Doctors can have HUGE debt loads that should peak near the end of residency if the doctor is putting part of his residence salary toward debt. Knowing exactly how much debt a doctor will have is complex and the most challenging feature facing me is predicting what the line-of-credit interest rate will be over a ten year period.
As this is my first post and you readers don't know me to well yet, I didn't get into a Canadian program this year. What is a guy to do? Some people have told me they know-a-guy-who-knows-a-guy that took 6 years to get in. Wowza! Since I am turning 26 in a month I don't want to delay my med school over another 5 applications possibly. That being the case I started to plan for different contingencies, the most relevant to this post was a complex excel sheet that covered all my costs for attending a IMG (International medical graduate) program in Grenada (see my link for SGU - St. George's University)
One thing that will shock a Canadian applicant is the tuition. Most Canadian programs charge under $20,000 a YEAR, an international programs cost around $25,000 a semester.
Melbourne MD program costs about $55,000 a year for four years.
SGU, MD program costs about $23,000 a semester for 5 semesters, and $21,000 for 5 clinical terms.
SGU seems similar to a lot of american schools so as a baseline I used SGU to estimate costs on a TD line-of-credit. It has served me well and turned my stomach a few times but this is the lifetime costs of a Canadian going to SGU.
The Canadian Medical Association recently advertised their financial planning tool for young physicians and surgeons to not fall into a bankrupcy pit (See this 2005 article on doctors becoming bankrupt http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2005/04/11/bica0411.htm), and rather are able to live within their means and not a buy a Fararri in their first year of residence. Here is the link to the tool:
http://www.md.cma.ca/tools/debt-projection/
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