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Services for Attending Physicians

A plan that grows with your career

As you move through your attending career, your financial decisions take on greater significance. Whether you are early in practice, mid career, or thinking ahead to what comes next, higher income creates both opportunity and complexity. The challenge is not just earning more, but making intentional choices that balance lifestyle, flexibility, and long term security.

Each stage brings different priorities. Early years often focus on cash flow, student loans, and major purchases. Mid career may introduce practice ownership, family planning, or advanced tax strategies. Later years shift toward protecting what you have built and planning for retirement and legacy.

A thoughtful financial plan evolves with you, providing clarity, confidence, and the ability to adapt as your career changes.

Optimizing Your Fresh Start as an Attending

Your early attending years are a pivotal moment. It creates an opportunity to set yourself up for lasting financial success or fall into habits that could create long-term challenges. With a significant jump in income, you have the chance to build wealth, gain financial flexibility, and create a strong foundation for your future. But without intentional planning, it’s easy to drift into lifestyle inflation, accumulate unnecessary debt, or miss key opportunities to grow your wealth.

As a physician, you have tremendous financial potential, and the habits you form now will shape your long-term success. Developing intentional saving, spending, and investing habits early allows you to take full advantage of your earning power. The right financial strategy ensures that you’re not just making more money – you’re making the most of it. Your financial future is yours to control, and with smart decisions now, the opportunities ahead are limitless.

Your financial situation is evolving, and we’re here to help you navigate the transition with confidence. We provide tailored financial planning for early career physicians, helping you make smart money moves while avoiding common mistakes.

The jump from training to attending income is the biggest financial change most physicians ever experience, and it arrives without an instruction manual. You’re suddenly making more decisions in a year than you made in all of residency, and most of them touch each other. A comprehensive plan connects those pieces, so you can see how a home purchase affects your savings rate before you commit.

We start with a Zero Call, then work through the GenFi process. If you’re not sure you need an advisor yet, when firing your advisor makes sense is an honest look at both sides, and assembling the right team explains why physician finances need a different bench. We’re also upfront about how we get paid.

For most attendings, student loans are the largest number on the balance sheet, and the right move depends on details that are easy to get wrong. Whether PSLF is worth staying for, whether to refinance, and how aggressively to pay down all hinge on your employer type, your income trajectory, and what else you’re funding at the same time.

The trap we see most is treating loans in isolation. Paying off a low-interest loan aggressively feels great and can still cost you real money if it means missing a match or delaying investing during your highest-compounding years. Your employment structure matters here too — W-2 and 1099 roles carry very different forgiveness implications. Still in training? Start on our Residents & Fellows page.

High income doesn’t automatically become wealth — where you put each dollar matters as much as how many you earn. The question we hear most is simply where does this one go next? Match, HSA, backdoor Roth, brokerage, loan paydown. The order matters, and it shifts as your career does.

That’s what navigating the financial waterfall walks through. Beyond the basics are strategies your plan provider won’t mention: the mega backdoor Roth, which sidesteps the pro-rata rule that quietly undermines standard conversions, and in-service 401(k) withdrawals, which unlock real flexibility while you’re still employed.

Your ability to earn is your largest asset, and it’s the one most attendings under-protect. Group coverage is a starting point, not a plan — definitions of disability vary widely, benefits are often capped well below your income, and coverage rarely follows you to a new job.

The details matter more than the premium. Understanding disability insurance covers what to look for in a policy, and our Disability Insurance page explains our approach. As your net worth grows, so does the conversation: life insurance can do more than replace income, especially for transferring wealth without losing 30–40% of an inherited retirement account to the IRS. 

Taxes are probably your largest annual expense, and there’s a real difference between filing well and planning well. Filing looks backward at what already happened. Planning looks forward and changes the outcome — through entity structure, plan selection, timing of income and deductions, and where you hold which investments.

A few opportunities come up constantly. With side 1099 income on top of a W-2 role, a Roth SEP IRA adds meaningful tax diversification. If your spouse does real work for your practice, putting them on payroll is worth a careful look — the internet oversimplifies it badly. With young kids, Trump Accounts are new and worth understanding. We coordinate with your CPA rather than replace them.

The house, the car, the practice buy-in — these quietly set your trajectory, because each one locks in a monthly obligation for years. Physician mortgage products can be genuinely useful, but “what will they lend me” and “what should I borrow” are different questions with very different answers.

We pressure-test the number before you’re emotionally committed: how the payment fits your cash flow, what it does to your savings rate, whether the timing helps or hurts your tax year. Sometimes a purchase is also an opportunity — see why 2026 may be the year to buy a qualifying vehicle.

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