re: Is it worth the loans to become a doctor? Would it be wise to consider the military?

I did this with the Army.

It was great not to have debt.

Pay was lower.

I actually ended up staying in and retired.

It’s not for everybody, but it was good for me.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you take 4 years of what your salary would be and add in that some places pay sign on bonus and loan forgiveness, the Army is not as good a deal as it seems when you are young and poor. You can attempt to minimize by living frugally while in med school. You could also work a little for spending cash on the weekend and summer. The kids I know with 250k are the ones who paid themselves a little extra for nicer housing and allowance. They knew they would be making it later and pay it back then rather than live poor.
My wife is a doc and she worked a waitress shift on Friday or Sat night that probably took 60k off her student loans. Her first job paid her $1200 a month her last year in residency as part a signing bonus that she sent straight to loan payments. She is very frugal and got out a lot closer to 150k than 200k.

I find it weird that people say only do it because you want to and not because of money.

$250K in loans can be paid back within 5yrs easy on a $200/yr income.

The problem with doctors is a lot of them are divorced with a couple kids. That can eat into the take home pay fast.

Also you have to factor in opportunity cost. If your current salary is near 100K, then giving that up would be difficult. But at a current salary of $60K/yr at 25yrs old, med school would be the better choice financially without question.

It's not about that. It's about putting up with people that are constantly at their worst (sick), putting up with people who have zero medical background telling you how to do your job (admin), and then having the patience to not be a dick when a nurse, pharmacist, whatever calls you with a problem in spite of the aforementioned.

You have to want to heal people. If you don't, you'll let the stuff I mentioned get to you and people will get hurt or die.

If you have a bad day at the office as a wall street banker, you lose money. If you have a bad day at the hospital, someone dies

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Lol, it is. Its stupid, and frankly ignorant.

There's simply no other career tracks that almost guarantee $250k by age 35. Some guarantee twice that. Even for the best and the brightest, and furthermore all across the country. Making $250k on wall street working 80 hour weeks is not the same as making $250k in Louisiana either.

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It is a perfectly reasonable statement, I once managed entry level engineers, there was a huge difference between the work of a entry level engineer who had wanted to be a engineer since they were 12 years old and one that looked at what majors paid the most and picked that. The later almost always have the single focus of getting out of engineering as fast as possible by moving to management. Probably not many options for getting away from patient care once you are a physician.

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Lol, it is. Its stupid, and frankly ignorant.

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Well by all means let me further play to your stereotype then.

With the understanding generalizations are far from all encompassing, medical school is generally extremely competitive. Candidates who apply are top of class in coursework, grades, and focus. Candidates who are actually accepted are the best of those.

Those "best" are then thrown into competition with one another for top residency positions. Only cream of the cream of those "best" attain them. Those are the positions which will lead to the income paths you've cited.

In terms of your "almost guarantee $250k by age 35," most of those in afore noted high end tracks won't even graduate from residency/fellowship until they are about 35.

Regardless, if you don't suppose those same very bright, very focused, high achievers could put in the same 100hr/wk efforts for 8-12yrs and often double their medical equivalent income in alternative careers, you are simply not in touch with reality.

The problem from that point forward is medicine generally demands hands on. It demands that throughout one's career. It is not like working Wall Street, or Corporations where as pay escalates so too do the number of people assisting with work-product, as well as the number of folks who can be tasked at your direction with labor intensive, hands on challenges.

A successful ortho doc is going to take call and pull extensive hours as a 60y/o, just as do his 35y/o new colleagues. Otherwise his pay falls off.

Now that is not to say there are not business models which can enhance remuneration in medicine, but it is to say those opportunities have largely evaporated secondary to obamacare.

It is to say that in the current paradigm, physicians increasingly find themselves to be salaried employees, and paid roughly half of what they are actually earning in fees. The other half being skimmed as profit by the employer.

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I also don't understand why doctor's believe they should be paid hassle free?

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There is enough you don't understand in this discussion without beginning from misconception. Holding that somehow "doctor's believe they should be paid hassle free" is a bizarre assertion, at best.

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Again, this is no woe-is-me story. It is simply a picture of what the OP likely faces going forward. It's not remotely a description of my own career, or of what I faced starting out. If I could step back in years and be given the my original environment, I would choose the identical path, and I'd do it with no reservation whatsoever. For me, it's been extremely rewarding both professionally and financially. But that was then. This is now.

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physicians increasingly find themselves to be salaried employees, and paid roughly half of what they are actually earning in fees. The other half being skimmed as profit by the employer.

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This is exactly what I’m hearing from physician friends as well. The big corporations are employing doctors and the ‘doctor salaries’ we used to hear about are becoming rarer and rarer.

Ortho + fellow= 32
GI = 3+3=32
Cards= 3+3 (maybe +1) = 32 or 33
Pediatric surgery is a long one = 5 + 2 (i believe), but many people do a year or two of research just to get the fellowship so pushing 35 for that one
Urology + robotics = 5 +1 =32


I agree that some long training pathways exist, but these are the minority of the graduating class (unless you are a nontraditional).

A lot of people that go into something like ER can get out at 29 making a nice salary