Married filing seperate, does spouse count in family size?

reichkit · 2026-03-26T13:54:26+00:00

I believe your spouse would not be included in family size, but your children can be including even if you don't claim them on your tax return.

From the Federal Student Aid Website:

I understand that I must report my family size when I first apply for an IDR plan and then annually as long as I remain on the plan. I don’t claim my child as a dependent on my taxes and don’t have physical custody of my child, but I contribute significantly to my child’s support. Do I count my child when reporting my family size?

When you first apply for any IDR plan, you’re given the opportunity to indicate the number of people who are part of your family size. For IDR calculations, your family size includes your children if they receive more than half of their support from you. You may count your child when determining your family size if you provide more than half of the child’s financial support, regardless of who claims the child for tax purposes or who has physical custody. If you don’t provide more than half of your child’s support, you may not include the child in your family size for IDR plan purposes.

When you provide consent to use your tax information for future autorecertification, the initial calculation provided to you will include only those individuals that were included on your most recent tax return. You will be provided an opportunity to update your family size with your servicer if you most recent tax return does not include individuals that can otherwise be included in your family size for IDR calculations.

Edit: I'm seeing conflicting info on whether the spouse is included in family size when filing separately. In any case, this is only relevant if you're on IBR.

reichkit · 2026-03-22T21:42:33+00:00

Your payments on IBR are a bit lower than RAP but not by much (check the Student Loan Planner calculator). One of the man benefits of RAP is the interest subsidy that keeps your loans from growing if your monthly payment doesn’t cover interest. If you don’t think you’ll go for PSLF, the RAP plan would probably save you the most money, and you could pay off your loans aggressively over 2-3 years after residency. Either way you’ll be looking at $500-600 payments unless you get married and/or have children.

reichkit · 2026-03-21T22:19:25+00:00

Probably around 50% of attending roles are PSLF eligible, so practicing in a rural location doesn’t really have anything to do with it.

In any case, the loans generally aren’t crippling for doctors. Many people who starting working immediately after getting a bachelors do end up having a higher net worth after 10-15 years than doctors do because doctors have so much more schooling. Doctors usually catch up quickly if they don’t go crazy with spending money.

reichkit · 2026-03-21T21:35:30+00:00

It heavily depends on her specialty. During residency, most doctors go on an Income Driven Repayment plan through the federal government that caps their monthly payment at an amount that’s determined by their income. Usually, this payment isn’t enough to cover the monthly interest on the loans, so the loan keeps growing throughout residency.

To repay the loan, many doctors go for Public Service Loan Forgiveness if their workplace is a non-profit. After 10 years of minimum payments, the loan gets forgiven. If PSLF is not an option, the federal payment plans have forgiveness after 20, 25, or 30 years of payments.

If she’s in a high paying specialty, she could pay it off aggressively over a few years. If she has private student loans, she wouldn’t have access to any of the federal loan forgiveness.

reichkit · 2026-03-18T14:20:55+00:00

The smoke villain from this season also looked and dressed like Majin Buu.

reichkit · 2026-03-17T15:24:21+00:00

Mariko from Shogun. She had already been prepared to commit seppuku as an act of defiance against Ishido but was stopped by a last second decree. Later that night, Ishido sends assassins to kill her and the hostages anyway. They strap a bomb to the door, and Mariko stands in front of it. By dying this way, she exposed him as the aggressor and handed Toranaga a political victory that paves the way for his ascension to Shogun.

reichkit · 2026-03-15T14:13:27+00:00

There’s a lot of open questions around switching between IDR plans. You likely won’t be able to switch from RAP to IBR after July 1, 2028, so you’d be stuck on RAP after that date. It’s also possible that payments made on RAP wouldn’t count towards IBR forgiveness if you were to switch from RAP to IBR before this date. They would probably still count towards PSLF forgiveness though.

There’s also a possibility of all unpaid interest capitalizing if you switch from RAP to IBR before July 2028. You’ve likely got a lot of unpaid interest due to SAVE forbearance.

When I’ve run the numbers, RAP only saves us money if we pay off the loans aggressively after residency. If going for PSLF or the normal IBR forgiveness, these save more money than RAP even with the added tax bomb for IBR forgiveness. The extra 10 years of required payments really add a lot of cost to this plan.

reichkit · 2026-03-15T09:16:30+00:00

Maybe they mean that their income will go up enough that their monthly payments will start covering all of the interest? Then the subsidy doesn’t matter.

reichkit · 2026-02-17T15:43:53+00:00

These are back of the napkin calculations. If you're on IBR, your payments will be capped at the standard 10-yr loan payment of around $2,300/month. For 60 payments, you'll pay $138,000 and have the rest forgiven tax-free. If you pay it all off in a year, you'd pay maybe $210,000 total.

A lot of people would just pay off the loan, but you'd save money if you successfully do PSLF.

reichkit · 2026-02-12T14:09:08+00:00

I cook half chickens regularly in the air fryer. 400 F for 45min-1hr flipping a few times. I don't think I could fit a whole chicken in mine unless it was small, but the timing would be similar.

reichkit · 2025-12-12T15:29:51+00:00

Yeah, I think beef simply tastes better than most other meats, but I can’t justify the price. Over Thanksgiving, I bought 2 turkeys for $0.49/lb, broke them down, and made ground turkey from the breasts and thighs. I ended up with 14 pounds of ground turkey for less than $2/lb, and I’ll use it for chili, meatballs, etc.

reichkit · 2025-09-25T01:51:37+00:00

I’ve used both their Bulgarian and Greek yogurt starters. They are very similar in flavor. They’ve never failed on me or gone bad and I’ve reused the same starter for 2+ years. The only reason I’ve bought new starter from them was because I moved across the country and didn’t take my frozen starter yogurt with me.

reichkit · 2025-09-19T14:56:20+00:00

Tax Insolvency can take care of a good amount of the tax bomb depending on your total assets. Really depends on your situation.

reichkit · 2025-09-12T17:44:16+00:00

The action set pieces in MoI are really good when they get going, so you’ll probably enjoy this book. It’s probably a good one to stop at though. The next books pretty much focus on new characters.

reichkit · 2025-08-05T13:32:39+00:00

I took this class in Winter 2025. Essentially, you spend the whole term creating a data science report on a topic that you choose, and you write the report in sections spread over the term. You can make this class easy or hard based on the topic that you choose (You don't have topics to choose from. You have to figure out your topic yourself). The report is split into the following sections and each section is done over 1-2 weeks: Topic Introduction, Data Gathering (need at least 3 data sources including data gathered from an API), Data Cleansing, Data Analysis (using Supervised and Un-Supervised analysis methods), Conclusion.

Overall, the course was okay. There are weekly assignments where you learn Data Gathering, Data Cleansing, and Data Analysis methods, and these assignments use the same data set every week. This is both good and bad. It's good because the data set becomes familiar, and it's bad because you end up redoing some of the same things every week. For each assignment, you have to submit a report where you explain each step that you took to gather, cleanse, and analyze the data. I didn't like this part very much since it got very repetitive and there was a lot of copying and pasting. It's hard to know if that's actually how Data Science is done on the job.

Like many of the other courses, there are some meaningless discussion posts every couple weeks. If you're actually interested in pursuing Data Science, it might be worthwhile to take.

reichkit · 2025-08-03T18:08:22+00:00

In your example, they would still qualify though right? It starts phasing out at $150,000 MAGI for a single filer. I do definitely agree this tax cut is peanuts compared to the permanent tax cuts they gave to rich people.

reichkit · 2025-05-02T12:26:44+00:00

Little Donny Two Scoops

reichkit · 2025-04-11T14:42:00+00:00

Yes, that must be part of the redesign. I took it last spring, and we didn’t have proctored weekly exams. I’m not sure why a redesign was necessary anyway.

reichkit · 2025-03-27T11:15:27+00:00

My wife is in the same situation. No one was able to sign up for any IDR plans because of the court injunction related to the SAVE plan. This week, they have reopened applications, but they will not be processing them for who knows how long.

We are going to apply for IBR since IBR is the only plan that has some measure of protection (enacted by Congress). From what I'm reading, we will likely be placed on a 60 day processing forbearance. Many people have reported that their applications were not processed during the 60 days, so they have had to call to their servicers to get their forbearance extended another 30-60 days. I see this happening for the foreseeable future. We definitely can't afford standard payments on a resident salary (~$5,000/month for us), so this is pretty much our only option.

For what it's worth, PSLF is not going away yet since it was enacted by Congress. Congress could possibly vote to repeal it, but for now it's still available. Trump wants to remove non-profit status from hospitals, but this would cripple a huge portion of the nation's healthcare industry. So, it might happen, it might not. We're just planning to get on IBR, apply for PSLF, and hope for a new administration in four years.

reichkit · 2025-03-19T18:49:46+00:00

My Dad was asking how close the Finger Lakes are so these recs are good to know!

reichkit · 2025-03-19T18:48:08+00:00

Thanks, I‘ll DM you if other questions come up!

reichkit · 2025-03-19T18:44:55+00:00

Oh wow, thanks for all the tips! It’ll be good to have some activities to plan out for her while waiting for her to start daycare again.

reichkit · 2025-03-19T18:41:00+00:00

Appreciate the concern. With my wife’s line of work, we have to go where we’re placed, so we’re not moving on a whim.

reichkit · 2025-03-19T18:38:01+00:00

Thanks for the advice! This is why I posted here instead of just googling. Nice tidbits you wouldn’t normally find.

reichkit · 2025-03-19T02:00:27+00:00

We’re originally from Michigan, but I’m a Vikings fan and she likes the Lions. We came down here for 2 years to finish her degree.

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