#10 The CARES Act – What Doctors Need to Know and Care About

Hey, everyone, hope you’re having a great week in spite of all the challenges, if you haven’t heard it enough, I just want to say thank you for doing all that you’re doing, essentially risking your lives during this whole pandemic. Try to do my part to bring any information that I can to you that will enhance what’s going on for you in terms of your life.

So the first topic I want to talk about is these individual checks and these stimulus checks. This is something that I’ve never seen happen before. I guess it’s happened before in the past, but the government is essentially sending out checks as a stimulus. It’s essentially a rebate check on your 2020 taxes, but in So it’s just basically free cash. Not everyone gets it, however, so only certain people qualify. 

Now, there are two major changes that people need to know the number one has to do with withdrawing money from your IRA. Now, in the past, if you want to take an early withdrawal, you have to pay a 10% early withdrawal penalty. Not only do you take the 10% early withdrawal penalty, but you are responsible for the taxes when it comes out right and that’s taxed at your ordinary-income tax that hasn’t changed. 

They say it’s available for people that are affected by the coronavirus. Either you got it, your family got it, or somehow you were financially impacted by it. And my guess is that pretty much everybody is. Now for most of you, the downside to this is that a lot of your money in your retirement accounts is probably not sitting in cash. It’s probably sitting in some sort of public equities like a stock or mutual funds. So you would have to actually sell it, to get that cash to be able to withdraw it. 

What if you’re a landlord and you have a federally backed multifamily loan, whether there’s some forbearance, and it sounds like there are some options for you, there’s a 30-day forbearance which can be extended another 60 days, especially under certain conditions.

Now there are two major loans to consider and talk about here. There’s a small business association, economic injury disaster loan, otherwise known as EIDL. And there’s something known as the paycheck Protection Program. 

The most interesting part of this whole loan is something called the emergency grant. Now that’s potentially available to you as a small business owner, and it comes in the form of a $10,000 forgivable loan. And that can be used for immediate operating costs, as some of the things we mentioned, like sick leave, your payroll, any sort of fixed debts or accounts payable.

Now, I know a lot of you who are listening to this still have a significant amount of student loans. I mean, the average is $200,000. For the average physician coming out, but we all know many physicians if you’re not one of them, has way more than that. Well, the cool thing is now all loan and interest payments for a federally owned student loan or federally backed student loan, those payments are now deferred through September 30, 2020. Now, I know a lot of people have been asking, man, I already refinance my loan with a private lender. So does it apply to me?