← CASE STUDIES

A physician, a teacher, two young kids, and a stack of questions about what to do next.

Who they are

Maya is 34, three years out of residency, attending in a nonprofit health system. Her husband Ben, 33, teaches 7th-grade science. They have a three-year-old in part-time daycare and a six-month-old at home with an au-pair.

Combined household income around $375,000. A new mortgage. A six-figure student loan balance. Modest retirement balances in two 403(b)s and one Roth IRA. $42,000 sitting in checking. No taxable brokerage. No 529s. No supplemental disability or life insurance. Net worth, on paper, negative six-figures.

The start of something good. But they didn’t feel like it.

What it felt like before

Maya describes it as

“making more money than I’d ever seen, and being more anxious about money than I was as a resident.”

The questions in their heads sounded like this:

Are we still on track for PSLF, or have we been doing it wrong this whole time?
Maya’s old residency 403(b) is sitting there. Should we move it? Where?
The bonus just hit. What do we do with it?
Are we contributing to the right accounts in the right order?
Maya’s group disability policy — is that actually enough?
Are we going to be okay?

In the eighteen months before they reached out, they’d been approached by two insurance agents and one wirehouse advisor. Every meeting ended with a product being sold, not a plan being made. Maya left feeling worse than when she walked in.

Why They Finally Booked

It wasn’t one thing. The bonus hit Maya’s checking account and sat there for six weeks. She pulled up her old residency 403(b) and realized she didn’t know how it was even invested. Their second baby arrived. The daycare bill doubled. And Ben asked the questions she’d been avoiding:

Should I keep working? Are we going to be okay?

That night, Maya started searching.

The Work

GET ORGANIZED

Map every account, loan, and policy in one place. Project where the picture is headed with no changes. For Maya and Ben, this alone surfaced two things: they’d been on the right PSLF plan for six years but had never certified a single payment, and Maya’s old 403(b) was sitting in a target-date fund charging 0.74% when an equivalent set up was available at 0.07%.

VALUES AND GOALS

The conversation most advisors skip. Not “what’s your risk tolerance,” but instead, “what do you want your week to look like in five years? What do you want to say yes to, and no to?” For Maya and Ben, the answer was margin. Maya wanted the option to drop to 0.8 FTE before 45. They wanted to know that if one of them got sick, the other wouldn’t have to make a financial decision in the same week.

BUILD THE PLAN

Recommendations, prioritized, sequenced, and explained. PSLF strategy locked in. The old 403(b) rolled into the current one, not into an IRA, because that detail mattered for the next move. Backdoor Roths for both. The bonus deployed on purpose: a chunk to the Roths, a chunk to a new taxable account earmarked for the “margin” goal, the rest to fix tax withholding. Own-occupation disability and term life put in place. 529s opened and ready for monthly contributions.

IMPLEMENTATION

Screen-share. Joint phone calls to initiate the rollover. Backdoor Roth executed. Long-term disability insurance quotes received and applied for the best policy. PSLF certification filed by Maya. New contribution rates entered into payroll while we were on the call. The plan stopped being a document. It became a reality.

ONGOING GUIDANCE

Semi-annual replanning. Decisions handled as they come up. A job offer, a question about a Roth conversion, an IDR landscape that shifts mid-year. The plan changes with their life instead of slowly becoming irrelevant.

Where they are now

Two and a half years in, the picture looks different.

PSLF payments certified and counting, 18 months away from forgiveness. Retirement balances more than doubled. Roth IRAs funded every year. A taxable brokerage funding the margin goal. Disability and term life in place. 529s started.

The point is this: Maya doesn’t wonder anymore. When the bonus hits, she knows where it goes before it lands. When her hospital sends out an email about a new retirement plan option, she forwards it, we talk it through for fifteen minutes, and she makes the decision the same day.

What replaced the wondering was something neither of them expected: possibility. Maya is seriously planning the move to 0.8 FTE at 44. Every January, the two of them sit down together and look at the plan with a trusted guide. Not because they have to, but because it’s become a thing they enjoy, envisioning the future possibilities.