(Ep. 105) Why The First Degree to Cost $700,000 is Worth It | Student Loan Debt Doesn't Matter?

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Student Loan Planner Podcast. This could be described as the Travis Rantz episode. Every now and then, I like to look at the total cost of going to school for a variety of different kinds of programs. I actually have this list and I haven't really ever completed it because it just seems like they create new dental schools, PT programs, med schools. It seems like they create them like they create new reality television shows on Netflix with people, you know, trying to compete with The Bachelor, right? So it seems like that's the level of which I have to try to keep up with this stuff. But some of the big programs, I do like to go in and update the projected cost that I think people will leave with with total debt at graduation. Here's just one thing that you probably have experienced. You went to your school and they probably gave you a cost of attendance. Maybe they didn't. Maybe they didn't even give you anything, which is honestly not too surprising if they did that. But let's just say that they did give you a cost of attendance, showing you, you know, how much you would have in debt, showing you the, you know, the tuition every year. Maybe even they had some loan fees on there as well. So one thing that these cost of attendance estimates are notorious about is they're just very inaccurate. Just to give you an example, if you have a school, let's say it's a law school that charges $50,000 a year for school and the tuition and educational fees are listed at $50,000 for year one, $50,000 for year two, and $50,000 for year three. But then you go back to the estimate two years before that, and then you find that the cost estimate is $45,000 for year one, $45,000 for year two, $45,000 for year three. Then you go back two years before that and you find that the cost estimate is $40,000 for year one, $40,000 for year two, and $40,000 for year three. In other words, every single school in America for the most part, every graduate program that I've seen, or at least the vast majority of them, engages in tuition inflation. And the hilarious thing is they know they're gonna do this, they know it's going to happen, if you look at their stated cost of attendance going back 10 to 20 years, you're gonna see tuition inflation every single year, yet most of these cost of attendance estimates do not have that expected cost increase on the amount of the cost of the degree program that you will have to borrow to finance your education. And in many cases, this is a 3 to 5% kind of yearly increase, so it's very annoying, but it's not devastating compared to the numbers you were given. Now in some cases they are devastating. I believe that the University of Washington Dental School had the cost of attendance, I think double or triple over a relatively short amount of time, basically because one of the people running the school, this is just my opinion, what I've heard based off of the rumors and everything, but basically they tried to open a couple branch locations and did some investments in the dental school that went horribly wrong, and they had tons of losses, and basically they just used the students to just make up for the school's losses by jacking up tuition. And so I think some of those students were hit with like 10% increases in tuition and then some, which is just, I mean that's just unreal, right? So you have tuition inflation, and this is a universal thing that schools do. So that's never disclosed to you, that they're going to increase the cost. Now I will give Midwestern Dental School a lot of credit about disclosure, right? Some schools, like the schools I really really dislike, are the ones that just really engage in my view of just outright misrepresentation and maybe even, you could call it deception, to get people to sign up so they can hit their enrollment quotas and targets and everything. But some schools like Midwestern Dental are just very straightforward and tell you that they plan to raise your tuition 5% a year based off of historical numbers. Like if you look at the disclosure for the cost of attendance for Midwestern Dental School, they literally list it in there that we will probably raise your tuition 5% a year. That's not good, but at least they tell you, right? At least you can point to something where it's like really clear and when you get mad about it you're like, oh shoot, I guess I did agree to this, right? I've heard from other schools. One time I got this really angry comment from an official at one of the Midwestern Veterinary Schools, I won't mention the name, but I put in my projected cost estimate for the program out there and he was like, it doesn't cost $300,000 to go to vet school. I counseled someone just last week that graduated with only $100,000 of debt. My response to this man was, does the school provide the rich uncle or is the person supposed to bring that with them? The only reason why this person had only $100,000 of debt from this vet school program is because they either had family assistance or they had some sort of savings that they used to cover a big portion of the cost. In other words, there's no physical way this person got out of this vet school program with so little debt because of the benevolence of the school. And a lot of times schools will use very misleading statistics to try to basically make you think it's not a big deal what they're charging you. For example, one school in particular, NYU Dental School, I've received probably more complaints about than any other program. Partly I think this is because it's a large school. They have a lot of people in the chairs, so you would expect larger numbers of complaints for larger numbers of students. And then also I think it's one of the most expensive programs in the country. And so I think people have said things like, you know, one admissions person apparently told someone that the average repayment period for their program is only about seven years. In other words, the average student pays off their debt in seven years. So if that's true, which I don't think it is, I think it's probably a lie, but if that statement was true, then you're talking about someone paying off an average of, if you look up the data on NYU, I think it's around $350,000 is the stated public average debt, but that's from the class of like 2016, 2017, if you look up the college scorecard data. So the, you know, the amount people are graduating with today is probably much higher than the publicly available statistics. Even if you go off of their number to pay a debt off like that over seven years, you'd have to be paying like 80, $90,000 a year towards your debt. That's the entire take-home pay of an associate dentist. 100% of your take-home pay as an associate dentist would have to go into paying back your debt. Either they mean some people pay back their debt in seven years. Maybe the people who had family assistance or got a Air Force scholarship or something like that, or they're just maybe taking an average of all the different people, the people who have zero debt and the people who have more. So maybe that's the way they're getting to that number. Or I guess theoretically this student could have been not being accurate. Maybe the student's exaggerating. I guess that's a possibility. Or the administration official that told the student that number is just totally lying through their teeth and doing whatever it takes to try to keep their job and hit their expansion numbers and get bonuses and keep their, you know, 500,000 to a million dollar a year position. That's the other option. These schools, I think a lot of the schools are going to put their best foot forward in terms of what they want to disclose. You know, if you're selling a house, I mean a lot of people might choose to not disclose as much about the condition of a house or they might leave it up to the person buying the house to figure that out and then may the borrower beware, right? Or may the buyer beware. That's kind of a well-established concept in terms of making financial transactions, right? You offer no warranty or make no promise that something is of a specific condition that, you know, you might expect it to be in, right? So I think a lot of schools just try to comply with the rules but also try to paint a rosy picture and definitely don't go out of their way to make sure that you're getting the full story. So if you think about the cost of education. So I mentioned expected tuition inflation. So what else do schools not really like to disclose? So the other thing they don't disclose is the amount of accrued interest that you're going to have at graduation. And this is really quite substantial. So right now we have zero interest thanks to the payment and interest freeze around during the COVID forbearance. But normally you have interest accrue while you're in graduate school. If you're an undergrad and you get subsidized staffer loans, interest does not accrue while you're in school. However, that's not the case for graduate school. All interest accrues while you're enrolled in graduate school. So the way the interest accrues is basically a simple rate of interest. So it's not as bad as it could be, but it's still substantial. For example, let's say that you borrow $100,000 for medical, law school, dental school, something like that. And then you have 6% interest. That's your average interest rate on the whole thing. So that's $6,000 of interest for that year. And say you're enrolled in a program for four years and I'm oversimplifying here, but basically what happens is you have that $100,000 you borrowed tax on $6,000 of interest charges in year one, $6,000 in year two, $6,000 in year three, and $6,000 in year four. So that $100,000 actually costs you additional $24,000 for four years. That's tacked onto your balance that you find out about when you graduate. The final thing to mention is origination fees. This is something that is kind of not that big of a deal compared to accrued interest or tuition inflation, but it's still a problem because when you take out a federal student loan, if you take out a Stafford loan, you get charged 1% upfront, and that gets baked into your loan. It's kind of, you could call it basically getting financed into your loan really. Now, Grad Plus loans, which is everything you borrow over the maximum of about $40,000 a year, everything else has to come from Grad Plus. $40,000 is the maximum for Stafford for medical fields. The amount's lower, around $20,000 annually for non-medical fields. If you borrow Grad Plus loans, the origination fee is going to be more like 4.25% approximately. That's a lot. If you borrow $100,000, let's say that most of it's with Grad Plus, so let's just say that the average origination fee you're paying is around 3%. Then that 3% origination fee means an extra $3,000 per year of extra financing fees on top of the accrued interest, on top of the tuition and inflation, on top of everything combined. You really have to stack all of these expenses. Now, the main thing that I wanted to talk about today, does a degree make sense when it costs $700,000? That's my question that I'd like to pose to you today. What degree in America costs $700,000? What a statement. First of all, let me just say that this podcast is my opinion and this is my own personal beliefs, so I just want to protect myself in saying that. The numbers that we have are projected as well, which means that they potentially could be subject to error or different student budgets, etc. Here's what I wanted to tell you. This $700,000 degree is a dentist degree, a dental degree, a DDS degree, for four years at New York University. NYU Dental School, by our estimation, is the first program in America, first school in America, to offer a degree whose cost is over $700,000 if you finance it completely yourself and do not receive any assistance whatsoever. Let me explain to you how I arrived at those numbers. The first is if you go to NYU's site, you can see that their total educational expense is listed on the site. The first year, it's $99,562, and then for the second, third, and fourth year, it's about $98,600. I'm not making these numbers up. These are literally the costs that NYU lists on its website. For example, they list tuition at $85,288, and they list fees of about $3,000 a year. They list instrument costs is about $6,300 a year. Health insurance is about $4,000 a year. Someone on a Facebook group that I posted this estimate on said, well, you don't have to do health insurance. You can stay on your parents' plan until you're 26. I thought, wow, where does NYU Dental send the check to this guy? It's like, yeah, you're right. Yes, you're correct that you don't have to accept the school's health insurance if you want to waive that cost, but you do have to pretty much go for all the costs. If you think about some of the instrument costs, I've asked a couple NYU dentists that have graduated from there once they're free and clear and own that DDS degree, and NYU can't take it back or get them in trouble. They've said things like, my box for holding my dental tools, they charged me hundreds of dollars for it. This guy's like, I do a lot of fishing. There's really no difference between the box that I use for fishing and put my fishing equipment in that costs $20 from Bass Pro Shops versus the one that they charged me $500 for, $200 for, whatever it is, that I put my dental equipment in. I've heard variations of that from a lot of different dental schools, not just NYU. For example, I think someone mentioned that someone was forced to buy their textbooks on a CD or something like that for thousands of dollars, and there was no other option except for just to basically pay it. Quite interesting stuff. Now, in terms of the total educational expense, so it's basically $98,000, $99,000 per year. Now, if you literally go back two years before, what you can do is you can take this page, this URL where NYU lists its total expense, and you can put it into something called the Wayback Machine. So this is a really great tool. I highly recommend it if you're trying to find out what a website used to have on the page back in the past. So what they do is this website takes screenshots basically of websites that were kind of stored historically so that you can basically pull that up and look at what the content of the site said back in time, which is really useful for reasons I'll explain here in a second. Anyways, if you go back in time a couple years, the total cost of the education was like $95,000, which is really quite interesting, right? And then you go back a couple more years, the cost was $90,000. And so, in other words, you have consistent increase in the cost of attendance with tuition inflation, and that's pretty much guaranteed to happen because it's happened every single year. So it's not going out on a limb to say that those educational expenses are going to increase the more you stay in school. If you want to get a degree, you're going to have to pay increased tuition for these numbers. That tuition inflation, we're kind of expecting that to be anywhere from $3,000 to $7,000 per year in total increased costs, both living expenses and the educational expense. So that probably means that the cost is $99,500 today, probably next year it'll be $104,000, right? The following year it'll be $108,000, then it'll be $112,000. That's kind of how this stuff tends to work. And that's just the educational expense, the direct educational expense. That's not the living expenses, that's not the financing expenses. So let's talk about those now. Obviously, I'm talking about a specific dental school, but this actually, this stuff really does relate to every single graduate school program. This is why you ended up graduating with so much more debt than you thought you were going to have, because of the tyranny of all of these expenses all added in and compounded together. So the living expenses. The school used to put this on their site. They used to have, a couple years ago, they listed an estimated living expense of about $37,000 per year. So for example, in the 2016 to 2017 year, basically about four years ago, they actually listed, NYU did, the total educational expense at $86,000. So today, it's at $99,500. So that's just exactly demonstrating my point. Massive increase in the cost of attendance, even while the person would be enrolled in school, it went from $86,000 to $98,000 over the course of only a couple years. Now the estimated living expense, this is interesting because this is what the school stated on its website. So back in 2017, the school was estimating that room and board would be about $27,000 in the first year. And then they estimated about $33,000 for the following year. So what's interesting is schools do this, and I just think it's just so ridiculous. So why would you estimate $27,000, then $33,000, $33,000, and then $30,000 for four years worth of rental expenses? The reason is because they basically tell you that the first year is a 10-month program, the second and third years are 12-month programs, and then the fourth year is an 11-month program. And so then what they do is they only list the cost of what it costs to rent an apartment for 10 months instead of 12. So I would like you to find me a rental unit that you can rent for 10 months a year instead of 12. Please go find one. I would love to see it. Maybe in New York City you can today because of just how bad the rental situation is there, but it's like really ridiculous. Like this is little stuff, you know? This is not like massive dishonesty, but it is like very misleading, right? Like these are all the little things that schools do to make the cost of your education look less than it actually is. And then when you add it all up, you're like, oh my gosh, how did I get this high? How did it get this bad? Think about the cost of living in New York City. It's gone up and up and up. Now maybe it's gone down a little bit with the rental costs, okay? But what do you think about $30,000 of expenses for rent and food in New York City? That's pretty much poverty-level living in New York City. Could you do it for less than that? Sure. You could cook your own meals, you could live in an apartment in the Bronx with a bunch of roommates, or even, you know, heck, I mean, I visited a friend once that was living in like a unit that had like six or seven people in it in Manhattan. I think each one of them was paying like $1,300 a month because they turned one of the living rooms into a bedroom or something. So it is possible to cut your rental expense lower than what schools estimate, but it's also possible to go significantly above what a school estimates, particularly if you were married or had kids or something, or even just, you know, didn't want to live with roommates, right? Which is a legitimate decision that people make for various reasons. Then that $30,000 estimate for living expenses could be way too low as well. Today, the total cost, it's estimated, you know, about, they're saying probably about $35,000 for rent, about $4,000 for personal expenses. Obviously you have to buy toothpaste, or maybe you don't have to buy toothpaste in dental school, I guess. Maybe that's free at least. But, you know, you have to pay for parking tickets, insurance costs, any kind of random clubs you want to go to, or maybe you want to go out and take dance classes or something, right? Just exercise programs. Maybe you want to do SoulCycle, right? Those are just some various examples of expenses. Transportation, they estimated a couple thousand dollars a year. I mean, honestly, if you fly a couple times, that could be bursting that amount, right? And then what's crazy is the school only estimates $200 for loan fees. So that's just ridiculous, like totally freaking ridiculous. I guess they have people in the financial aid office there that are just total incompetents that don't know how to use multiplication that we learned in the seventh grade. I mean, maybe that's too harsh, but you literally only have to take 1% of all plus 4.25% of all the grad plus amount for loan fees to get an estimate. And they said that the loan fees subject to change per federal regulations. That's what they put in the asterisks. And then I think since that date where they published it, they just pulled it from the whole website. I mean, if you're not going to have any regulation of schools, if the government is going to talk all the time about canceling student debt and not talking about how NYU, a not-for-profit school supposedly is charging people $700,000 for a dental school education. I mean, you need to talk about both of those issues, but this is just disastrous, right? Like honestly, I feel like Gordon Gekko and the Wall Street CEOs back in 2008 kind of get put to shame sometimes by higher education administration officials, really. I mean, it's just that bad now. Anyways, that's just the evidence again of schools that are trying to hide small things that together add up to big problems for your finances. The other thing is we didn't talk about accrued interest. So remember that accrued interest is something that is additive and starts from day one when you borrow the money. So if you are taking that money out for year one, that's going to have four years worth of accrued interest growth. And then year two, three, four, year four at least would have one year of accrued interest growth by the time you graduate. And this is simplified a little bit, but you get the idea. And then of course, as we mentioned, add on about three or $4,000 per year of loan fees, right? So if you look at the total cost, the total cost, if you sum up all four years now for the class of 2024 at NYU dental school, who has to borrow the entire thing, right? Has to borrow the entire thing, that total summed cost sums up to $705,977. That's the projected cost that we arrive at when we do the math, do the projections, model out the cost of actually going to that school and getting the program completed. Now here's the crazy thing. If you went to undergrad, that's in addition to what you have for undergrad. And if you took out the maximum Stafford loans for undergrad, you probably have around $30,000 in debt on top of that. If you had to take out maybe some loans for parent plus loans or private loans, then you might have maybe a total, let's say maybe 50,000 from undergrad if you're lucky, right? So that's a total, add that 50K on top of that. So now you're talking like 750K or so just to finish and graduate dental school by going this route. And if you want to become a specialist, right? If you go to a orthodontics program where you have to borrow to fund a residency, then virtually every single person that goes to a specialty program, residency program in the dental world that went to an expensive school, and this is probably true for any expensive school, really. So Roseman, USC, Pacific, Midwestern, AT Still, NYU, those are just some of the ones off the top of my head. If you look at any of those high cost dental schools and then throw in a specialty residency after that, pretty much the typical debt that people will have starting in 2024 is over a million dollars. Okay? I think that talking about canceling student debt is an important debate. I think there's a lot of good arguments, really in my view, on both sides as to why you would do it or not do it. And that's really for voters and politicians to decide how to do that, right? And so that's a really legitimate discussion. But one of my concerns is that if I'm a cynical leader of a higher education lobbying group, I will pump up the discussion of canceling student debt to the loudest decibel level that I can possibly get it at because I do not want Washington leaders knowing that I am charging people almost three quarters of a million dollars to become prey for a corporate dental group and to feel like I have no options in life once I've graduated except to follow this very strict path or else my finances are totally wrecked. We know that high student debt levels, even if you get a plan from student loan planner cause, well, at least a lot of people say that it's a lot better after getting a plan from us, but the debt levels, one of the things that causes so many people to reach out to us is because it causes lots of anxiety and fear and guilt and shame and depression and worry and nausea and fear for relationships, fear for the future, am I ever going to be okay? So I do have some piece of good news about this. The piece of good news is that there's a reason why NYU and expensive dental schools, expensive law schools, medical schools, PT, Cairo, PA, pharmacy, there's a reason why all these programs cost so much money and that's because NYU received over 3,000 applications for about 375 seats last year. Now maybe they're goosing those numbers a little bit with people applying to a lot of dental schools to try to get in somewhere. So maybe they're yield protecting, right? They're rejecting a lot of people to make the acceptance rate look really good. But let's say that those numbers are really legit, like there's a legit 10% acceptance rate. Why can they do it? It's because they can. And why do people sign up for this? People would not sign up for expensive graduate school programs if they heard stories in the New York Times about supposedly wealthy dentists or wealthy lawyers or wealthy physicians being homeless on the street because student loan collectors are ruining their lives with taking 100% of their salaries. You wouldn't go to get a graduate degree if that was the case. So why is a $700,000 degree actually worth it? Now this is going to be interesting because this is actually where I would wholeheartedly agree with an administrator at NYU. Getting an NYU dental degree is worth it. Now I want to caveat that. It's only worth it if your whole spectrum of options is become a dentist or not become a dentist and do something that's much lower paying. If we're talking go be a dentist versus going into tech or finance or something, maybe that's a different discussion. But I'm talking about somebody that could just be a hygienist and have no debt versus becoming a dentist at NYU and having $700,000 of student loans. The $700,000 case student loan case and becoming a dentist at NYU is actually the better deal. And why is that? It's because I'm going to pay the same 10% of my income if I go to NYU and spend $700,000 for dental school or if I go to UAB and spend $200,000. My payment is going to be pretty much exactly the same if I pay 10% of my income. So there's no difference in what the total cost actually means for my life except for the fact that forgiven student loan debt is taxable income for now, but politicians like President-elect Joe Biden and others including Republicans in the Senate have stated their desire is to cancel the tax consequences of forgiven student loan debt. And they'll probably eventually do that simply because it will be very impossible to actually collect on that money. And because when this problem happens, the people it's going to be happening to are the most highly educated voters that will be older voters that will be pillars of their community, employers that will have lots of influence over local elections because they treat everybody in town. That's something that's just really evident to me is that the most powerful voting blocs get what they want. Why do we spend $7 on senior citizens for every $1 we spend on children at the federal government level? Seven times as much money on people at the end of their lives instead of at the beginning of their lives when the return on investment would presumably be 70 years, right? Instead of say 10. So why do we have that big disproportionate split on benefits for like social security, Medicare versus early childhood education and parental paid family leave and those kinds of things? Why does that ratio exist? It's because Nobody wants to piss off or scare seniors at the political level, right? In the same way, that's one real reason why I think that you're not going to see the tax being collected on forgiven student loan debt when it eventually does hit simply because do you want to make the 55-year-old dentist that employs 20 people in your local congressional district really pissed off? Do you want to be that person? I don't want to. If I'm a politician looking out for my own skin, honestly, I get all these calls from lawyers and doctors and dentists and PAs and nurse practitioners in my district that all vote and they tell me that they got this huge tax bill from the IRS and that they need it fixed or else they're going to lose their house in their retirement and they're going to vote against me for the rest of my career. I'm going to be really responsive to that. But guess what? Those phone calls are not happening right now because your tax bill from the IRS that gives you the 1099-C, they haven't given you that form yet. They haven't told you that you owe them $200,000 for your education and taxes yet. And people have a lot better things to do with their time than call and complain to congressional officials about a bill they're going to owe in 20 years. That's not when people make the call, right? Procrastination. People make the phone call when the bill's due today. Those phone calls are not going to happen until the earliest in 2031, probably really more like 2033. The reason for that is IBR came about in 2009. 25 years after that's 2034. And then pay as you earn kind of really got going around 2013. Add 20 years to that, that's 2033. So those phone calls are not going to start happening until the early 2030s begging for forgiveness of canceled taxes or, you know, canceling taxes on student loan debt. And when that does happen, the person who went to NYU that has the 700k debt that's become 1.5 million that's forgiven who potentially would owe $500,000 in taxes or more on their debt, they're probably not going to end up having to pay that. They're probably going to have to pay literally nothing. And that means the 10% payments of their income that they had to pay on their student loans was the exact same if they had gone to NYU or if they went to the in-state school in Georgia. And the thing is, is sometimes I make kind of a bad joke. It's not really a good joke because it's not really that funny. It's a little sad. But it's kind of like, well, a lot of times the biggest mistake people make when you're going to an expensive school is not running up the tab even more. Because at the end of the day, it's going to be the same expense. And, you know, if you're going to spend an extra $1,000 in school, you're going to have to pay 40% of that in 20 years. Well, the present value of that is the equivalent of paying like 15 cents on a dollar in today's dollars. So if I could get $1,000 and enjoy my life a little bit more now and have it cost me 15 cents, I mean, that's like getting lifestyle at 85% off. The real real has got nothing on that, right? That luxury resale consignment shop. I've been getting a lot of their ads lately. I don't know how, but that's not a paid ad, by the way. I just, you know, just trying to make a joke. So I just think about this and it's just kind of mind blowing that like, probably what somebody should do logically, if you go to NYU dental school is really live it up, you know, join the premium versions of all the dating services, I guess, in New York, if you're single to try to meet the best partner for you, go out with your friends, pay for people's meals so you can get gifts, I guess, from them. You know, just basically take out the absolute maximum if you're going to NYU, because there's no incentive not to. And if you're a dental school, they've looked at these numbers and everything. Their leaders get paid hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to be very sophisticated and understand these rules very carefully and very strategically. And they know that they don't get rewarded if they give you a total cost of education of 500,000 versus 700,000. There's virtually no reward. And why would they care if their applicant to seat ratio is 10 to 1? Now, in some professions, you're seeing declining ratios. You're starting to see in some fields, like pharmacy, where the applicant to seat ratio is basically 1 to 1. They get exactly the number of applications almost for the number of seats available. It's really getting quite bad in some fields. But maybe that turns. I mean, the main reason I would argue that that was happening in pharmacy, and when it happened in the law school market a couple years before that, the reason it happened was not because of the cost of education. It happened because of the job market. The job market for pharmacy and law lawyers degraded some, and it was harder to get a job and harder to get a good high-paying job in those fields. And so smart people looked at that and basically substituted other programs. They went to other programs to spend their money and their time and learn skills, right? So really what you see with these schools is the thing that causes the demand for them to drop is really almost never the cost, because the cost is totally, it's basically the same regardless of how much you borrow, right? So the thing that really influences it is what kind of earnings could you get? So to kind of circle back, if you come out of dental school, you'll make $120,000 as an associate somewhere, working at some big corporate dental group. You know that's pretty guaranteed, and the unemployment rate for dentists is virtually nil. So you're going to lose 10% of your income, worst case scenario, you'll probably lose 5% to 10% of your income if you want to save for that tax bomb. So let's say you want to be responsible. You'll probably have to put aside $500 to $1,500 a month into a brokerage account to cover your tax bomb amount that you're expected to owe. So that works out usually to 5% to 10% of your income in addition to the 10% of your income you're doing towards your loans that you have to do. Now, that's a total of 15% to 20% of your income. And that 15% to 20% of your income that you're having to set aside to cover student loans, that's going to be the case regardless if you go to chiropractic school, or dental school, or medical school, or law school, or whatever. Let me ask you this, if you could be a dentist losing 20% of your income, so $120,000 minus 20%, or you could be a chiropractor making $50,000 minus 20% of that, which one would you rather have? Obviously you'd rather be a dentist. Medical school, maybe it's a little bit different calculation. You know, maybe there's more upside for you in owning your own business, and then maybe that could be more lucrative for you being a dentist. You don't have to do the residency program like you do in medical school as a dentist, so maybe you could argue that you start earning money sooner and maybe get a payoff sooner because of that. In general, what you should be caring about is as to is this degree decision a good deal or not, first of all decide do I want to be a professional with a specialized skill set which kind of narrows the things that I might do, and a lot of people want that because it's safety and it's security and it's a guaranteed standard of living at a minimum level, right? You know that a dentist is never going to get denied a car loan. It's not never going to get denied, you know, a mortgage at some level, right? You know you're going to get access to a decent quality of living even if it's on credit because people love lending to professionals, and so you have this minimum standard of living and again it comes back to it doesn't matter that the debt is $700,000. That's not really what you owe. You owe a 20% tax to the government, worst case over 20 years, and if you have no tax bomb then you have a 10% tax owed to the government for 20 years, and if you account for careful tax planning you can reduce that IBR or pay-as-you-wear number lower which is a lot of what we do, right? And then you can maybe pay 8% of your income for 20 years, and then if you account for the deduction that's 150% of your family size poverty line level then maybe you're only paying 6 or 7% of your income for 20 years, and then if you know about community property rules and filing taxes, married filing separately, and the double debt loophole for spouses that both have loans, and all these other loopholes like saving for retirement, maximizing your 401k, setting up a self-employed retirement plan, maybe even setting up a defined benefit plan or owning your own practice to do accelerated depreciation, maybe write off business interest and write off equipment that you might purchase for your business, and still grow your total wealth, right? These are all really intelligent ways to grow wealth that you can use to save money on taxes, but that lowered AGI gets you lower student loan payments, so the thing is you can really get that tax, because that's what student loans are when it's more than a certain level that you really can't pay back without really hurting yourself financially, when it becomes that level of debt it really becomes a tax and not a debt, and a tax is only as bad as the lack of financial planning you've done on figuring out how to minimize that, or the lack thereof, right? So the tax can be really bad if you are on the IBR plan and you've done no planning and you filed jointly and you don't really know what you're doing, you know, it could be kind of bad, right? Like that could be a really high percentage of your income. Alternatively, if you're really careful, you do a lot of planning, you figure out things, you figure out how to pay as little as possible, then this quote-unquote tax can really be pretty minimal, and so if you could get really careful planning and you were able to knock down the functional cost of your dental school down to like 5% of your income, because you've maximized all the loopholes, well shoot, 5% of your income, I mean, that's pretty much nothing. I mean, that's just very, very little, and again, the only mistake you made was instead of $700,000, well shoot, could you have lived in a bigger apartment in a nicer part of town spending a little bit more money and going out a little bit more with friends in your 20s and have it not really make that much of an impact on your life financially? So that's the sad conclusion that I have for you in today's episode is that the first school to ever have a cost of a degree more than $700,000 is actually worth it compared to, you know, a lot of the other opportunities available. That's why people will not stop applying to graduate schools in general until the job markets become much worse than the available alternatives. In other words, when becoming a dentist pays $60,000 instead of $120,000 after four years of dental school compared to earning $50,000 or $60,000 with $20,000 or $30,000 of student loan debt straight out of undergraduate. Until that happens, people are going to continue applying in big, big numbers to dental school and to graduate school in general. Thank you so much for listening to today's show. Know that our availability gets a little bit shorter during the holiday season, so feel free to book a plan if you need a plan for your student loan so that your student debt can be figured out one way or the other. Go to studentloanplanner.com help and get a plan from one of our team of consultants. I'm excited to help you minimize the burden of student debt, both in a literal physical sense of having a plan, but also reducing the psychological toll that this debt takes. So don't let debt control your life. It's never nearly as bad as you think it is. That's why owing $700,000 doesn't even phase me when a client says that that's what they owe for their dental degree. If somebody can owe $700,000 for a degree and have that be a good decision, whatever mess you feel like you might've gotten yourself into is not nearly as bad as you think it is. And in fact, it can still lead you to having a wildly successful financial life. So I hope you enjoyed today's show. I hope you had a good Thanksgiving and I hope you're getting excited about the holidays. And I guess we're all just going to have to be watching Netflix reruns because maybe a lot of people are not going to get to go anywhere. Thank you so much. If you're a healthcare professional, my wife is potentially being asked to do a certain basically helping with surge cases of COVID treating patients. So thank you to anyone who's regularly exposed in the line of duty. Thank you so much for what you do. And hopefully we've got a vaccine coming. We've got probably a lot of exciting stuff to talk about in 2021. And boy, oh boy, am I looking forward to the new year, right? You probably are too. So thank you so much and have a wonderful rest of your week.