 Alright guys, in this episode I'm going to share how I paid $2,000 off my med school loans in just one month. Let's get into it. Alright guys, welcome to the MD journey. A channel completely dedicated to helping students succeed on their medical journey but doing it with less stress. My name is Lakshman, internal medicine resident and physician. I've been making videos on studying, productivity, as well as now personal finance to help you on your journey. So if you're new here, definitely consider hitting that subscribe button. If you're listening to all your podcasts, also consider hitting that subscribe button on your favorite listening platform. One of the topics that I personally love learning about and also just putting into action is personal finance. Now I've made a video that will link down below of my med school loans and essentially how much I owe in my plan to pay it off. But finally that plan is going into action. So I'm going to draw the same approach that my wife and I have used to save money over the first few months of our marriage and residency. And now are able to add some fuel to the fire when it comes to paying off our med school loans. So here in this box we have essentially our savings. And initially both my wife and I were really just relying on my income during the first few months as she was finishing up her school. But now she's also working and that's relatively new income, which is quite nice to have over the last few months. So now we have two incomes. But initially our main goal is to really fill out a few check marks. So the first check mark was to have an emergency fund fully funded. An emergency fund for most people about two to three to four months of living expenses. So if you're living on $2,000 and essentially saving up to six to eight grand. Now this is obviously for any emergency that you don't see coming as well as some things that you may see coming up in the future. So for example, I've been driving my car for about five to six years and it has about 200,000 miles on it because it's like 10 to 12 years old. So I know pretty little Jenny the Jetta is eventually going to go. So I'm expecting to have a big expense come up whenever that day happens. And so essentially we've went ahead and made sure that there's a certain amount of a paycheck that is going into this emergency fund. So that was the first check box that we wanted to check off. And we did it pretty quickly within the first few months of our residency. And the next thing for us was to making sure that, you know, we had a nice kind of buffer inter savings. This was more for comfort reasons, but we just wanted to make sure that if we wanted to travel or if you needed to buy plane tickets or if we needed to pay for an expensive exam like step three, which is almost a grand that we wouldn't feel short on cash. So we wanted to save this and everyone creates their own number. I'm just going to use an example, but let's say you want to save 20,000 in their savings. Everyone again has a different number and this is just one that I'm giving for this example. But again, each month we would get my paycheck and now hers and we use a technique called reverse budgeting. I'll link down below a video on how to budget and save money in medical school as well as residency. But we were using this to make sure that a certain amount of money was always going into our emergency fund and now our savings. And so over time, we're able to get to our numbers. So in this example is 20,000. Now, once we got to this 20,000, we had a few decisions to make. You know, we could either invest or we could go ahead and pay off some of their loans. Now, our loans aren't simply just like one number and it's just something you have to pay off over time. You know, there's more like a little bits of small student loans and bigger student loans that we need to make sure we attack. Our plan was to first knock out some of these smaller loans because then the minimum payment of 50 to 100 dollars that you have to pay towards them is something that we can use to either invest or pay towards the big loan that's coming up. And so once we were able to reach, you know, our number for our savings, any bit of income that didn't go into any form of our budget immediately went to paying off this. And so over the last month, you know, my wife and I have had a set of income and a set amount that normally would go into the savings and we've been able to essentially save $2,000 that are able to almost knock out one of the loans and probably will within the next few weeks. And then we'll do the same thing for this one and this one. And then we get to make a decision. Do I want to go ahead and throw some of that money into investments? And I'll make a different video about this in the future of where you should put your money and when you should pay off your loans versus go ahead and invest. And so this is the approach that we're using. So we know that if, you know, something happens, our emergency fund is fully funded. So if Jenny the Jetta decides to crump, which she probably will, we're ready for it. Our savings is at a certain point. And if it ever goes below that, then we'll go ahead and fill it up and stop everything we're doing. But in the meantime, we can now use any extra bit of cash. And normally we'd go into our savings to pay off these loans and we can do it at a pretty fast rate. And as long as we're staying on top of her, by the way, we're pretty and I have been doing pretty well. Each month, we're typically going to be making more than we'd be spending. So that extra money is going to go towards loans and eventually pay off the little ones. And that way we can attack this big beast that I have. But this guy is simply a quick video and episode to kind of show you how you can effectively pay off your loans without making it over complicated. Make sure you save for your emergency fund. Make sure your savings is to a number that you're comfortable with. That doesn't have to be obviously a hundred grand or even 20 grand. It can be like 10 grand or five grand. You pick your number. Once you get there, throw any bit of savings into those little bits of loans that have a huge interest rate or go ahead and start investing. Now, this is just going to be one of the first videos and episodes and kind of our personal finance journey and more videos that are upcoming on the journey. So make sure if you haven't hit that subscribe button in either your podcast platform or YouTube. And also, if you're watching this on YouTube, you go ahead and hit that like button. It tells me that you enjoy this piece of content. It was helpful and I wish it would make more just like this. Also go ahead and drop any questions you have about personal finance, manage your money, paying off your loans. I'd be happy to answer them. A total geek when it comes to that kind of stuff. So I'll be thrilled to make a video for you guys in the future. I'll also link down below a personal finance resource that either is in the process of being made or is already being made and you guys can check that out down below as well. That's it for this video guys. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure you hit that like and subscribe button helps the video helps the channel also tells me you enjoy this kind of content and I appreciate the support. Thank you guys as always for watching this videos being a part of my journey. Hopefully I've been a little help to you on yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.