SoFi Blog

Are you a dentist or doctor? Here are some tips on starting a practice while still paying off student loans.

There are lots of good reasons to become a doctor. Being a physician means you can help people in one of the most direct ways possible: By doing your best to restore their health. An added bonus is you can eventually make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing it; Medscape’s 2016 physician compensation report found that the lowest-earning doctors (pediatricians and endocrinologists) bring in around $200,000 a year, while the highest earners (orthopedists and cardiologists) make over $400,000.

In our #SoFiStartups Q&A series, SoFi co-founder Dan Macklin sits down with startup founders who have gone through the SoFi Entrepreneur Program, where we offer mentorship, access to investors, and student loan deferment for founders of young startups. In a candid conversation, he speaks from one entrepreneur to another about their experiences founding a company.

Medications can improve the quality of your life—when you remember to take them, that is. This is the insight at the heart of Pillsy, a smart pill bottle that syncs wirelessly to your phone and beeps when you forget a dose. The set-up lends an effortless, tech-assisted hand to help you keep track of your vitamins and medications.

But if this solution sounds deceptively simple, that’s because it is. In fact, it took the Seattle-based startup two years to get to where they are today, on the verge of launching their product. Challenges like manufacturing cost-effective hardware, wrestling with Bluetooth, and developing a user-friendly format didn’t make Pillsy easy to bring to life. As co-founder Otto Sipe describes the process, “It was long and there were a lot of rewrites along the way. Along the lines of—Oh, this is completely not going to work.“

It’s no secret that the average doctor is saddled with tons of student loan debt when starting practice. In fact, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the average doctor graduates medical school with $190,000 in student loans—6x the national average.

Having a strategy to quickly and efficiently pay down your student loans is critical to long-term financial success, so we’ve put together a few personal finance tips and tricks for doctors to help them pay down student loans faster in 2017. These tips are relevant to all doctors, regardless of specialty or income.