I am currently a medical resident with 3 years (not including the rest of this year, ending June 30th) of residency left. I am hoping I won't have to do a 1 year fellowship but that will be determined by the job market for my specialty. My girlfriend is also a resident with the same amount of time left, plus an additional 1 year fellowship. I am budget conscious and use Mint to make sure we are not over spending and can track our expenses. I have some questions and seeking advice for our potential future income streams.
We currently each make about $50k and this will increase about $2k each year during residency and fellowship. Her institution takes 10% pretax and puts it into a retirement fund and matches it, while mine does not. However, the next 3 years I will be at an institution that does that as well. This is all we are saving towards retirement right now. With that being said, from using Mint we typically have a surplus of ~$500-1k left over each month to build up our emergency fund and save for future travel. We also each pay $1k per month ($24k/year total) towards our student loans (each have $275-300k in loans). Unfortunately, this doesn't even cover all the interest at years end! We have lived together for several years, share a bank account, credit cards and living expenses.
Our plan for after residency is to use my salary which will hopefully be $300-400k to pay off most/all of our loans in the first two years post residency. Then we will have that weight lifted off of us. When she is done with residency she will hopefully be making ~$300k starting in private practice. Both of our incomes should increase a little each year. After paying for loans we want to live off her income and use hers for our retirement accounts, while using mine for other ventures. Such as, rentals/income property, franchises, etc. I am business oriented and my specialty is luckily very flexible hours wise. We don't have any sort of "target date" but I want to get to a point where she won't have to work and my side ventures would allow me to retire from medicine after ~5-10 years post residency to focus solely on business ventures. We are both young enough where we don't plan on having children for ~10 years.
The reason I mentioned the franchise's is that they can be huge money makers. Obviously they are more expensive than a typical start up, but they also have the logistics and such ironed out. I would only want to be a part of a franchise that has typical revenues of $1M+ (Restaurant franchises, like McDonalds, Wendy's, etc have profits of ~10-12%...I Don't want to open one of those per se. I'd like to get involved with a smaller franchise that still has 2-300 locations that are more regional and starting to branch out). My good friend is a chef and has run a few restaurants, thus having more knowledge about them than me or other potential partners I would consider. Getting together ~30% down for all costs associated with a franchise (debt finance the rest) would take me (by myself) a year and if I have partners even less time. I've spoken to my friend and he would love to work for me on a profit sharing basis (almost like a non-owning partner), which in my opinion would make him work harder and have some "skin in the game". I'd start with one, see how it goes and then potentially open more from there. Still paying my friend % profits. He does the day to day work and I'd have no problem handling other higher up stuff. Plenty of franchisees own multiple locations, obviously being their full time job, but I wouldn't get to that point for several years after opening a first location. My neighbor owns 18 Wendy's that are several hours away. He has a team run them, so he makes less but he is able to bring in plenty. Goes up there once to two times a month and spends time with family or travels the rest of the time.
I guess what I'm getting at is I'd like make more money than I would in medicine even if it delays Early retirement. At the same time, allow my SO to not have to work while maintaining the same (if not higher) level of living. I know this may sound "greedy" or dumb because being a physician you can do most things you want, but I'm never satisfied. I am always trying to learn and move up.
Does this sound reasonable? What would you do in our situation differently?
Thanks!
Submitted January 17, 2015 at 07:54PM by Da_Silver_back http://ift.tt/1xhmB9p
No comments:
Post a Comment