Does Your Debt Motivate You?

[Gabriela]

(I say that with full knowledge that far too many in our society have been duped into buying—literally—the empty promise that a college degree will guarantee you a ticket to the middle class. Ours is not an economically healthy society in general...)

[Basilisa Marie]

My debt doesn't motivate me, the fact that my dad cosigned my loans does. No way am I letting him be responsible for that mess.

[Ice_nine]

if motivation is the same thing as paralysis, then sure, I'm plenty motivated.

[puellapaschalis]

if motivation is the same thing as paralysis, then sure, I'm plenty motivated.

 

Thank goodness I'm not the only one.
 

[CatherineM]

Ummmmmmmmmm .... pardon me while I remove my jaw from the floor.

Last time I checked 1. parenting, esp. foster parenting, is not a "part time job" and 2. foster parenting is NOT somethingto do because you are "hurting for money"

I was being silly. Sorry. I think I work about 80 hours a week with the four we have.

[GregorMendel]

Long story short, Catholic undergrad plus medical school will leave me with ~$250,000 in student loans by the end of it all. Note: With scholarships, I paid half of what I would for undergrad and I only take out 5-10k beyond my tuition payments now in med school for food, rent, etc; that sum is not the result of poor financial decision making, just a reality of modern medical education.

This is the picture that most young doctors face when emerging from the cocoon of medical school and recognizing with the financial realities of the modern healthcare landscape for the first time. This is why individuals like myself are highly motivated to pursue a specialty which will offer a higher salary (ie. ER, Surgery, Ortho, Radiology, Anesthesiology, any of the IM subspecialties, etc), and avoid the lower paying specialties (ie. Family medicine, general internal medicine, pediatrics, preventative/occupational health, etc), or those with significant hardships regarding current practice models (ie. OB/GYN malpractice rates).

As American Doctors in the 21st century, I believe that my peers and I recognize and are grateful for the excellent lifestyle our occupation will afford us, regardless of specialty. However, the financial realities already in play when we graduate force us to react to it realistically before our careers even really begin. I will graduate medical school at 28yo, plan to finish an IM residency at 31 and perhaps sub-specialize after that. Mind you that during residency, PGY1-3 Physicians only earn around ~$45-55k, not enough to make big dents in debt without significant sacrifices. If I have any hope of keeping to my ten year plan of repaying my student loans by 38yo without living like a pauper during most of that time, I probably need to sway towards higher salaried positions (rural vs urban medicare reimbursements, inpatient/hospitalist vs outpatient/pcp).

PS. Im fortunate enough to have a desire to practice as a rural IM hospitalist, but if not for the compensatory factors for such positions (ie. Healthcare networks now pay a premium for hospitalists, Medicare reimbursements are significantly higher in rural areas, etc), you can bet your bottom dollar that the the argument to be a cardiologist in NYC would be Much more appealing to me.

[Cherie]

Debt is what motivates me not to pursue a college degree. No joke. I'd love to finally have a degree under my belt, but no way I'd add to my husband's already paralyzing law school debt. It's just the way it is.

[Maggyie]

I certainly feel no obligation to maintain the economic value of my neighbor's property.

Well not to be fresh but I would be sad/worried if my neighbors expressed the same. We live in an inner ring suburb that so far has avoided disaster. When people stop caring it can go bad fast. We have a community liaison for people to contact about ways to avoid foreclosure because it is horrible for the public schools as the tax base dries up (in Ohio we pay for education through property tax) horrible for police & fire because the houses are a magnet for crime and arson. Horrible for the neighborhood because when you need to sell your house because you finally got a job across town, you can't.

We also have a program where people with older houses can get tax payer money for help maintaining them. Our house was built 1932 and that is average. Needless to say a lot of the homes have the original cedar shake. Or as my husband calls it cedar $hake. I don't mind helping others maintain their homes. I also prefer to live in a working class neighborhood where people care vs an affluent one where people are indifferent to their impact.

If you care about your community you care about your neighbors property value. When values slip below a certain threshold it's the beginning of the end. In Cleveland we had a lot of people with the so what attitude walk away and they may as well have torched their neighborhood for the people who stayed.

[Slappo]

Maggie,

 

I'm certainly not going to try to actively devalue my neighbors property or wish economic loss on them, but I certainly have no obligation to take the economic value of their property into consideration when reviewing my own financial situation. I won't make a poor financial decision for my family to maintain the value of someone else's property; it's as simple as that. I won't even take into consideration the value of their property or the impact on the local neighborhood when making a financial decision to sell or declare bankruptcy/go into foreclosure. The list of things to take into account is so long and important that the value of other people's stuff does't even make the bottom of the page.