First of all, I am far from a financial genius. I am also not a natural saver. Thanks to scholarships and jobs, I made it out of college without loans. But, I took out a $191K for medical school. In the middle of med school, I took a year off to teach. During that year, I didn’t put anything towards student loans and lived it up. Unfortunately, in forbearance, those loans accrued interest and that interest capitalized when I started repayment.
In residency, I started making income-based payments that came nowhere close to touching the principal. My husband and I bought a house in Nashville with nothing down. This turned out to be a great buy, but it is definitely on the “what not do to do as a resident” list.
My first attending job was in beautiful Savannah, Georgia. We bought a beautiful house on an island in an upscale gated community on the water. I had made it! Everyone told us we were living the dream. By now, my loans had grown from $191K to $237K (even after making about $25K in payments in residency). We had $237K in student loans and another $335K in-house loans. Add to that $40K in car loans and another $130K in loans for the Nashville house that we rented out. Altogether, we were a cool three-fourths of a million dollars in debt.
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