Geez to go into that level of debt and do ortho I would want to be making much more than $225k but I guess that's what you get if you take a corporate gig in Utah...

I'm in dental school and I don't get people's plans after they graduate. I will graduate with some hefty loans, and it keeps me up at night thinking about how I will pay them back. Lots of my classmates who are single seem to spend more money then I do with a family of four. It's crazy how many show up EVERY SINGLE MORNING with a Starbucks. I just have to roll my eyes at my classmates driving new cars and talking about how they wanted to get the bigger Mercedes but decided to be frugal and get the entry level C class...

What I really don't get is how many of them either plan on or end up working in corporate dentistry and think that somehow their $150k salary is going to pay back their loans. Umm, have you done the math on that? Do you really think $150k is going to be enough to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans at around 6-7% interest. It's mind boggling to me.

When I graduate, my mindset is that I will be making $40k a year. Anything over that is going straight to my loans. The house that we buy, the cars that we drive, all the money we spend, will be according to a budget of someone making $40k per year. It will be like that until my loans are paid off, which I hope is in 5 years but that would be a pretty aggressive goal.