(Ep. 109) Best Student Loan Repayment Strategy Tips by Occupation | Best Repayment Tips

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Student Loan Planner Podcast. I hope that as 2020 is wrapping up, we can look at everything that's happened. There's been a lot of really painful things, but there's been some things to be really grateful for and happy for. From a personal level, 2020 will always be the year that my daughter was born in, so I'm certainly really grateful for that. For student loan things to be grateful for, obviously no one was expecting they were going to suspend payments and interest for nine months out of this year. Hopefully that's something to be thankful for. If you ended up refinancing because you didn't know that they were going to do this, like no one really knew, then at least we have low interest rates that you can lock in for the long term instead of having to pay 10 to 15% interest rates like our parents had to pay on mortgages in the 80s. If you look at it, I hope that in your own life, as we just reflect on this really, really difficult year, obviously if you've lost a loved one or something, you've been affected personally by this pandemic, my thoughts, prayers are with you, but let's look forward to the future. Let's think about the time when this is no longer something that we have to think about constantly, something when the search volume in Google for how many cases are there in X, Y, Z state, there's almost zero volume at all for those search terms. I can't wait for that to happen. 2021, vaccine, here we come, but until then, let's talk about I wanted to do this episode actually for a while now. I've been really interested in doing a free wheeling episode on tips by occupation for just overall student loan strategy. Student Loan Planner sees a lot of different occupations that are affected by the student loan crisis. One thing that's interesting is a lot of people, I think, they're aware of what's going on in their own professions, but they're not aware of what's going on overall in the whole United States when it comes to the student loan crisis, and that's something that we're uniquely able to provide some perspective on because we have so many clients in all different professions that require huge amounts of student debt. We've advised around 1.2 billion now for about 5,000 people, and that's just the people we've made formal plans for. That's not counting the hundreds of thousands of emails that we get and comments on the blog and things like that that give us even more of a perspective on what's going on out there. That's one reason when people ask me about things like the tax bomb, it's like, well, guess what? This is not going to be just a problem for veterinarians. This is going to be a problem for veterinarians, dentists, chiropractors, lawyers, physicians, fill in the blank profession that requires or encourages a graduate school degree. This is going to be a problem for millions and millions of people, and that's the kind of thing that we like to think about when we're trying to predict the future of policy. So all of these professions, I figured that what I would do is talk to all the professions that we've had at least five clients for. I'm probably missing a couple just because this is just kind of I just pulled the data from what our consultants entered their category as. Sometimes categories, people might enter something slightly differently. We might miss a couple professions that we've had at least five clients for. So I thought I would just really quickly give you some thought on the professions that we've helped and that'll give you some perspective because you'll see a little bit about what's going on in other fields that are not your own, which is probably going to make you feel a little bit better, too, I think, just to find out what other people are going through. And then I'll also just read the people that we've had fewer than five clients for. I just want to read some of those names of those occupations so that you really get a sort of a view of how intense this crisis really is. You're going to be shocked. Some of the occupational names that have had six figures of student loans that are going to come up. So let's first start with I'm going to kind of go in descending order of the number of clients that we've had. So the first, most popular occupation of student loan planner clients is physicians. And it's not by a long shot either. It's just a bare plurality because dentists, veterinarians and lawyers, chiropractors are very close behind. But physicians in particular, why do physicians tend to talk to us a lot? Well, obviously, the typical debt for medical school is two hundred to five hundred thousand dollars, depending on where you go. And physicians deal with a lot of different kind of situations. So PSLF is obviously a really big, big one that would lead somebody to reach out for help more often than not. But you also have to figure in, you know, refinancing medical school loans if you're going in the private sector. The one thing that I would say about physicians is a lot of physicians could save a lot of money just by simply understanding how to file taxes separately, how to choose the right repayment plan for PSLF, how to make sure that their loans are set up the right way for PSLF. And then the ones who are going into primary care or private practice jobs that don't pay a lot more than what they owe in debt. A lot of physicians really need to know a lot more about forgiveness in the private sector. It's really stunning to me how a lot of the physician sort of attitudes about student loan debt, it's kind of like paid off or go for PSLF and nobody really talks about that third way. And that's going to be more and more popular as physician incomes for specialties that are not orthopedic surgery, urology, neurosurgery, right? Like the ones that are not the top, top paying jobs, gastroenterology, right? Professions that are outside of those that don't qualify for PSLF, there's going to be a lot more talk about forgiveness in the private sector for those kind of things with the trend of med school costs. The number two is dentists. And I promise I'll go faster here when we get down the list because I'm just wanting to talk a little bit more about these, say, top five most common professions that we work with, just because obviously there's a lot more of you listening in those professions, so I figured I'd spend a little bit more time talking about those. Dentists are really interesting from a cost perspective because we see people that might go to an in-state school in Texas that might owe $150,000, and then we see people who go to a school like NYU that come out with $700,000. So dentistry is this interesting thing where the in-state schools have more limited capacity because they receive some assistance from state legislatures, and so they kind of cap the number of in-state people they'll take. And then the people who charge $700,000 or $600,000, or I guess technically I should say the tuition for the most expensive schools is like $100,000 a year, those places tend to have a lot more seats available because it's sort of designed as a moneymaker for the institution. So that's what we typically see dentists kind of disproportionately having these larger debts because there's a lot more seats available at these private schools and out-of-state programs than compared to the in-state programs, which are just extremely competitive because the costs are significantly lower. The kind of thing that's kind of interesting about dentists, in terms of income, most dentists come out making $110,000, $150,000 as an associate, and dentists can do a lot of different things. Some of them will go work at federally qualifying health centers just because they want to get a little extra loan forgiveness. I can't tell you how many times I've had dentists go work at those places and find out they didn't need to go work in those places because they should have just gone for general forgiveness anyway, and it didn't really help them that much. But a lot of dentists also tend to be more small business owner types. In the physician world, the medical industry is so consolidated and so dominated by big healthcare systems now just because we've moved towards a lot more gigantic bureaucracy for charging for medical services, right? So it's just really challenging to handle that as a smaller group. Whereas dentists are still kind of this small business kind of ethos where you have a lot of private practice owners. And so that means that dentists have the opportunity to hide more of their income than other people might. So you have the ability to open up profit-sharing plans, 401k plans, depreciate assets, own a building and write that off. There's just a lot more available to a dentist to reduce their taxable income. And the debts are as high as physicians in some cases higher just because I think med schools tend to be sort of prestige kind of colleges where they tend to get more support from donors, from state legislators, etc. And dental schools really get none of that love. So I think that's probably one reason why we see the cost for dentists being higher. And because so few have that access to PSLF eligible jobs, it's usually a discussion of are you really going to make a ton of money as an owner and not have the ability to hide a ton of it? Or are you going to need to go for the forgiveness in the private sector world? And another thing that's interesting with dentists is you have residency programs with dentistry where you have to a lot of times pay money to do residencies. That's one crazy thing that physicians will be shocked by is the government basically through the Medicare program pays for I think 100,000 or so positions for residents in America, which that's why you earn 50 to 60,000 because that the pay is kind of set with that program. And you don't have to pay extra money for that training, whereas dentists don't receive that program and that funding from Medicare. And so a lot of dentists for if you're going to go to a specialty program, you have to pay tuition or fees to participate in that program. So that's one reason why dental specialists tend to have the highest debt of all. And anyways, the student loan programs are not set up at all for dental residency programs either because they don't really know if you're working or still a student. They just don't really know how to describe it. So it's really kind of interesting. So number three is veterinarians. So I'll say that the vast majority of veterinarians trend towards doing loan forgiveness, a 20 year type loan forgiveness under pay as you earn. So veterinarians, DVM degree, you're looking at anywhere from 150 to 400,000. Veterinarian degrees tend to be a little bit cheaper than dental degrees just because the income potential is a little bit lower. So I think that they recognize that and try to charge a little less than the dental schools do. But by and large, the veterinarian degrees are really expensive. And plus your income is going to be a lot more limited simply because to be in a place where you're going to make a ton of money, you also kind of have to be in a place with a lot of wealth and a culture of spending a lot of money on pets. I think that that's just maybe a reason why in like rural areas, I'll just give you kind of an anecdotal story. We had a veterinarian that was working in the Southeast U.S. and she was pretty depressed. And I was like, why are you depressed? And she says, well, I have all these patients come in all the time or all these customers come in all the time, bring their dogs in. And because they backed over their leg with a truck and they don't have $500 for me to do this simple surgery to fix their legs. So I have to put them down because it's 50 or $100. And it's just really depressing. And I'm like, wow. And then you hear stories about vets in like San Francisco and New York City where people would not necessarily have a problem with spending $5,000 on a surgery to save their dog's life. And it's just kind of an interesting dynamic where veterinarians don't quite have that same income potential as dentists do. So it just makes them a lot more likely to go for forgiveness as a profession overall. Also with residency programs in veterinary medicine, while I don't think really many of them charge tuition or anything, it's still kind of a really intense life where you're making 30 or $40,000 and just working your tail off and to be a specialist. So it's just real, real fascinating sort of professions there. Those are all medical professions. So I'll talk about one that's not lawyers. That's our number four client occupation. So if we think about tips for lawyers, you tend to be kind of a big law, kind of a situation where you're making a ton of money in a big city, working crazy hours, or something like more of a corporate type law field where maybe you are in-house or you are making good money, but less money than big law. And then you also have the smaller firms, you're making 60 to 80,000 in some suburbs somewhere doing family law. And also the public servants that are making less than that being public defenders or assistant DAs or something like that. So you just certainly have that dynamic of, it's kind of similar to physicians where there's a lot of paths to PSLF, except in the lawyer world, there's very few paths to PSLF that involve a really high income. So that's one thing about PSLF is it is such a generous program to the physicians out there, because if you're a lawyer and you're taking a job at a city government or something to do public defense work, you're going to make almost no money. Whereas if you take a job at a major healthcare system that happens to be nonprofit, you can make almost as much money in some cases as private practice, but just happen to get paid on your W-2 with a not-for-profit and be eligible for loan forgiveness. So it is really interesting how I feel like PSLF kind of works sort of as intended in the law world. And maybe in the physician world, I feel like there's going to be some major labor market problems with the PSLF program that that's going to cause with conflicting with like for-profit hospitals. They're going to finally realize when people start getting PSLF en masse that, oh, shoot, this makes us extremely uncompetitive in trying to hire people. So we're going to start opposing this program or at least try to get our physicians included. So with lawyers, it's a little different because healthcare professionals often make a ton of money for being in a out-of-the-way place, right? Healthcare professionals do. With lawyers, you kind of get paid a lot of money for being in a big town that's at a big firm. So it's a little different dynamic. And there's also a lot of people in law that are in a big law firm and making a lot of money that don't want to be there and are working crazy hours and are trying to look for an exit. So what I find is a lot more lawyers than think that they should need to go for loan forgiveness because a lot of them don't realize that, okay, if you make three years of super high money, that doesn't mean you can't stop that, that kind of gravy train and just do an income-driven plan and use all that savings that you had to sock away money for retirement and savings and doing your next venture, whatever that is. It seems like lawyers might be a little bit less entrepreneurial than some of the professions out there, but that does exist out there. It's just not super common compared to say dentistry where there's just a very easy, straightforward path to being a solo doc practice owner. So that's kind of interesting with lawyers. Another one, our fifth kind of most popular is chiropractors. So chiropractors, wow, chiropractors really have it tough. Let me just give you some stories here. If I had a nickel for every time someone told me that their chiropractic college told them they were going to make six figures and have an easy doctor lifestyle, then I would be super rich because that's basically what all of these colleges like to do. In my opinion, the most deceptive, aggressive advertising tends to be done by chiropractic colleges too. Just one example, a student at a chiropractic college told me once that the college would pay for students to come out and tour the campus, pay for their flight, their hotel, their meals, give them a per diem. And why would you do that? Well, what you need to do is bring people into your conversion funnel, right? And so if you have a product that's extremely profitable and probably difficult to convince people to sign up for, what do you do? You try to bring more people into your conversion funnel so you can convert X percent of them and make a lot of money. And so if you're charging somebody $250,000 for a chiropractic degree that on average pays someone 50,000, what you need to do is make wild over-exaggerated statements and you need to do what it takes to bring people over to your campus to check out the campus so you can try to convince them in person. So I thought that's kind of a practice that should probably be banned unless this college is going to give you some sort of full scholarship. That would be a little different if they were paying for your visit because they were recruiting you like an athlete that's getting a scholarship. But that's not obviously what happens with chiropractic. So we've had successful chiropractors, but I'll say out of the 233 chiropractic clients that we've had, I probably can count maybe 10 that have been making a six-figure income. Now obviously we have a little bit of a selection bias problem because people that have really high debt that maybe don't have their finances 100% under control making a ton of money are more likely to talk to a student loan planner than people that might be really successful as chiropractors. But I will say that I've seen plenty of extremely high-income, high-net-worth people actually in other professions that have contacted us that have had a lot of student loan debt that are just trying to figure out the most efficient way to handle it. So I do feel comfortable saying that, that as a chiropractor, the good news is if you enjoy the work, you can do it and you can make similar income after paying for your student loans with 10% of your income plus paying for the tax bomb in a brokerage account. You can make similar income to maybe what a teacher would make. And the thing is you also have some upside there where you could make maybe as much as two times what a teacher would make or if the most successful ones could make three times that. But certainly you don't have that easy path to making $200,000 a year like dentists and physicians do. So that's kind of an interesting one where I would say 95% of chiropractors probably go for loan forgiveness. So that's my top five. Again, spent more time on those because those are the most highest volume of our clients. But a lot of this list that I'm about to read you has at least 50 clients in that category that have sought our services. So I think this is really interesting hopefully for you because you're getting to hear a little bit about what it's like in other professions and just what else is out there and what other people kind of are going through. So I'm going to go a little bit faster, try to spend a little bit less time per occupation in this next list. Let's talk about pharmacists. That's number six. So pharmacists anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000 of debt, typically $100,000 income. Obviously a lot of the people doing retail refinance, a lot of the people doing hospital jobs go for PSLF. You're not going to get a ton of income growth for pharmacists. It's pretty stable from what I can tell. So it seems like that occupation is doing pretty well right now with the pandemic that I'm curious long-term how that's going to hold up. Pharmacists I would say definitely pay back their loans less so than private practice physicians, for example. Teachers, you might say, wow, teachers? You've had a bunch of six-figure debt teachers contact you? And I'll say yes. A lot of the master's degrees for teachers in particular are where people rack up a ton of debt, particularly if they did a master's where they were not working at the same time. And why is that? Because teachers might borrow $20,000, $25,000 a year for living expenses, plus pay $20,000 for the master's tuition, add those up together and then defer the loans a little bit and all of a sudden you're at $100,000. And teachers obviously can make $35,000 to $50,000 a year, $60,000 a year, it just depends on the state and the locality. But that can be pretty debilitating debt. And I would say that teachers also tend to not be the best at personal finances as a general rule. Again, don't offend anybody, I'm talking about an overall average for the category. But teachers got into teaching, you could argue, because they don't care as much about money because they could have done a lot of different things that would have paid them more. So it makes sense that people that are not as worried about making a high income would sort into teaching and then they would therefore not be maybe as aware of maximizing the present value savings on loan forgiveness programs. So a lot of teachers could benefit from going for PSLF more efficiently. You gotta watch out as a teacher for the teacher loan forgiveness program because it's named after teachers and then it's actually a terrible loan forgiveness program, it's pretty lousy for people that don't have, for people that have more than $20,000 of debt, it's pretty useless. So you really gotta be careful as a teacher that you use the PSLF program. Next is psychologists, which is not the same thing as a psychiatrist, right? Psychologists get this ID degree or a PhD and a psychologist really kind of ranges in how they're treated state by state. So California psychologists for us seem to be treated a lot better income-wise and payment-wise. Other states don't recognize psychologists as much from a reimbursement perspective and treating them as very highly educated professionals. It's interesting to see the state by state difference. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, the average, I think that a lot of people will sometimes be contracted through groups. Like for example, we've seen a lot of people contracted through prisons or hospitals or something to provide services where they're not directly employed by PSLF employers. Psychologists are going for loan forgiveness generally via the 20-year route. Next is orthodontists. You might think, oh wow, they make so much money. They're definitely going to pay back their debt. And in fact, I would wager that fewer orthodontists probably pay back their debt than pharmacists, or at least fewer of them should pay back the debt compared to pharmacists. The reason why is there are a lot of pharmacists out there that owe $100,000 and make $100,000. Orthodontists, there are a lot of them out there that make $200,000 to $400,000. But I would say if you went to any orthodontic program that charges tuition, you probably have $500,000 to $800,000 in debt. So the way orthodontics works is you do four years of dental school, you pay for dental school, say that's $400,000. And then you need to go to a residency program. Well, if you can get into one that you don't have to pay a bunch of tuition for, you're lucky, but those are the hardest ones to get into. So if you still want to be an orthodontist, you might go to one that charges tuition. Well, guess what? A lot of these high cost dental schools have programs that charge you an arm and a leg. So say you go to NYU and pay $300,000 for your orthodontics residency program. Yes, residency, they charge you money to become a specialist. And so then you come out with all this debt. The good news is that you can certainly pay it off with massive income. We have had clients contact us that have made over $800,000 a year within a few years after finishing training. I mean, you talk about the biggest debts and the biggest incomes, orthodontists are candidates for that. Nurses, RNs, nurses, a lot of times you'll have a master's or something like that. There's all these masters for accelerated paths into nursing. They often cost like $100,000 or so. And that's really where we see the big debts for nurses because you would think like, well, why would you have a bunch of debt when you could go to undergrad program for that? And it's just because there's a lot of these programs that definitely charge for the opportunity to become a nurse. The good news is a lot of nurses who'd be PSLF eligible, probably more nurses are PSLF eligible even than physicians because they're never really paid through a for-profit group like some physician groups are if you do work at a hospital. But that's the interesting thing with nurses is just watch out for those accelerated programs unless you're going to do PSLF. Now, PAs, physician assistants, one little note for you, never say physician's assistant. That's definitely a big no-no. You do not want to say that because that implies you're the sort of assistant of the physician, right? Physician's assistant is possessive kind of with the apostrophe. So it's physician assistant. So that's just a fun fact for cocktail parties if you ever run into a PA. So a PA profile, I would say often pays back their debt. Sometimes might be eligible for PSLF, but a lot of PAs end up in private practice settings, outpatient settings, and don't have necessarily as much debt because the length of training is just a little bit shorter than some of the other medical professions. So that's why the debt to income ratio is a little better. And plus you start earning income a lot sooner than some other medical fields. Physical therapists, huge school growth, massive oversupply because of this huge school growth. And honestly, like if you had to say what are the greediest schools out there, I think it'd be a battle between probably physical therapy colleges, dental schools, and maybe pharmacy schools. I would say it's kind of a slug match between those. The reason is you had this vision 2020 statement for physical therapy. And what people need to know about that is basically it required everybody to move from masters to doctoral degrees. The problem is when they switch to doctoral degrees, there was no real change in reimbursement rates or incomes really. And so all the schools did was just force everybody to go to school one extra year, one to more, maybe even extra years to get an extra chunk of tuition revenue without really any benefit to the PTs themselves. So kind of messed up. There are people that certainly make it a lot of money to pay back their loans, but not like a lot, a lot. We're talking like low six figures. So the people who really crush it, most people make like 60 to 80 K from our experience. And that means most people are going for a loan forgiveness type strategy. Although there are a lot of low cost schools, particularly in like Texas and places like that, where you can go for really cheap and come out owing a modest amount. Next is optometrists, OD degrees. The income can really range a lot. You can do 80 to 150 is probably what we've seen at the top of my head, 267,000 average debt. From what we've seen, the degree of training can kind of range a little bit, I think three, four years off the top of my head. But it's interesting with optometrists because that debt's really exploded. And a lot of older optometrists will say, well, of course I pay back my debt because again, making a lot of money. But then you've had a lot of the, I think consolidation in the industry as well. And you have a lot more power by the big players in the optometrist world where they can sort of negotiate more heavily and have more control, I think over salaries they pay to optometrists. So I think that that's turned the optometry profession a little bit more into a loan forgiveness kind of a world where you're doing the 20 year loan forgiveness kind of path and fewer opportunities to do PSLF eligible jobs in some other professions. Next is social work. Social workers often have to get an MSW, Masters of Social Work. That can often cost on average for our clients, $125,000 is the average debt of our social worker clients. It's been about three dozen of them that we've helped. Usually they're doing PSLF. Sometimes they'll do part-time work. And in that case, you want to make sure that you're eligible for the 20 year loan forgiveness. I guess the good news is that a lot of social workers qualify for PSLF, but again, like other professions that people don't go into for the money oftentimes means that they don't get the kind of personal finance guidance that social workers deserve because it's just the reality of working in the financial profession. A lot of people want to maximize the value of their hourly wage and think about it like this. If I spend an hour with a social worker and help them with their finances or an hour with a physician and help them with their finances, if I'm going to have a recurring engagement for financial planning, who can pay me more? Obviously the physician every time, there's a lot of financial planners I know that charge five to 10,000 a year flat financial planning fees to physician families. Social workers could never afford that. And so you're going to get all that really high level advice for financial stuff to physicians and not to the social workers who need it too. So I'm glad that one thing I'm proud of with our student loan planner service is that we're able to provide an accessible, affordable solution to help people figure out what to do with their loans that probably everyone can afford. It's kind of like paying for a flight, 395 to 595. So that's one thing I'm happy for. We'd love to serve more social workers. And I know it's still a big investment for that group, but it's pretty awesome to see a social worker realize they can get PS left and optimized for that and not have to be so stressed. Keeping down the list, just got a, Ooh, let's see a few more here. Hope you're enjoying this getting to see a little bit of a different professions out there, pediatric dentists. So we've had two dozen pediatric dentist clients. And a lot of times they'll do hospital residency. So pediatric dentists is like another dental specialty thing that you have to go for training after dental school for. And a lot of times their residencies might be paid and they don't have to pay as much fees for those. I think incomes have been more like 20 to 50% more than general dentists. Pediatric dentists are less likely to have monster debt compared to some other dental specialties, just because a lot of them get these residency programs that are subsidized by hospital systems or something like that. Next is professors, two dozen professor clients. Sometimes PhDs don't get funded and then you have to take out a lot of debt. A lot of professors will work at colleges would be eligible for PSLF. Next is DNPs, nurse practitioners. So you've got to do three to four years of training, a little bit shorter than obviously medical school and for a lot of programs and you make money faster as well. And you can make six figures. Most nurse practitioners in our experience do make six figures right out of training. I think that a lot of them have that opportunity to do PSLF, but I would say the ones that are not doing PSLF, I would say the majority that are not doing PSLF of nurse practitioners are refinancing and paying it off. It's actually one of the best debt to income ratios of any graduate degree, one of the best ROIs of any graduate degree in terms of how fast that degree pays for itself. Next is endodontists. Endodontists do root canals. I think that endodontists are probably a little bit less than orthodontists in terms of the total debt that we've seen. I think that maybe there's some more two-year programs out there maybe for endo compared to maybe three-year programs for orthodontics. But a lot of times these folks, endodontists, will travel around different dental offices doing procedures. A lot of people make 1099 income, which gives a lot of opportunities to reduce your taxable income and go for loan forgiveness if you want. Sometimes endodontists have some weird problems for that you're getting paid a bunch of 1099 income. It can be a little more challenging to qualify for things like a student loan refinance or a mortgage. And so you know, a lot of times people might need to wait a year to have a 1099 sort of proof of income to use for a lot of those kind of things. Number, I don't know what number we're on, but now we're on acupuncturists. Acupuncturists go to schools, and this is what the name of the school is called, okay? The name of the schools, they're usually called Colleges of Oriental Medicine. Some go by the name College of Chinese Medicine. Acupuncturists tend to have, and then a lot of times you'll see these programs combined with naturopathic programs, but this is one of the worst debt incomes, period. It's very similar to chiropractic, except chiropractors are something that at least people will see it, and a lot of like, especially working class patients will say like, oh of course, like you're truck drivers of the world, right? They're gonna go to the chiropractor. Acupuncturists, that demand can be kind of a little bit more place by place, and I think there's a lot of maybe clustering effect too, where a lot of acupuncturists will set up shop where there's other acupuncturists, because maybe there's a lot more demand where people are setting up shop, I guess, and that results in a lot of competition in the areas that do have them, and drives down the incomes accordingly. So certainly a lot of these schools, I just have no idea why the Department of Education allowed these kind of institutions to take out graduate school level debt. This is something that should absolutely not cost $200,000 given the incomes that people have, and obviously very few PSLF eligible jobs out there to be had for acupuncturists. Architects, master's is what really stings here. 200k average debt that we've had for our architecture clients, most of all those folks went to master's programs, and it's just one of those things where becoming an architect is really competitive, you can do the undergrad path, but it's really, people would assume, oh you're an architect, you make a lot of money. Well, we see that it really takes a while to build up to that point where you're making a lot of money, and you kind of have to put in your dues along the way. Some architects end up going for the loan forgiveness route probably a lot, some go for the refinance route, especially the ones that just got by with just their undergraduate. Periodontist is next, 16 periodontist clients, 580,000 of average student loan debt. This is a dental specialty, you work on gum disease, implants, things like that. Less extreme debt than orthodontics perhaps, but in lower income as well, but it's kind of like an in-between in terms of you're going to make more than a general dentist, but you're going to have more debt. Speech language pathologists is next. Speech language pathologists also, they go by SLPs, which is kind of like student loan planner, SLP, right? So they have a special place in my heart. Fun fact, if you're still paying attention, because this is a long list, Cassie from The Bachelor was an SLP assistant, I think, a speech language pathology assistant. Fun fact, right? There you go, it's a little secret about me. My wife and I like watching The Bachelor sometimes. Sometimes, not all the time, don't worry, I'm not that extreme. But anyways, speech language pathologists have a similar profile to social workers. Slightly higher income, would probably do PSLF, I think some of them have a little bit more of a private kind of setup, but a hundred-something thousand is the typical debt we see for speech language pathologists. Continuing down the list, oral surgeons. Oral surgeons are one of the highest debt folks we work with, also one of the highest income. So you have four-year and six-year programs. Six-year is the one where you do a medical school degree, which is kind of interesting, and then two years of med school and four years of residency after dental school. So you really borrow a lot for that one. I'll say that the four-year programs, oral surgeons end up not necessarily owing a ton, because usually these residency programs for oral surgeons are paid. So I think that's why they owe a little bit less than orthodontists do, and they make similar amounts of money, if not more, than orthodontists do. So kind of an interesting one. Usually those folks end up refinancing because of that just dynamic of owing a little bit less than orthodontists do, but not all, for certainly not all, especially in big cities where they might make less money. Next is managers. Those are corporate folks, maybe managing like a Target, for example, and most of those folks are going to go for a refinance. If you are working in corporate America, you probably just need to pay back the debt, especially because more and more employers are coming out with programs that just generally make sense. Next is CRNAs, nurse anesthetists. We've had 15 CRNA clients, and you could say that nurse anesthetists, you could lump them in with nurse practitioners in terms of having good debt-to-income ratios, tending to need to refinance unless they're working at a hospital. Next is podiatrists. Foot doctor would be the way a casual person might refer to a podiatrist. Similar profile to optometrists in the sense that you would take the $80,000 to $150,000 that optometrists make, maybe add $20,000 to $30,000 on top of that, and then with podiatrists, you have to do a three-year residency is the big difference. I would say that most of those folks are going to go for a kind of a forgiveness kind of 20-year strategy, like a dentist or a veterinarian might, but certainly some can make a lot of money and go for a refinancing path. Mental health counselors, similar to social workers, right? Master's degree, PSLF, $130,000 is the average mental health counselor debt. So if you see a mental health counselor, tell them thank you, especially this year in 2020 with the pandemic, am I right? Next is engineers. Usually engineers are going to refinance. They like to pay back their debt unless they're working for the government. Pretty straightforward. We've got occupational therapists next, similar to PTs, except the occupational therapists have not yet been required to get doctoral degrees. So that's probably the big difference is just you haven't had to get a doctoral degree yet forced on you. So there's some folks out there that have a little lower debt, but similar earnings, 60, 70K. Marketing folks, people in marketing tend to refinance. That's just pretty straightforward. Next is retirees. So retirees, if you have a lot of student loan debt and you're a retiree, that's one of the things that we can really transform lives the most for because most people that have student loan debt that are retired don't necessarily have a ton of assets, which kind of makes sense because you would have paid your debt off if you had a ton of assets going into retirement because it can be really stressful. So what we like to do is see if someone is qualified for the die with your debt loophole, which sounds awful, but if you think about it, if I owed a million dollars and I had to make a payment plan on that for $500 a month, I'm never going to pay that off. So if I can just afford the $500 a month in perpetuity, then that's the same thing as me not having that debt and just having to deal with $500 a month payments, right? So that's similar to the way we think about it for retirees. If you're living on Social Security income, your income driven repayment amount should be close to nothing. And you can pay that for 20-25 years, then consolidate it again and reset the clock. So if you're 65, pay for 25 years, you're 90, consolidate, now you have to live to 115 before you actually have to pay the tax bomb. Retirees actually have a lot of opportunity to handle their debt without having to affect their lives. A few more for you and then I'll read the list of all the professions. Prosthodontist, another dental specialty program similar to periodontists. You train for a few years after dental school, you usually have to pay tuition. Better income than general dentists, probably similar amounts would go for forgiveness in refinancing as just a general dentist would. Real estate brokers, we've had several real estate brokers. I think maybe because people might get into debt from some other field and have debt from other things, but income can be really variable and in situations where your income is really variable, you want to be really rock solid with your finances before you consider refinancing. Last two that we've had at least five clients for, dental anesthesiologists. This is a brand new specialty in the dental world where you go usually pay tuition for the specialty program. There's not a lot of places that have it yet and they make very high income. Kind of maybe even go between different practices, kind of like the endodontics a little bit, like you might make a lot of 10 out of the nine contractor income. So it's a little bit of a weird animal, but it's a new specialty, a lot of debt. And then HR, a lot of people in HR get master's degrees and those have had about 136,000 in debt on average, probably are going to go for refinancing. So I wanted to kind of tell you some of those occupational tips for just what different kinds of folks that have used us, what the trends have been. But this is the list of the professions that we wrote down for people that used our services besides that. I'm just going to read the titles for this because it would be way too long to actually talk about all these folks. So here are professions that have ever used Student Loan Planner Services. And you'll be pretty shocked, I think, to give you perspective on what is out there in terms of how many people, how many different professions have six figures of student loan debt in some cases. So healthcare administrators, graphic designers, principals, auditors, business owners, chemists, office managers, designers, lecturers, electricians, research analysts, photographers, medical equipment techs, construction workers, air traffic controllers, fundraisers, systems analysts, data analysts, operations manager, corporate employee, research scientist, compliance analyst, paramedic, naturopathic doctors, regulatory affairs professional, UX designer, dental claims consultant, tech employee, museum conservator, business executive, writer, financial analyst, producer, artist, global health specialist, unemployed, cannerist, synagogue, that's an interesting one you wouldn't think of that would have six figures in debt, arts management, public policy, fellowship director, data manager, dental hygienist, 3D animator, dairy farmer, baker, a lot of six-figure debt bakers out there, petroleum engineer, caseworker, leasing agent, tech consultant, neuropsychologist, marriage counselor, and biochemist. So those are the 90 or so occupations that have had six figures of student loan debt that have engaged our services. I'm sure I've missed several, but let's kind of think about all these different professions, okay, just to put things in perspective. The good news is as we go into 2021, we have so much to be thankful for, like I said. One of those things to be thankful for is you are not alone in this struggle of student loan debt and having it not wreck your life. So to the extent that you have a lot of debt, you also have a lot more income than other people. The median income in America, I think it's like $50,000 or something like that. So if you earn anywhere close to that, then you're already making more than half of the families in America as an individual, which means that you are making a lot of money. So your revenue is not the problem. And if your revenue is not the problem, what is the problem? Well, it's your expenses, right? Well, what do people look at with debt and think of? They think of the monthly payment they would have to pay to pay it off. So that is the expense that you're worried about. Well, remember that most debt can be turned into a tax. So if most debt can be turned into a tax for the federal system with paying 5% to 10% on your income once you account for deductions, and then 5% to 10% for your tax bomb, then what you can kind of do is control that expense where it's moderate. And so then your revenue minus your expense, which we can make more moderate with an income-driven plan, actually works out at being pretty attractive. And then you think about the tax bomb that might be owed, and this tax bomb is something that probably goes away at some point. I'm not exactly sure how. I'm not exactly sure if that's going to result in a lower cash flow. If they wipe the tax bomb, they might ask for higher payments. Who knows exactly, right? But one thing I can feel pretty sure of is that we're going to have a big issue with all these people having this tax bomb at once. And it's going to be dozens and dozens of occupations with millions and millions of people in these affected occupations. All these professional groups, all these lobbying groups, lobby for special treatment from Congress as it is, right? So you have all these folks that are seeking out a specific kind of treatment, maybe reimbursement rates, or having certain kind of programs extended to them, having some sort of treatment in the tax code, right? Now imagine all these professional groups from all the professions that I mentioned, all lobbying together at the same time, asking for better treatment when it comes to student loans and student loan taxes in particular. That's going to have a big impact. So just think about that. Remember, if you want to go back and try to find your profession, what you can do is probably just go to the show notes for today's episode, which you can just find on the blog, and then you can actually look at the podcast category and look at the show notes, and you'll see kind of the order in which I talked about things, so that you can go back and figure out, okay, about when in the episode did he mention my occupation? Because I want to go back and listen to that. But with nearly 100 professions that we've helped that have had six figures in student loan debt, we see a lot of things. Obviously, I'm sure that some people are going to listen when I talk about your occupation and think, oh, you kind of missed the mark there. I understand. I'm just trying to give you a high-level view off the top of my head of all the professions that we've helped. So I just want a lot of people to think, well, he helped physicians and dentists or something, but what about me? I'm a mental health counselor. How is he going to help us? Well, we've helped a lot of you. We've all these people in all these different professions. So don't think that we haven't seen a lot of different trends from different things people are going through. And the good news is, as we build up the number of clients in a particular category that we've helped, sometimes we identify things in a consult such as, hey, did you realize that you're in the bottom 10 percentile for pay for your specialty or your profession and your area? And that's something that we can do, obviously, especially for the fields where we've had more than 100 people use our services. But that's one thing that's kind of fun to do is help people advocate for themselves and put themselves in better situations financially and just make them aware of all of their options and everything. So I really love doing what we're doing because it really does apply to anyone with six figures of student loan debt and even five figures. In many cases, you can save somebody a ton of money. I know that we're going to probably have some news over the holidays as I'm recording this. I'm going to be paying attention to what's going on with the stimulus bill that probably will have passed by the time I have this podcast go live. So we'll certainly talk a little bit about that. We'll have some great content for you, I think, about how to handle your finances in the world post COVID-19 as we look towards getting the vaccine and moving beyond this as a country. We'll certainly talk about that in the first few episodes of 2021. Thank you so much for being a podcast listener. If you have any feedback, obviously, I'll always love to hear it. If you have questions for the podcast you'd like us to feature, obviously, you can go to studentloanplanner.com voicemail for that. Thank you. Have a wonderful New Year celebration. I don't know what you're going to do. Maybe I'll probably drink some spiked eggnog or something to celebrate. Maybe that's gross. I don't know. But feel free to let us know. Podcast is studentloanplanner.com if you want to share what you're doing for New Year's Eve. Take care and have a good rest of 2020.