I learned about anatomy from a prosected cadaver. (Prosection is skilled dissection of a human body... meaning someone else did it. I'm eternally grateful that I have never had to cut human flesh!). I learned about physiology - how the body works - including how the urine color chart came to be from the developer himself, Dr. Lawrence Armstrong. (He basically dehydrated himself for days and charted the color of his own urine until it was a near-death experience and then later tested it out in other subjects). I've always thought he was telling the truth about that one.
I learned about healing and disease processes and was astounded by the number of ways that things can go wrong in the body - either from internal causes or external ones. I learned the basics of pharmacology - of which I remember exactly one drug which I have never seen on a medication list: Loperamide - which I learned because it made me think if Jennifer Lopez's booty... it's a bulk-forming laxative. AKA Immodium. (UPDATE: Loperamide is an anti-diarrheal... guess I didn't even remember that one correctly! So thankful for having pharmacist friends!) Seriously - we must have learned about ibuprofen or medications that patients actually do take- but somehow those are not in my brain.
I learned about how people move or how people adapt when they have mobility limitations. We were either wheelchair bound for a few days or on crutches or in a sling or simulated being blind... I spent time with patients with numerous diagnoses, interviewing them about their experiences. I spent time in hospitals, nursing homes, clinics, schools, gyms, and the classroom with all different types of people across the age spectrum. I learned about different modalities and how they interact with the body - heat, cold, electric stimulation. And I learned about various types of exercise and their benefits on the body.
This could go on all day! I have binders and binders of things that I learned and wrote notes about during PT School. The funny thing is, even now, several years out, despite all that learning, I still feel like I have so much more to learn. (Working at Seattle Children's Hospital, I regularly ask kids what they learned at school that day when they come into the clinic. It's amazing how as a young child you say you didn't learn anything at school each day - but then in your late teens you graduate from high school and know a whole bunch of stuff!) But I can tell you one thing I learned absolutely nothing about in PT School: how to pay off the student loans necessary to get my education.
I don't know the exact numbers. I'm pretty sure the first time I added it all up, right before my first bill came in the mail, the total was $124,000. The paperwork said I could take 30 years to pay it off, and if I did it at that rate, it would cost me a total of $305,000. I may - or may not - have cried. And then paid the first bill.
The total is astronomical. I used $5000 in PT School to go to the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Ten days across the pond with two friends enjoying the mashed peas of London and watching so many sporting events cheering for random countries when USA wasn't competing... it was one of the coolest experiences of my life. Every time my autopay goes through, I remind myself of how amazing that trip was, and how cool my career path has been, choosing to be grateful for what my loans paid for in the past rather than being annoyed that I'm still paying for it. I've paid off that trip 10 times over now, and it makes me feel better to think that my monthly payments are going to my trip to watch the USA Women's National Basketball Team win the Olympic Gold Medal!Recently, my student loan total balance finally went below $100,000! I jumped up and down, posted it on Facebook (otherwise it didn't really happen, right?), and called my parents to share the big news. It has taken me a total of over $50,000 in payments to get rid of that first $24,000, but at my current rate, I should be able to finish in less than 15 years. As long as I never buy a house, continue living with an extremely generous roommate, and continue wearing scrubs that cost $22.99 to work every day and last five years before needing replacement, I don't have to eat Ramen Noodles every night and I can pay this mountain down.
So, since I learned absolutely nothing about paying off my student loans in PT School, I'm going to share how I got rid of this first 20%. I hope it helps someone else, even just a little bit. I'll highlight the important parts in bold for ya.
There is a grace period between graduation and when you have to start paying. During this time, interest accrues, but you don't have to make payments. My loan companies all gave me the opportunity to make payments towards that interest (as well as the interest that was gained while I was in PT school) so that it wouldn't get added into my principal balance. I couldn't pay off all of the interest, but I did make a few smaller payments before I had to start paying which was projected to save me several thousand dollars in the long run. Stupid interest. Unless you're talking about my savings account, and then yay interest! 1) If you're able to pay before you're required to pay, you can avoid compounded interest becoming part of your principal, which saves you more in the long run.
Immediately following the first payment, I set everything on auto pay. My student loan companies ALL decreased their interest rates by a fraction of a percent simply by doing this. I think I did the math and that at a decrease of .25% I would save about $300 dollars. WORTH IT. I don't have to do anything except keep working so there's money in the bank account and the minimum payment is taken care of. Easy way to save. 2) Set your payments to autopay so you can reduce your interest rate!
I personally stuck with some Dave Ramsey principles recommended by a friend in planning my repayment. In case you're not familiar, Dave Ramsey is an American Businessman and finance adviser who has written several books and done TV shows all about how to best spend and save your money. He learned it all from buying real estate and then losing a ton of money, only to climb back out of the trenches and become successful. I definitely made a plan, stick to it as much as possible, updated the plan when something big came up in my life that took some of the funds I had planned for the loans, and got back on track. 3) Make a plan.
What I'm doing is working for me. I can't promise it will work for you. If I'm ever able to purchase a house, I'll know this really worked. Some people say he does things backwards and you should pay off the biggest stuff first... but I like immediate gratification and every time I pay off a smaller loan, my minimum payment gets smaller so I have more available to put away - either to the loan I'm focused on - or towards something else. I asked people if they paid the big ones off first or the small ones, and if you fluctuate your extra payments and aren't going to be keeping everything the same month after month, it's really difficult to tell which method will save you the most money in the long run, so you just have to pick a method and stick to it. Don't bounce around. 4) Consistency is how you win.
Some Dave Ramsey principles. 5) Save up an emergency fund. Before I was willing to make any extra payments on my student loans, I saved some money in a special savings account. I had moved to Seattle from Connecticut right after PT School and had to borrow all the money to move - which left me super uncomfortable and with no money in the bank. I spent my first several months living in Seattle buying only groceries and bare essentials because I was afraid that I would get a flat tire and didn't have anything saved up to repair it.
Fortunately, I didn't know anybody, so I wasn't eating out. Rotisserie chickens are inexpensive, delicious and nutritious, and feed you for several meals. I would buy one on Sunday with a bagged salad kit and again on Thursday. I calculated that I was eating lunch and dinner for about $2.00 a meal for the first month I lived in Seattle. As a special treat, I would grab Pagliacci's Pizza by the slice on Wednesday nights for $5 when I was usually out of chicken and a Diet Snapple every Friday. When my savings account had $200 in it after the first month, I added PB&J sandwiches to the mix! My how far things have come! 6) Make financially reasonable choices and recognize that eating at home can save a lot of money compared to eating out.
So I saved up my emergency fund, which Dave Ramsey suggests should include about three months worth of rent, and simultaneously paid back my parents. It took me almost an entire year to pay back my move, paying only the minimum on my student loans - which was an entire year of almost only interest payments. (If I ever make a cross country move again, I'm burning everything I own instead of moving it. Only the car gets to stay and whatever fits inside of it). When my tax return came back saying I owed the government money - despite paying over $10,000 in student loan interest - I was furious. But I had a savings account and could pay what I owed out of my emergency fund - and I had enough extra money to make a trip home to see my family after being gone for more than six months.
So my plan at the beginning was pretty vague... pay off family and save up a little money, then get to the loans. Once I felt like I had enough money for an emergency room visit in the bank (just in case I cut my hand open while cooking - which has happened at least three times but never did I cave in and go to the hospital), I reviewed all the money that I owed to the world. Yep... the world. My family was reimbursed, but I had a car loan and two different student loan companies to deal with. One student loan company only held 3 loans - it was the remainder of my undergraduate fees - and the other had 12 loans compiled into it. (I actually had a Federal Perkins Loan from another company, but a classmate told me that we could apply for it to go away after five years working in healthcare, so as long as I keep slaving away as a physical therapist - the whole thing gets canceled next year and I don't have to pay it!) So you should look to see if you have loans that you don't really need to be paying because that's $10,000 that I'm never going to pay as long as my boss doesn't fire me before next September.
I wrote a list of all those loans and put them in order from smallest loan to biggest. And following Dave Ramsey's snowball method, I paid off the ones with the smallest balances first and just paid the minimum on the others. First I paid off the smaller loan cluster from undergrad - which meant getting rid of an entire payment every month that I could then apply to the next targeted loan. Then I paid off my car - and that beautiful Honda Fit better make it another 100,000 miles. She recently got a new set of tires... and because I had an emergency fund, I wasn't horrified or even thrown off of my payment plan when the flat tire meant I had to make that bigger purchase. 7) Start making targeted payments to 1 specific loan while making the minimum payment to the others, targeting either smallest to largest, as Dave Ramsey recommends, or largest to smallest - as others recommend, but with consistency.
This method helped me pay off my car and smaller loan company completely. So where I started out having a minimum monthly payment of $1200/month ($100 to my undergrad loans, $125 to my car, and $975 to the largest loan company) I now could use the money that went to the completed loans to start targeting the giant mountain that I'm currently climbing. What I didn't realize was that every time I paid off one of the loans in that giant cluster, my minimum payment would also decrease and I would have even more money available to target to the smallest loan. (I thought the payment would have been the same the whole time and would just distribute differently across all the loans... that's what happens if you just pay the minimum the whole time!)
Once I got to just this one company, I started making extra payments into my retirement fund. This doesn't follow Dave Ramsey's principles. He outlines that you should pay off all debts first, and then prepare for retirement later but at a higher percentage rate. It made me uncomfortable to delay putting anything away for later - and sometimes the contributions to retirement have helped offset some of the money I've owed on my taxes. The whole thing feels a bit like a game of Monopoly, doesn't it? Ultimately, the majority goes towards the student loans, a tiny bit goes to retirement with the hopes that the stock market will make me rich quickly, and I'm mostly sticking to the Dave Ramsey Principles.
Over four years, I've read quite a bit of online discussions between PTs making recommendations about how to do this. But in almost all cases, I read that the key is to redistribute the money you're making, finding ways to save and budget based on your income. Sure, this makes sense and applies to most professions. But as a physical therapist, there are constantly per diem positions available. So instead of only redistributing the money I was making - I also got another job and increased the money I was making. While this wouldn't be possible in every career - I do think that there are several other ways you can try to make money that might be outside your career. Every time I pick up a per diem shift, I take a little bit of the money from it and set it aside for something fun, and the rest goes right to my student loans. Over the summer I worked ten per diem shifts in two months and it was enough to cover two trips home to Connecticut and an extra $1500 on my student loans. I'm already prepared with some extra work in November to prepare for upcoming holiday expenses. 8) Don't ignore opportunities to make extra money that can help pay loans down faster.
So, like I said, this plan has so far worked for me. It won't work for everyone. I wonder how differently this plan would look had we actually learned about this from someone who knows what they're doing. Maybe PT Schools should start bringing in a financial adviser as part of their curriculum to help their students out a little more! Good luck current PT students. You can do it! Just know that you're probably coming out of school owing more than six figures, unless you live at home with your family and don't need loans to pay your housing and meals... and that you're going to work hard to get it paid off. You should probably be sure you want to be a physical therapist before diving in!
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