Lexington, Kentucky native Lauren Perraut, 32, found her vocational niche as a pathologists’ assistant. She’s a very good advocate making about $122,000 a year and does it without the decades of training typically required in the health sector. Balancing her professional responsibilities with family life, Perraut lives with her husband, Dylan, and their two-year-old son, Reed, in a comfortable three-bedroom home they purchased in 2021.
For Perraut, his path to the medical field started with a significant family impact. Her mother spent decades working as a medical laboratory scientist at a community blood bank before her retirement. Inspired by her mother’s career and her own fascination with anatomy, Perraut pursued a bachelor’s degree in medical laboratory science from Eastern Kentucky University.
During her search for new healthcare career opportunities, she learned about the pathologists’ assistant career. Yet this thriving profession requires just a two-year master’s program. It’s a much quicker route to an in-demand and satisfying job than the long medical degrees often associated with the healthcare industry.
This is how Perraut likes to spend her time—working about 40 hours a week, loving the nitty-gritty of the daily tasks that make up her position. As an Anatomic Pathologists’ Assistant, she performs anatomic dissections of organs and conducts examinations of specimens or body tissue to prepare them for pathological evaluation. This important work plays an enormous role in patient diagnoses.
“When I get to work, we usually have specimens set up for us to start working on,” – Lauren Perraut.
Perraut feels fulfillment in her role, stating, “I feel like my career is really high impact.” Her hard work and advocacy are the backbone of the healthcare system. She has noticed that most people are still unaware of what she’s designed. “Most people don’t even know that I exist,” she remarked.
Financially, Perraut is the chief wage earner in her family, and both she and Dylan live a financially responsible lifestyle. They have just one debt—their mortgage—and save about $3,900 per month into savings and investments. Their financial strategy has yielded positive results: the couple has accumulated around $400,000 in retirement savings and another $113,500 in a shared brokerage account and high-yield savings account.
Perraut is particularly passionate about smart financial planning and educating the community on their future financial choices. “Our goal is to save up enough to have the flexibility to retire when we want,” she said. This ongoing commitment to thriftiness is emblematic of Saving’s larger attitude toward personal finance.
“I feel like Dylan and I are both relatively frugal people,” – Lauren Perraut.
She elaborated on their approach to spending, noting, “I don’t feel the need to buy super expensive things or go out to super expensive restaurants.” Adopting this mindset has helped them save aggressively, even reaching FIRE status, while living a full and comfy life.
Now, of course, Perraut has made a career choice in healthcare during an especially challenging time. Our industry is facing a massive crisis of medical laboratory worker shortage. She sees this gap as a chance for herds of ambitious young professionals looking to join a force for constructive change in the health industry.
Along the way as a pathologists’ assistant, Perraut shows that there’s often more than one way to make it. Her successful career provides her family significant financial stability. It allows her to do work that she finds fulfilling and impactful, in addition to the highly sought-after public sector.