 Hey guys welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for tuning in and watching the other videos. Today in this video and in the next couple of videos I'm going to be talking to you guys about the finances of going to medical school. Is it really worth it? Before I went to medical school I was a New York City school teacher with a husband, a car and a home and no student loan debt but I wasn't fulfilled because my lifelong dream was to become a doctor. So I applied and I got into medical school where I now had my tuition, room and board, books, another car note and student loan debt. So as I look at my student loan debt I wonder what if I had stayed a teacher? Would my life be really different financially? So in this video I'm going to play out that what if scenario and for all you pre-med students out there I've hidden a question in the video as a bonus and the first person who comments on this basic science question with the correct answer will win a one-year subscription to Chegg. For those of you who don't know what Chegg is it's a site with 24-7 access to homework help as well as solutions to textbook questions for your class exams or for your study for the NCATS. In this day and age it's a really valuable online resource. I'll reveal the winner in a future episode as well as the answer so please stay tuned to the entire video to find the question and get all this important information. When I look at my student loan debt I sometimes wonder what if I didn't become a doctor and I stayed a teacher. So in this video I play out that scenario of staying a teacher and see how much my life would be different. I will present those two settings one with and without kids. So when I left teaching in 2007 I was making around 40,000 a year as a New York City science teacher. This was pretty much an entry-level salary. My husband and I had actually bought our first home two years prior to that because the market was really good at the time. This is a home that we paid 309,000 dollars for. I know this is New York. If I had stayed a teacher and had not had any kids considering the growth of my salary at the time as well as the payoff of the house on a 30-year mortgage that means I would have a lot of equity on the home and I would actually be close to paying it off. To make a long story short this would have helped my husband and I since he was also a teacher save a lot more of our checks give us extra funds to travel and see the world. As years went on and the salaries went up combined at this point we would be making about 200,000 dollars a year. That combined with the house that's paid off and the pension we would receive in our retirement of about 100,000 dollars we would have lived a nice life comparable to that of a pediatrician or a family medicine doctor without the debt and who knows we could have also bought another house and expanded our wealth through rental income as we sort of do now. This could be attributed to money saved from education expenses which is about 300,000 dollars as well as savings from not having children. Kids are expensive but this is a very rosy scenario and is not at all a realistic one. That's scenario one but the second scenario is if we had kids while we were teachers. So not too much would have been different with this scenario except we would have traveled a lot less most likely and had invested a lot more since we had kids to worry about. We would have spent money on after school activities as well as clothes of 5,000 dollars a year on that health care and maybe even private schooling 18,000 dollars a year and daycare 25,000 dollars a year. We would have still bought the first house at 309,000 dollars later maybe a few years after the children got a bit older. We would have probably tried to upgrade to give our kids more space to grow in Rome so probably a 500,000 dollar price tag on a home. Then as savings would have never come and we would have spent a lot of our money on our kids and saving for college about 100k three kids in public college off of a 200,000 dollar combined salary that would have left very little for our future. The problem that most people don't see is that the more you earn the more you spend. I'll tell you exactly how much my education career this far has cost and how I'm paying it off in the next episode.