How We Paid Off $662,000 In Student Loan Debt! #452

debt . I could work more or I could decrease my expenses and , to my husband's chagrin , because I'm from Flint , because I grew up in simple means , I knew how to make the most .

Very briefly , dr Brittany is an internal medicine doctor up in Boston one of the worst places that I hate to hang out .

, buddy . So , dr britney , welcome to docs outside the box . We love you . Um , so it's not with the . You know , everything I said in the beginning is is just we just joking around ?

I was an attending at Emory and while there no one questioned my authority , no one questioned my intellect , and when there was some disagreements between other staff members and my assessment or evaluation of the patient , we just hashed it out . We're just like Dr Brittany , what's going on ? And we talked about it and we did what was best for the patient .

And when I moved to Boston that was something that I still had to kind of work through and establish . And then my husband became the chief behavioral officer of the Boston Public Health Commission , which is an inaugural position , and he creates basically the mental health plan for the city of Boston . He works with the mayor's office .

And at that point in time I was like , ok , this is a black man assuming a new and I want him to do well . So we decided to stay and we own two properties here . Our baby's there in school and we're invested , you're invested , we're invested , we're invested and it's been great . It's been great . We found a really great church home and created our community .

So we're grateful for Boston .

I finished residency it was 135 .

So basically , from medical school you know we all do these exit interviews where we meet they review your debt profile , your student loan debt profile , and they're like , okay , well , essentially what they told me at Northwestern is to enroll in the income-driven repayment plan and sign up for public service loan forgiveness and so , taking that advice , that's what I

did , but we all know that with student loans , I don't know for me . I hated verifying my income and my employer every year for the public service loan forgiveness .

We know that sometimes who they put in positions as representatives and administrators in the Department of Education are sometimes not the most knowledgeable , and so I just kind of hated just this reliance on the government to forgive my student loans and at the time public service loan forgiveness actually had .

You don't know if it's going to get forgiven at the end of 10 years Right Depending on who's in the government .

So I started paying a little bit extra when I was in residency and once I graduated from residency that's when I did a refinance . The economic conditions were different then , but I was able to refinance my student loans from a 6.8% interest rate to a 3.5% interest rate over a five-year term .

But I was like , okay , if I could pay this monthly fee and I'm maxing out a 401k and I'm still traveling and I got cash flow , let me just get this gone .

But at that time that was the one thing that I knew how to do and that was the one debt that I knew would be a guaranteed return on investment . So it wouldn't be a set amount every single month .

I didn't create a budget for the additional payments , but when I realized that all of my bills had been paid and I still had money to travel to go see my husband who was at Morehouse , and I had a little bit of money extra , then I would just throw the extra at the student loans .

You know , I'm going to max out my 401k . I'm going to . Where did you learn to do all of that ? Was that something that your parents instilled in you ? Was it podcasts ? Was it blogs Like ? Where did you learn all of that ?

After I graduated from medical school and I had my exit interview and started making money , I had this revelation that I was the only doctor in my family at the time and that I would have a huge responsibility of managing a large sum of money . And having to do that .

Well , because there were still people in my family who I desire to support , right , not only just financially by giving them money , but also helping them to facilitate better stewardship over their money . So at that time and I think this is still existing , but I don't listen to it as frequently it was marketplace money on NPR .

I was like an avid consumer of marketplace money on NPR and they just taught essentially some of the basics . I also read the White Coat Investor book from James Daly and I really appreciate the knowledge that he shares about money and how physicians can be good stewards and good managers of their money .

And then you know , reflecting on just my history , I am grown from Flint , michigan , of low means .

You know my mom's like don't say that , but essentially we were , like I did the retrospective , retroactive calculations of how much money my mother earned and how our household size , and I realized that we were actually living under the federal poverty line , for a good portion . They don't .

But you know , then , when I think about my mom made a lot out of what she had and she created these moments of joy out of little . So I didn't need to live in a nice area per se or live in like this building . I know some of my co-residents . They lived in a building with a gym and all of these like luxurious , luxurious amenities . I didn't do that .

I lived in a neighborhood that was safe . I shopped at Audis , I got all of my free meals through residency , I went to the gym that the residency paid for , that I got a discount for , and I lived pretty simply so that I could create cash flow that allowed me to achieve my goals .

I wake up , try to get to work , try to get there you know , be the best surgical resident I could be , you're staying there late , you know , you study at night and then you wake up and you rinse , wash and repeat and the last thing I had on my mind was just finances , right , because I literally was like OK , do I have enough to pay my mortgage ?

Do I have enough to pay my bills ? I wasn't thinking about saving , I just wanted to just get through residency . Because I just wanted to get through residency , and like I , just for me , I wish I was at your mindset , right .

So I guess the thing that I was , that I wanted to ask is like , how did you , how did you like not feel like you were drowning between trying to survive as a resident you know , being a new city and all those different things survive residency , get through , thrive , and then also , at the same time , have this like forward thinking plan that even the extra

bit that I have , I'm going to put towards this delayed gratification of paying off my debt . Talk to me about that . Like , how did you make that ? That decision Like this is where the money's going to go right , because that's no-transcript .

But just being able to manage the money my student loans and the money that I had coming in at medical school and developing a budget then helped me to master that skill . So when I got to residency I could build upon it .

I could now think about creating a debt strategy and understanding what an income driven repayment option is , and okay , if it's based upon my income . So what do I gotta do to lower my income , to lower my payments , if I'm seeking for forgiveness ?

It allowed me to capitalize and understand that , okay , I have these moments in which I'm cooking , I'm cleaning , I'm doing other things that I can build in some education here outside of medicine . And how can I do that ? By capitalizing on an audio version of learning material .

So I don't have to necessarily sit down and read , but I am still building this muscle and to understand that financial literacy has two components it has the acumen , so the understanding , the stuff that we read about in the books , but it also has the utilization of that information , and so I knew then that if I don't start to practice these small skills when

I become an attending and making a lot of money , then I'm more susceptible to making mistakes . So let me just practice at my lower threshold .

Some of you don't even know how to write a check . When , by the time you're becoming an attending like , how are you expected You're going to be more what's the word ? More gun shy , so to speak , and excuse the pun , but more shy to take action .

But I think a lot of us just feel like , when I talk to residents I recently gave a talk on financial wellness to African students Like there was more public health , medical students and some attending an African health conference and one person she's like I was talking to my friend who does finance and he told me that I should wait to start investing because

even if I can only invest like $100 , like that's not going to afford me anything , and I'm like it's not necessarily the amount that you're investing , it's the habit that you're building , Right . And so I think sometimes we often defer the education until we arrive to the moment , and then right , and then we feel like , oh well , I'm not an expert in this .

Then right , and then we feel like , oh well , I'm not an expert in this , so let me give this over to somebody else . So I wholeheartedly agree , I think , financial education we all have to make money , but no one is going to care more about the money that you make than you do . So , why not start caring today ?

You know , and I it's funny because you know I work with pre-meds all the time and even the skill of answering questions for the MCAT , for example . You know a lot of them wait until well , no , I got .

I have to do all of the review first before I look at even one question and I'm like , let me ask you a question If you or a loved one of yours was pregnant . And then they came to me and I'm like , well , I read a lot about C-sections , I read a whole lot about it .

Okay , and I finished the last page about C-sections today , on the day that you are getting ready to have your baby , am I the person that you want to do in your C-section ?

When I was paying off my student loan debt , it was my debt , so I could do what I chose to do with my debt , and when I was paying it off , my husband was still in residency , you know , so he didn't afford anything to that debt payoff . Now , when he had his debt , there were . I was a little bit more advanced in now understanding .

Okay , what does it look like to refinance , right ? No , seriously , I had a little bit of experience behind me .

So she was like no , I got a plan that we could pay it off , maybe in three years , or even in what'd you say ? Three or one year ?

You know , what I learned from that experience is , when I refinanced my student loans , I went for a five year fixed . So I knew I had five years and that this was going to be the payment , and so I could budget around that , even if I paid extra on it as I did .

An arm instead , an adjusted rate agreement , I guess it's not a mortgage , but adjusted rate agreement and I did not like that personally . I don't know how you felt about it , but the interest rate just kept going up you know , that's the thing that scares me the most about it .

Now , when we did that , we actually had a bit of a different view on debt between he and I , because by that time Y'all had a fight , y'all had a fight . We did not have a fight because it was still his debt right .

I paid off my student loans so aggressively and I think that I had evolved a little bit in understanding how to leverage a lower interest rate and maybe do an interest rate arbitrage , put more money into the stock market to build our net worth faster than to pay down the debt aggressively .

But he still had the debt , it was in his name and it was his debt , so I'm a big debt free .

But there's a huge psychological component to money and I think if we're unable to reconcile those emotions , then we're going to lead down a path that's going to maybe lend itself to different results or at least it will help us to heal whatever emotional turmoil and dissonance that we're having internally . So I think that that's where we were .

I was debt free at that point . I had paid off my debt , so it wasn't my responsibility . This was his debt that he felt was his responsibility . But I'm like , if you can leverage and put this money in a stock market instead , then we can potentially grow our net worth faster and the numbers are gonna make sense .

But from a psychological and emotional perspective he's like no , but I still got this debt that I don't want to have .

I remember . Do you remember those months where there was literally like a 20K payment ?

So when you talk about that emotional component of like okay , this is what's in your bank account , and just being like yeah , nah , that's for Navient , and just push it right into the middle and it's just gone , it was so painful . But you know , when we saw the next month's calculation , and the interest like decreased so much because there was less principle .

That's what you know . The logical side is like OK , this is working .

I mean I think if he , while the arbitrage is real right , where you could certainly increase your net worth , you know , even faster , the reality is that in order to going back to , like , building up that muscle of you know , paying off or , excuse me , investing and doing all the other things that you , that you can do with your money , that emotional block is

then decreased . You know that emotional block just lowers and so now he might be so much more open to doing all of those things and taking those risks because he doesn't have the debt Sometimes this may be something that it just not for y'all .

Basically , what I'm trying to say is when you feel like you're the , you're the major breadwinner , sometimes you don't want to take chances and you're just like yo I gotta pay off this debt and I don't have time to put my money in the stock market . That would be great .

But if I lose my money , particularly if you don't have , um , if you're not really knowledgeable about the stock market and and you're just new to it , and you know , ok , like , look like me and you know , and you know I'm sure Dr Simon knows now , like you know the likelihood of you losing all your money if you do it the right way , it'd have to be the

zombie apocalypse Right Like that's not going to happen . But if you don't know that much about it , you're like yo , I ain dad did it this way . We kind of know that .

Hey , listen , if we end up having to take loans for any reason and it makes financial sense , then maybe we take more of a balanced approach and so forth , so I definitely understand his sentiments . I do have a question for you , though . In terms of paying off the debt right Once you became an attending , how did you do that Like ?

Can you walk us through that process of , like your income comes in and then how did you pay it off ? And how did you do ? How were you consistent . Yeah .

I went from . You know , under standard repayment would be 10 years or even think about income driven repayment right under 10 years technically , and now I've decreased that down to five years . So the first thing I did was I wanted to ensure that I could pay off this higher amount and do that consistently first , before I try to .

My plan was not to pay it off aggressively in two years and nine months . My plan was to pay it off in five years . So Under a new attending salary I'm still trying to manage stuff . I just moved in with my new husband . You know we're trying to figure out how to work things out . I basically just set it automatic .

I removed myself from the equation that payment . They got their payment every single month once the money hit the account .

I maxed out my 401k . I basically just put that on automatic , okay , and I still have money left over ? Okay , what else can I do ? And when we think about finances , money has been given this branding . That is very complicated . It's not that complicated , it's actually quite easy . Like if you could do medicine , you could do money .

And so I knew okay , money . The money equation in my mind is your income minus your expenses equals your opportunity . That opportunity was my ability to pay off my debt . And so how do I modify that equation ?

I could work more , do locums and moonlighting and all this extra to increase my income , or I could decrease my expenses , or I could rewrite the equation and I could say income minus your opportunities equal your expenses . So at this point , I was not up for working more , because I've always been an entrepreneur .

So I was working on a hair accessory in the background . That's a whole nother story . I was working on a hair accessory in the background , so I'm like I don't want to see no more patients . I'm not trying to work extra .

So how can I minimize my expenses and , to my husband's chagrin , like because I'm from Flint , because I grew up in simple means , I knew how to like make the most . So I essentially decreased our expenses , you know , and I lived very simply and I would unplug things like the microwave and the TVs .

Can I leverage other tools that are accessible so that I can minimize expenses ? So you know , at some point we got a credit card with points . We did not carry a balance on it , but we were able to leverage those points to travel , and so it was just kind of doing some of those things .

And then , once I mastered that and I saw that there was still additional cash flow , I would put that additional cash flow If I came into a windfall like a bonus . We would get , you know , our bonus every year . I knew that that was coming in October after everything was done . Okay , let me put the extra money towards the student allowance .

I think my husband's like , yeah , let's do this thing , but I'm not , I'm not ready for it yet because I still want to read a little bit more . I want to make sure that I can evaluate properties pretty quickly , understanding , you know , cash flow , the returns and all of that and I just haven't practiced that enough .

So it's a goal for this year and we're going to achieve it . I'm just not . You know the first quarter . I'm not ready yet .

Government wise , right , like I can use , you know , paying off a lower amount If I stay at a hospital , you know , for 10 years , or a nonprofit hospital for 10 years , you know I can use the additional monies you know to invest or do something else with it , right , which is what you're talking about and what you know we didn't do .

Or you know there's also the other message of just pay it off and get it done quickly because you don't know , we don't know if PSLF is still going to be here , we don't know if hospitals are going to be considered nonprofits anymore or anything like that .

What's your advice for folks listening right now , like the resident who's up and coming , getting ready to finish , or in attending ?

And so whenever we make money decisions , my first sometimes not as logical as people want to hear but my first recommendation is to turn internally , because we look towards external sources often for information . But you gotta figure out okay for you , what matters most to you Is forgiveness , the option that you want to pursue Like .

Does it sound okay for you to work at a federally qualified center of some sorts ? You know who has a 503c designation for 10 years ? How does that feel for you ? For me , I didn't want to be limited by that right .

If I wanted to go part-time and not meet the eligibility criteria , then I wanted to have the freedom to do that right Without somebody telling me that I had to go to work . I see so many of my female colleagues specifically who wants to cut down because now they have children but they have to go because they're under PSLF .

And if that is the case for you , then I say that forgiveness is likely a good option . You know , if you feel like you want to have freedom to do other things , to pursue other passions , then forgiveness is probably not the best option .

Then I think you have to just go introspectively to understand how do you feel when the locus of control is outside of yourself , when we see that things can change depending on the administration . How would that feel for you if you would have done all of this and at the end of it you still got to pay off your student loss ?

Right , and so for me because PSLF feels like 1% of people were getting their student loans forgiven . I'm like , nah , you know I got . I could do better than that , and so that was . That was my perspective . After you've gone introspective , then the next step is just getting an understanding of what your debt profile is .

I hate when people make decisions out of misinformation . There's no worse way to make a decision right . And so you want to understand what are your student loans ? Where are they ? Are they federal ? Are they private ? How much do you have ? What are the interest rates ? I got like a spreadsheet just make a spreadsheet . I got one that I give to my clients .

I'm happy to pass that along , but that's where you want to start at , because that's going to modify your moves of how you're doing things and then go on a few websites , get a calculator and see how much your monthly payments are going to be .

Another thing that I want to say is Sometimes we feel disempowered that we have to pay the amount that has dictated us . No , you don't .

If that's going for forgiveness and it's based on an income driven repayment option , understand what it looks like when you make more money . Understand what it might look like when you get married , like what is that going to happen to your income ? What is that going to happen to some of the other benefits that you might get as a married couple ?

But maybe you might want to file separately . But when you file separately , you lose some of those benefits , right ?

Most people haven't had to pay on their student loans , but at some point those payments are going to be due and you want to make sure that you can afford that payment and you want to understand how that payment is going to be based so that you can actually make it , because you don't want to put the loans into deferment , right and then , or forbearance , and

now you have , you know , accumulation of interest and you don't want to miss payments and then it reflects poorly on your credit profile . So making the payment is going to be to your advantage from a financial perspective of lowering the amount that you have to pay and , just overall , making sure that you're financially well .

And if you wait to figure out how much the payment is going to be on the day that that payment is due , it's less likely that you don't have the money in the bank or you're going to feel good about the payment Right .

I can say that looking at the amount of money that you have to put out also , I think , has that psychological component right , Meaning , you know , if you , especially as a resident right , as a resident you're not making the big bucks , You're making something but you're not making the big bucks .

But if you have a thousand dollar or eight hundred dollar payment , right , Something that , honestly , most of us who have gone from medical school to residency , we've never had an $800 payment each month for something like that in and of itself , Right .

So when you talk about introspective , going in and thinking about I have to pay $800 a month for this , to pay $800 a month for this For me , I have to tell you , when I was in residency , that was a big blow to my mind . You know , like $800 a month , Like what in the world ?

I've never had to make $800 , you know , an $800 payment per month for something . So when you are talking about being introspective , I think that there's that component of recognizing that that seems like a lot of money to you .

You know what I mean , and it's like you got to get over that hump of recognizing that you're just going to have to pay a whole lot of money . But I will

tell you , once we started paying off our loan debt and me just mentioned that we would put $20,000 in at any given point in time to the loans . Right , that actually didn't bother me , and the reason it didn't bother me is because I had a North Star . I had a plan . I knew when it was going to end In residency .

I felt like it was never going to end , but I didn't have a plan .

So if you are , you know , in a position to the listeners , if you're in a position right now where you feel like , man , but this loan payment is so much , I'm telling you , if you have a plan , if you have a goal and you say I'm going to pay it off in this much amount of time , that amount of money will not hurt as much anymore because you know ,

eventually it's going to end .

It's the folks who are graduating with 400 yeah , 500 that I'm really worried about , because I get it , yo , I get it like I get that you don't want to be at a place for 10 years , but yo , 400k as a single person if you're single on your own in terms of paying off debt .

It's a lot to think about .

But the long and the short of it is like I agree , renee , like you just need a plan , you need to create a plan , whatever the plan might be forgiveness or paying it off and then you need to be able to afford your payments .

You need to understand how those payments are actually going to be calculated and what other life events will influence the amount that you have to pay and I think . oftentimes we wait until the payment is due to figure all that stuff out . But you're going to be much farther ahead if you start to conceptualize this stuff now . Yeah , the government is crazy .

They put my payments on pause . Thank you , jesus . I ain't got nothing to pay right now , but let me actually do a little bit of understanding of what does this income driven repayment option mean ? So , if it's based upon my adjustable growth , adjusted gross income , how do I adjust my gross income to ?

be the lowest amount , so I pay the least amount over time . You know if that means that now , instead of buying shoes or going on the trip , or whatever the case may be contributing to those things that don't bring you joy .

It is prudent for everybody to understand what they want to do , understand how they want to do it and what the payments are based on , and then also give yourself some grace and compassion that if you want to change the plan , you can change the plan . I was doing PSLF and then I paid my student home and both ways work , you know Right .

So listen , dr work you know Right .

Actually , tell them what it's about .

Md because we are MDs but also the MD stands for money decisions and we really come from a position of vulnerability and also expertise because we want people to know it's not all about getting things right .

I think many times that pigeonholed us into seeking a financial advisor or paralyzes us from even getting started because we don't want to make mistakes advisor , or paralyzes us from even getting started because we don't want to make mistakes .

So on the podcast we share our money mistakes and to say like , look , we I don't know how many years in the game and we've been doing this and yeah , I got charged a fee because you know I didn't put something on automatic or I did this .

So we talk about our lives . You'll hear me talk about my kids on the podcast . My husband Alicia's travels as a single woman , but then we also get nitty gritty and talk about backdoor Roths . And you know I'm going to be sharing how we did this strategic tax move to save about 23 grand on our taxes this year , you know , without using extra money .

About 23 grand on our taxes this year , you know , without using extra money . And so we allow for people to get a glimpse into our lives and our pocketbooks , as my grandmother would say . So that's Wealth Minded MD Podcast . We're on Apple Podcasts , we're on Spotify . You can find us on Instagram as well .

So that's why we haven't done like those type of episodes in a while which , now that you mentioned it , we need to go back to that but like we started off doing whole life , even though it didn't work for us , you know we started off with that and then we got rid of it and then we paid off our debt and then you know we made other mistakes along the

route , you know , along the , you know our pathway and stuff , and I think it's , you know , just as as nice as it is to share your wins and to share how glamorous your life is , and so forth . I think it's equally important to share the mistakes so other people can be like ah , I see what that person did .

Let me not do that immediately residency and so forth . Let me pick the right spouse , let me talk to my spouse the right way . You know , like let me not be on the lam with the irs . You know I'm saying like these are just things . Am I telling your story ? These are just things that you know , the more you share .