Throwaway for PF reasons...
Hello all PF,
I'll be getting married this summer, just a couple of weeks before my soon-to-be-wife will be starting her first year of medical school. I'm looking for advice on how to handle her loans for tuition and living expenses, and how to transition from having two incomes to just having one.
We currently take home about $7.5k/month together and have about $4.5k in living expenses. This has been great to save cash for the wedding, but once the wedding is done and paid for, we'll only have one income to build that level of savings back up. My take home (while still getting 401k match) is $4.6k but that means we'll save minimially each month, if at all on just my income. That's a hard pill to swallow since we've been able to save over $100k in retirement and cash in the past 4 years, only to have it level out for the entirety of medical school.
But is the math really that simple? It's not worth it to take out any extra student loans for living expenses if I can cover all of our expenses on one income, right? How do other couples go through medical school without having one of them with enough income to support both fully? Should (can?) she apply for an extra $5-$10k/year in living expenses just in case something happens to me or my job, and I can't guarantee my current level of income for 4 years? I have a very stable job, but it's been comforting knowing I could leave if I needed to...
I'm finding this quite tough to handle since I've had a sizable buffer each month "just in case" anything happened, both unexpected and voluntary (sister needs to stay at our place for a week? sure! 3 weddings in one month? $200 gifts for all! unexpected travel for family reasons? $1500 flights no problem! want to go on a long-weekend vacation? let's make it 5 days instead!) To now knowing that any unexpected costs will put us in the negative for the month
Am I just being overly-privileged with my current lifestyle, and need to accept that we need to really look at cutting costs for 4+ years, since it's now "us" instead of "me and you"? All this seemed so simple before we were married, since she would obviously take out as much loans as possible to cover all expenses in case something happened to us. Should I be just planning on supporting the both of us and minimizing expenses as much as possible, just so we can minimize the amount of loans taken out? We have a 6-month emergency fund, ~60k in retirement, and 40k in other savings, about 15k of which is to be spent on the wedding. It's hard to think that those numbers might grow very little in the next 4 years.
Thank you for the help; I'd appreciate any constructive criticism if necessary to tell me I'm being overly anxious. I'm just trying to wrap my head around the changes that will be happening in 2018.
Submitted January 19, 2018 at 10:32AM by pfta1000 http://ift.tt/2FVp5q5
