Solution is simple: when you start your future jobs, keep your current lifestyle...
+1
Congrats on making it through the med-school process, that is difficult enough for one spouse, let alone both (I don't speak from experience)
Don't stress about your current financial situation, just focus on not burning out in your medical career. By far, the most important thing is that you both finish your training healthy and are ready to work for a few more years with phenomenal incomes. The only thing that will mess you up is if you get burned out now and quit practicing medicine.
Your debt sucks, especially the debt above 10%, but you will be able to pay that 10%+ debt off in <2 months once you have your high salaries even if you ignore it between now and then (1 year). For 99% of people, this would be a nightmare/emergency, you are in the 1% where this is actually not worth losing sleep over, so don't. Just keep your mind right and focus on your medical career.
Now... once you start making 600k per year; this is what I would do (and many others have already suggested similar strategies)
0. Keep your lifestyle spending where it is. This is plenty for a family of 4 and I don't include debt payments in this figure except your mortgage. Recall, MMM spends less than 30k.
With a
rough calculation, I'm guessing you are going to take home about 30,000 per month. If you spend 7,000 (your current take-home pay) you have 23,000 per month worth of extra ammunition to attack your debt and build your FI machine.
Just pause and realize how awesome that is....
With that 23K excess per month I would do the following in the future:
0. Set aside 23k in cash for emergencies (1 month)
1. Max out any 401k/403b accounts because you will be in a super high tax bracket (this will take <1 months worth of salary since it's pretax)
2. Pay off the IRS, lending club, credit cards and cars (2-3 months)
3. Pay off your student loans starting with the highest interest rate first (This will take 18 months assuming 400k @6.5% paying 23k per month.
At this point your are debt free except your house..... It has been 23 months since you started working .....
4. Take advantage of any HSA or other tax advantaged accounts you can (
stay away from whole life insurance and financial advisors, the salesmen will be after you very hard given your higher salary, just ignore them...)
5. Start putting the 23,000 per month into low cost index funds at your desired asset allocation (80/20 stock/bond is good enough).
If you return a modest 4% in your portfolio and keep putting that 23k in every month, here is what your net worth will look like...
5.5 years from today --- 1 million net worth
8.4 years from today --- 2 Million net worth
11 years from today ---- 3 million net worth
13.5 years from today ---4 million net worth
15.6 years from today --- 5 million net worth
You will be on the right side of compound interest.
Do you see how irrelevant it is to count your pennies and worry about part time jobs and rental properties right now?
Yes, I'm an advocate of living frugally and there are some details that I haven't captured but this will get you 90% of the way there.
Good luck and keep us posted.