Abby and Logan: An Established Pediatrics Household, Scored

Abby has practiced pediatrics for eight years and earns about $250,000. Logan earns about $100,000 as a software engineer, which puts the household near $350,000. They have two children, 8 and 5, in the Denver area. This household does one thing completely: it kills debt.

The killing is nearly total. Abby's student loans are paid off, crushed ahead of everything else the household might have done with the money. The only debt left is the mortgage, about $400,000 on a home worth about $650,000. There is no consumer debt and there are no vehicle loans. Total debt sits at an anchor of about 1.1 times income, and the discipline behind it is real: saving was automated into a habit years ago.

What the household never did is assign that discipline a second job. The emergency fund holds about two months of expenses, about $30,000, against total assets of about $1.05 million: about $400,000 invested and the $650,000 home. Saving runs at about 10 percent, automated, with no stretch above it and no goals written anywhere: the household does not have a savings plan beyond the automation, and does not know its tax bracket.

The protection layer is the thinnest in this hub's cases. Health coverage is in force for the whole household, and a $1 million term life policy is in force on Abby. Disability was never bought at all. There is no umbrella policy at any size. Malpractice is an occurrence policy. And the estate shelf is empty: no will, no powers of attorney, no health care directive, with an 8 year old and a 5 year old in the house.

The Financial Health Assessment grades a household across the same seven frameworks and lands the total in a band. Abby and Logan score 42, in the Corrections band: the debt work needs no correction at all, and everything around it does, one uninsured event or one unsigned document away from damaging a balance sheet that took a decade to build. The episode scored the household in four groups.

Compare this shape with the other established case in this hub and the lesson sharpens. Claire and Matt built every system and underused several. Abby and Logan built one system perfectly and the rest not at all. The rubric does not average intentions. A household is the sum of its layers, and layers at zero pull the total where zero pulls it.

The first deep dive is the Protection Stack, taken first in this episode because it is where the household is thinnest, and the finding is a stack with its base layers missing under a finished roof. The income layer: no disability coverage at all, on the $250,000 salary everything else depends on. The liability layer: no umbrella at all, against about $1.05 million of assets and two kids approaching the ages where households get sued. The legal layer: no documents, which with minor children means a court, not the parents, names who raises them if both parents die. The layers present, health for everyone, a $1 million term policy, occurrence malpractice, are real, and they sit on nothing.

The Stack's ordering is the argument. Protection is built from the catastrophic inward: insure the income first, the liability second, the documents third, and only then argue about optimization anywhere else. This household optimized the one thing that was never going to hurt them, a loan balance repaid early at modest interest, while the events that actually end households went uninsured. The full model is on the Protection Stack page, and the disability layer is sized on the insurance page.

The second deep dive is the Tax Efficiency Ladder, and the finding matches the protection finding in a different key. The household does not know its tax bracket. Across eight attending years there were no deliberate moves: no Roth against pre tax analysis, no backdoor Roths, no HSA strategy, no timing of anything. Every account filled by default and every default was the employer's, not the household's. The Ladder group scores 2 of 8, all of it from the default pre tax lane.

The cost of default compounds the same way the debt payoff did, in the other direction. A household at this income that runs the Ladder, the backdoor Roths for both spouses, the HSA filled first inside the max tier, the Roth against pre tax call made deliberately each year, keeps money every single year that this household mails away. The framework is laid out on the Tax Efficiency Ladder page, and the prescription turns it into assignments with dates.

Five moves, in the order the episode gave them.

One: Buy the individual own occupation disability policy. No coverage at all on a $250,000 income, with two kids and no debt cushion narrative to hide behind, is the largest single exposure in the household. Specialty specific, portable, non cancellable.

Two: Add a $1 million umbrella policy. The cheapest layer in the entire stack, at $1 million just under the about $1.05 million of assets it protects, so size up as the assets grow. This is a phone call, not a project.

Three: Sign the estate documents. A will with guardians named for an 8 year old and a 5 year old, powers of attorney, and health care directives for both spouses. The estate planning page is written for exactly this household.

Four: Learn the bracket and add two tax moves. At this income the household is most likely in the 24 percent federal bracket, and every pretax dollar saves 24 cents once they know it. The two moves are a backdoor Roth IRA for each spouse, with a tax pro checking the first one, and a maxed HSA if the health plan qualifies. Put both on the calendar so they happen every year.

Five: Write three goals with numbers and dates. Nothing is written down, so every money decision is a guess. Three goals, each with a number and a date, give the Decision Filter something to check decisions against. This household crushed the loans because it had one clear target. It needs three more. A household this disciplined needs assignments, not motivation.

Run all five and the episode's arithmetic is 42 plus 16, a score of 58. The striking fact about this prescription is its speed: four of the five moves are finished in a month, because nothing here requires saving up to anything.

Debt payoff is a system, not a strategy. This household aimed genuine excellence at the most visible target and finished it, while the rest of the financial structure stayed at its residency defaults. The rubric's shape is the correction: twenty points for debt, eighty for everything else, because a household's financial health is everything else. Any plan that ends at zero balance ends early.

The second lesson is about which risk a household actually carries. A crushed loan balance feels like safety, and it is a form of it, but it does not pay a claim, defend a lawsuit, or name a guardian. The events that damage households arrive as disability, liability, and death without documents, not as interest charges. Insure the catastrophic, sign the documents, and then let the discipline that killed the debt run the rest of the board.

Do you want Ryan to run your household's finances on a future Financial Health Assessment episode? Submit your situation at financialfellowship.com/submit.

Ryan Inman is a retired financial planner who worked with about 500 physician families. He created the Financial Residency podcast (about 3 million downloads) and is no longer affiliated with it. Financial Fellowship is his sole focus. This guide is educational. Last updated October 2026.