$250,000 In Student Loans But Want A Boat

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. I am a dentist. I graduated about a year and a half ago. I have $250,000 in student loans. I'm getting married to my fiancée in four months, and she is a lawyer. We can both expect to make about $200,000 this year. And how much student loan debt does she have? She has no student loan debt, actually. How did she pull that off? Just fortunate, I guess. She had a big scholarship. Wow. To be a lawyer. Okay. Cool. Yeah. All right. And so you've got $250,000. How much other debt do the two of you have when you're married? So we just bought a house. So we've got a mortgage of $252,000. So a total of $500,000 in loans. Okay. And you're not married yet? Not married yet. Okay. So the mortgage is technically in her name, actually. Okay. All right. Good. Currently. But my name will be put on it. I think I got the picture. How can we help? I've kind of prided myself, you know, the last year and a half living frugally. I feel like I'm living the same way I did in dental school, driving the same truck I have since high school. Now I've got a little bit of money. How much debt? Wait, wait, wait. You got money? You didn't put it on the student loan? I mean, I have, you know what I mean, an emergency fund, and I've had some investments and stuff. Okay. How much do you have in investments and in an emergency fund? I got about $40,000 in investments, $25,000 in an emergency fund. Gotcha. Okay. I'm caught up. All right, good. I'm sorry. I hate to keep interrupting you. I'm just trying to make sure I know what's going on. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're good. I'm an avid duck hunter, and for years I've dreamed of kind of getting John Boat to go duck hunting with, and I found a real good one for $5,000. And I feel guilty about it, so I wanted to get your take on that. Well, I think we kind of panned back from the whole situation and say, all right, what would we do in your overall situation now that we've got a decent handle on it? And, of course, our goal for the two of you is to, once you're married, to combine your finances and have an emergency fund of $1,000, and everything above that goes towards your student loans, and you pay off those student loans like your hair was on fire. With no investing, no investing, no 401ks, no nothing. And with your great income, the combined income in particular, and I think you said four months you're married. Then you attack that with a vengeance and you work all the time until you make enough to get this paid off. Both of you, you work like maniacs. You've got obviously great professional careers, but what tends to happen and we've worked with doctors and dentists, For years, doctors are worse than lawyers, but not much worse. When you take your vehicle to the shop, you want to know it will get fixed right. 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You get out of school right where you are, and the first thing you do is you exhale and go buy a $250,000 house. You exhale and go buy a BMW. You exhale instead of turning around and addressing the student loan debt. And that's very typical among people. And it's because I'm asking you guys, Two, after you've held your breath for 16 years, 18 years you've been in school, I'm asking you to hold it for two more years and clear the student loan debt so that you've got the rest of your life with a $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 household income and zero debt. But I'm asking you to do something that's very, very hard to do emotionally, and that plays right into this conversation. And so what we teach is this extreme thing, because it works. I have continued to have no life. You said you're acting like you're still in dental school. That's good. But you're really not because you're making really good money and you've only saved 40 grand. So that's okay. It's better than most, but you're really not like living on a beanbag chair. I mean, you're really not down to nothing. You've just been careful and intentional. So, um, the, the $5,000 bass boat, or I'm sorry, duck boat is not going to cause you a, to get more ducks. You're already getting ducks with your buddy's boat. And B, it's not going to cause you to go bankrupt if you go do it. But what I'm most concerned about is that you address the overall philosophy of this idea that somehow I've got the cat by the tail. You don't. You're a broke dentist. You're a quarter of a million dollars in debt. And bless your debt-free wife's heart for marrying you. Yeah. You know, and I want you to get your head around that and then decide, is this grown man going to go buy a $5,000 boat to hunt ducks? There's nothing wrong with it. I don't blame you. It's kind of fun. I like hunting them too. But I'm a wingman. I love shooting birds. But I'm going pheasant hunting in a few weeks. But I'm not buying a boat to do it, and I've got the money. I'm just going to fly up and use somebody else's stuff. So you can do that a lot in your area. So I wouldn't buy it because of what it represents in you. I want you to reprioritize things and who you are as a man coming into this marriage. And you're putting her first. You're putting your future first. And you're addressing the little boy that lives inside of all of us that wants cereal on the cereal aisle. And you're going to tell him no. And that's called being a man because I have bigger goals. And then I'll buy a duck boat and buy a piece of ground with ducks on it later in cash. You'll buy a real nice boat. And then buy some ducks. I mean, whatever you need to do. I mean, you'll be able to do any of it you want to do at that point, right? But I wouldn't do it for that reason, not because the $5,000 is a deal breaker. What do you think, George? Well, it's not an affordability question. This just happened last night, Dave. My daughter wanted a Popsicle before dinner. And in my head, I'm going, if she eats that popsicle, she's not going to touch what's on the dinner plate. She's not eating those vegetables. Look at you, bring the metaphor. And so then I'm, this is kind of how we all are. That toddler still lives in all of us. And I'm going, if you get that duck boat, you're going to get pretty comfortable. Those weekends are not going to be spent working overtime. You're going to be going, I got to use that boat. I got to get it on my boat. And so I like it for the dangling, dangling the carrot is good for humanity. It makes us want to go hit the goal, do it faster than we normally would have so we can get to the dessert. So we can get to that key lime pie at the end. But it's not about a duck boat is wrong. And it's not about a $5,000 duck boat in your situation is wrong. It's about what it represents in your philosophy of life and how you're going to address the next five years. Because dude, if the two of you take care of the next five years and you're making three or 400 grand and you got zero debt and you pay off your student loan, you pay off your house, you understand how fast you're going to have 10 or $15 million. I mean, the numbers are astronomical in your favor. Unless you screw it up one duck boat at a time. If you just took the student loan payments that you free up and invest that, you'd be multimillionaires. Just that alone. Just that alone. As soon as you do that. The sooner you do that, the sooner you're multimillionaires. So we teach people, John, to live like no one else so that later you can live and give like no one else. In the scriptures, it says no discipline seems pleasant at the time, but it yields a harvest of righteousness. And, I mean, some people, a very small percentage of the public, likes to go to the gym. The rest of us do it because of what it gets us, not because we like going to the gym. And, like, we had a whole bunch of us run the half marathon around here. And Kelly, our producer at the time, she said, I'm not going to run anywhere. I'm like, why? She said, the Bible says only the wicked flee when no one is chasing. That's in Proverbs. You can't argue with that. That's biblically based. At least. Why are you running? Who are you running from? What did you do? But to Kelly's credit, yeah, not this Kelly, not a different one. She's lost a bunch of weight. She's now John Deloney's producer. That's why she's so healthy, Dave. She's in great shape. I'm so proud of her. She's done a great job. But it wasn't by running while no one was chasing. Create your free EveryDollar budget today. The simplest way to budget for your life.