I ran across this gem of a post buried in a thread on the Student Doctor Network EM forum and thought it deserved a lot more publicity.
https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/how-bad-am-i-being-taken-advantage-of.1283186/#post-19354652
I love some of the lines like these:
What do you think? What would it take for you to move to another state?
https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/how-bad-am-i-being-taken-advantage-of.1283186/#post-19354652
2011, my first job out of residency paid me about $140/h. long commute (65 miles each way, though done intentionally because this job paid quite a bit more than jobs in town) decent benefits, in a fairly high cost of living area. high state taxes, not as high a CA but too high to ignore. 250k loans. 2 kids. We chose to live in "our town", extended family, lots of life long friends, great social scene, but we were just barely scraping by. putting 18k away for retirement, big monthly loan payment, left with a few hundred or a thousand dollars every mo which always seemed to be eaten up by some sort of "adult life" snafu. My wife and I sat down and started to run the numbers, at my current pay we would be well paid poor for decades. Then the third kid showed up and the $1000 buck a mo we were squirreling away was eaten up by diapers/daycare etc and we were rolling paycheck to paycheck which led to me supplementing with more work, which in turn, led to some spousal resentment because I was never around to help with 3 little kids because I was always at work or in the car coming/going to work. my 9h shifts were basically 12h with clean up time and commute and I was starting to resent her for moving us here and thus making me work so ************************ much just to break above even. A bit about me, I don't super love our job. I like it, and I wouldn't want to live in any other house in medicine but I'm not part of the "This is my calling" clan and fully intend to retire out of medicine as soon as I am able. Obviously after 3 years of this hamster wheel of this work I started to burn out...hard.
At this point I was as crispy and fun as a deep fried tarantula, so my wife and I had an Algonquin roundtable discussion about what we wanted and where we were headed. We decided that our current situation was untenable. I was working effectively 18 12h shifts, spending 36h/mo in my car commuting. missing my children's childhoods. pissing off my wife. not being able to enjoy any of the fruits of my labor, when the whole delayed gratification bug was already biting me hard hearing about my friends from residency who chose more profitable, lower cost places to live, buying sweet houses, new cars and I was renting and driving my Camry with 240k miles on it and not really seeing any growth in my savings. We were going to be living like fellows (slightly better than residents) for life at our current pace. And as an added bonus, I was spending plenty of time seething and silently blaming my wife and squabbling over spending. A bit more backstory, I love my wife dearly, she is the greatest person I have ever met and she's a very rational person so we discussed all our options and we decided...we had to move.
We looked at the south (where I did residency) and Texas. The rumors about Texas salaries alone were enough to pique our interest. add in no state income tax, tort reform, cheap housing, etc. I contacted a friend from residency who was there and confirmed the rumors. He was making about $250/h in a metro area, lived in a nice area about 20 minutes from the hospital and liked the work. So we went out, checked it out, and liked it enough. We struggled mightily with what we would miss by leaving but in the end we recognized, as previously stated, that even if we only did this for 3 years we would gross at a minimum 650k more than if we had stayed and it would alleviate the only real stressor in our lives. So in the summer of 2014 we packed up the family truckster and moved to Houston. Entering year 4 of the Texas experiment, truthfully we haven't regretted it. Doubling your salary changes your financial life which has absolutely improved our regular lives. Loans gone. 15y mortgage on a reasonable (by Texas standards) house is been shrinking. Solo401k maxed out every year. Roth converted IRA every year. 529s for the kids are growing. Taxable account growing. At the end of every mo, we still have plenty left over to do with as we please. we still have enough to fly home (we still call it home even though we live in Texas) whenever we want, or fly wherever we want. We go home for a week or so every couple of months and stay for a few weeks every summer. We speak frequently about moving back, but my wife and I firmly believe that right now is the golden age of emergency medicine and that it won't last forever. Physician salaries and reimbursement are clearly in the crosshairs of the populous as an idiotic "cost containment measure" and a hair cut is coming, but please spare the Hospital's Junior Vice President of Pencil Sharpening....don't get me started. So we want to make hay while the sun is shining and sock it away for a hopeful financial independence from medicine back on our front porch at "home".
I recognize that we made the extreme plunge and not all are willing to risk it. Happy wife/happy life is a good motto to live by but smoldering long term low level misery can really erode your martial bliss. As for a less extreme recommendation, you mentioned locums and if I might offer a suggestion look at travel locums in Texas. I have numerous friends that live all over the country in crappy paying areas, California, Arizona, Boston, Chicago, all of whom fly in and work 10 days in Texas and fly home. They make more in 10 days than they would have working full months in their respective home states and then they are off the rest of the month.
I love some of the lines like these:
I was as crispy and fun as a deep fried tarantula....
We were going to be living like fellows (slightly better than residents) for life at our current pace. And as an added bonus, I was spending plenty of time seething and silently blaming my wife and squabbling over spending....
Doubling your salary changes your financial life which has absolutely improved our regular lives....
What do you think? What would it take for you to move to another state?
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