Growing up, I loved reading, I loved science, I loved the
critical thinking behind it, and I wanted to pursue a
career in medicine.
And I eventually worked with physician assistants,
which I thought were a perfect balance of being
able to have some of that critical thinking and
helping patients in a expedited timeline.
I'm a certified anesthesiologist assistant
and my base salary is 198,000.
But through picking up overtime overnight, on the
weekends and after my shift, I pick up about
$10,000 to $15,000 in overtime.
My name is Chabely Rodriguez. I'm 28 years old.
I make over $200,000 as an anesthesiologist assistant
and I live in Tampa, Florida.
I'm so happy that I went to Florida.
I always wanted to live there. It had great weather.
I wasn't a fan of the New York City winters, so I've
gotten to do a lot of fun things and live a different
life than I was living in New York and have a lot more
space and have my money go a lot farther.
And I don't have state taxes, which is really nice
to take home extra money.
I also have a roommate, so I have a lot of extra income
at my dispense that I choose to mostly invest in
stocks. And then I also put extra money towards travel
back to New York because I have family and my boyfriend
lives in New York.
I grew up in Brooklyn, New York,
and my parents came from Mexico, and they wanted to
make more income as we were a family of seven.
So they ended up opening a business in upstate New
York, where they started a farm and they would sell at
the farmers markets.
We went to school in New York City, but after school
and also on the weekends, we would go upstate or work
in the farmers market.
And then during the summertime and during half
days, we were always either on the farm or again in the
farmer's market throughout New York City.
So growing up, it was difficult working a lot.
Just commuting back and forth between New York City
and upstate New York was challenging, and there were
times where we slept in the car right before we went to
school, and they dropped us off.
It was a lot of difficult conversations with my
parents. However, I see that it made a difference
for my younger siblings and I'm happy that I was able to
do that.
The time in medical school was going to be a lot and
also the student loans.
So that's why I started looking more into physician
assistants, something with similar responsibilities,
but with a shorter timeline.
Also typically less debt.
I had to go to graduate school, and they were all
around the $100,000 mark or more for tuition.
Given that the salary would be around $150,000, I felt
like I had a realistic chance of paying it off
within five years.
Instead, I eventually put it into a high yield savings
account. I ended up just putting that money straight
back before the pause ended, to avoid any extra
interest on my student loans.
My parents gave me an allowance and paid me for my
work on the farm. They always had to work really
hard to provide for us, and so I always remember saving
my money, saving it up every time they gave me
money. When I finally graduated and started making
over six figures, over $100,000, I still had a lot
of that scarcity mindset of save, put the money away,
never really thinking to enjoy as I was saving, and
I'm trying to change that now.
Currently, I'm saving about 50% of my income.
I have picked up a lot of overtime, and I've been
having a lot more fun this year and traveling more.
But at the same time, when I have extra money, I put
that aside to my investing.
So I've hit about an $85,000 investing goal this
year, which I'm very happy with.
So my biggest routine expenses are my rent.
I try to keep that low with a roommate.
Rent and utilities are around $1,400 a month.
Other than that, another expense for me is about $1,000
a month for travel.
I just remembered looking at a lot of different countries
and always wanting to look at the world and be a part
of all those different cultures. I just never felt
like I had the money, and so I look forward to doing a
lot of different travel experiences. That is a
priority for me. I'm saving to go to Greece with my
boyfriend in a year and a half from now.
On an average day as an anesthesiologist assistant,
I can see one patient if the surgery takes ten hours,
for example, or I can see up to 14 patients if they're
very quick turnover cases.
I just meet the surgeon's needs and the patient's
needs in terms of the length and cases in the day.
I work with needles, I draw up medicines, I place IVs on
patients also needles for epidurals, needles for
blocks which will numb up local areas of a patient.
For example, if they had a knee surgery, I could place
the anesthesia locally so that their knee would be
anesthetized, but they could still have full range
of motion of other parts of their body.
My favorite part of the job is waking patients up and
seeing how comfortable they are at the end, and they
wake up and they are surprised that the surgery
is done, that they're already awake and recovering.
Sometimes there are days where I see that it
looks like a really busy day, and I can anticipate
that I may end up getting some overtime that day, but
typically around 5:00 to 530, my day ends and I can
move on and do some of the things that I want to do
outside of work.
Hi, everyone. My name is Chabely.
I’m a board certified anesthesiologist assistant.
I have a YouTube channel, just
mostly around my job so that people can learn about
it if they're, let's say, a first generation college
student like myself.
And I also like to work out that helps me decompress,
mostly lifting, but I'm trying to get into cardio.
I would love to continue this profession.
And that's part of why I do my YouTube channel, so that
hopefully there's more exposure and maybe more
states that can open up to the profession down the
line. Once I feel like I have enough invested, I
would like to reduce my workload or end up changing
my work schedule to 2 to 3 days a week and focus on my
other hobbies and activities the rest of the week.
My money mindset has changed from just saving now
to invest for my future, but also spend the time now
to see my family and have experiences that we’ll have
for the rest of our lives that we can think about and
remember and enjoy.