My wife (31F) and I (30M) are both physicians. I finished in 2020 and have 259k in loans left to repay. I am currently making around 400k/year. My wife just finished her residency with an additional 250k in loans and has basically decided that she can't do it anymore. Medicine has made her nothing but miserable and has wrecked her mental health. It finally got to the point where we had to decide if it was worth it for her to continue, and we ultimately decided her happiness was worth more. And yes we are addressing her mental health issues with therapy, professional help, etc. It does go beyond career and work, she has had issues with depression throughout life but it became severe throughout residency.
Obviously, I'm supporting her in this decision but I would be lying if I said it hasn't brought me an insane amount of financial anxiety. She has 250k in loans as well and was on track to be an ER physician, same as I, where she would also be able to make around 400k a year. The plan was always for us to both work full time to start off so we could pay it off asap, and then cut back a bit but work aggressively towards retirement and enjoy a semi early retirement, without having to bust our asses along the way.
Now, I'm trying to figure out how our financial goals will be impacted by this change of plans. On one hand, I know that my own salary is sufficient to live a comfortable life style and I am not trying to sound ungrateful for my own income. But on the other hand, when I try to break it down into what this will actually change it really starts to seem less optimistic. From the way I see it:
-
we are losing massive income potential obviously from wife's earnings over life
-
we are losing potential investment earnings with wife's theoretical earnings
-
losing wife's 401k retirement plan and company match
-
we are losing the potential of my income that could have gone towards investments which will now have to first go towards paying off her loans too for many years
-
I'm losing the value of time with how much longer I'll have to work now.
When I think of it like this, it seems like this will delay our ability to retire by at least 10 years if not more. Is that an accurate estimate?
I know i could be in worse situations, but honestly it sucks. I basically gave up my college years and my 20s and worked my ass off to get to this point, as did my wife. Now we're in our 30s and the light at the end of the tunnel was supposed to be that our earnings would offset some of that missed opportunity and will also allow a very comfortable lifestyle and will allow us to retire early. Kinda feels like I got to this point now just to keep working harder with no real payoff in the foreseeable future. ER work is not easy, and I already am starting to feel burnt out. Doing 10 to 15 more years than I planned of this seems horrendous if I'm being honest.
Strategies I have thought of so far include:
-paying bare minimum on our loans and waiting 25 years to be forgiven
-wife has a private disability policy she started in residency which covers psychiatric illness. She has not been formally diagnosed but we're both doctors and know 100% that she is depressed. IIRC though, she would only be eligible for 2 years of disability from something like this though
-have her declare bankruptcy individually and try to get some loans forgiven. Her credit score doesn't really matter as much since I pay for everything and everything is in my name. But I also don't know if a judge would consider her situation as a hardship considering my income.
-pumping 100k into the next meme crypto coin and getting lucky. Jk. Kinda.
Obviously her working a different job would be an obvious alternative solution, and we haven't written it off yet but long story short answer to that is - it's hard at the moment for her to envision doing anything at all due to the severe depression she's in. She has zero career oriented passion or desires. Hoping therapy will help.
Any advice would be appreciated and thanks in advance.
Submitted November 06, 2021 at 08:14AM by Fessywessy1 https://ift.tt/3GWeniB
