted time and time again that she'll probably never marry or have kids. Now, this is her choice/mentality, which doesn't mean that women can't be successful NS or CT surgeons and have a spouse and kids, but it's a difficult job. If you want to raise a family, other specialties, like psych, FM, and PM&R tend to have much better hours.
Now, I'm not trying to bust your chops here, I just want to give you some information. It's great that you are already considering a career in medicine, but it's worth knowing what you might be getting yourself into. Good luck!
