Services for Residents & Fellows
Lay The Groundwork with Limited Time
During training, making any progress toward your financial future can feel like a real challenge—and the truth is, it is a challenge. Your income is limited, your time is even more obligated, and setting either aside can feel impossible. But making the most of the limited resources you have and being intentional about your path forward can make a huge difference in setting a solid foundation. Even if you don’t feel like you’re making major strides, the intention and preparation will put you in a great position to transition smoothly to attending life and hit the ground running.
Disability Insurance
This is the one financial decision in training that’s genuinely time-sensitive. Your ability to earn is worth millions over a career, and it’s cheapest and easiest to insure while you’re young and healthy — before a diagnosis, a procedure, or a hobby shows up in your medical history and limits your options permanently.
Group coverage through your program is a starting point, not a plan. Benefits are usually capped well below your future attending income, and the policy rarely follows you when you leave. What matters most is the definition of disability: a true own-occupation policy pays if you can’t practice your specialty, even if you could work elsewhere. Our post on what to actually look for in a policy breaks down the language, and our Disability Insurance page covers how we approach it.
Student Loan Guidance
Your loans will follow you into attending life, and choices you make now — which repayment plan you’re on, whether your employer qualifies for PSLF, whether your payments are counting — shape what’s possible later.
Refinancing usually isn’t the right move yet, because it forfeits federal protections and forgiveness eligibility for a rate cut you can’t fully use on a resident’s income. The bigger question is whether your career path points toward forgiveness or payoff, and that depends heavily on where you land as an attending — W-2 and 1099 roles carry very different forgiveness implications. We’ll help you map it out before you sign anything, and our Attending Physicians page picks up where this leaves off.
Financial Education
Most physicians finish a decade of training without a single hour of financial instruction. It’s a genuine curriculum gap.
We work directly with residency and fellowship programs to provide no-cost financial education talks and resources, covering the topics trainees actually ask about. You can see the programs and organizations we work with, and we’ve built a library you can use right now: GenFi TV for short video explainers, our blog for written guides, and The Myth of the Rich Doctor for the bigger picture on why high income and real wealth aren’t the same thing.
Attending Transition Planning
The first attending paycheck is a bigger adjustment than most people expect. Income can triple overnight, a whole new benefits package lands on your desk, and the habits you set in the first year tend to stick for a decade. Lifestyle inflation is easy to slip into and hard to reverse.
We help you review offers, understand what your new benefits actually cover, and decide what changes now and what waits. If you’re weighing employment types, W-2 vs. 1099 compares the long-term wealth math, and From Resident to Independent Contractor walks through the transition in detail. Our Attending Physicians page covers what comes next.
Investment & Savings Strategy
You don’t need much money to start — you need the right order of operations. A resident who opens a Roth IRA and contributes modestly for four years is often better positioned than an attending who waits two years to start, because your low tax bracket right now makes Roth contributions unusually valuable. That advantage disappears the day you become an attending.
The framework is the same at every income level: capture any employer match, build a small cash reserve, then invest what’s left in the right account type. Navigating the financial waterfall lays out that order and how it shifts as your income grows.
Personalized Financial Guidance
We know full financial planning usually isn’t a priority during residency, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. That’s why we offer no-cost, no-obligation consultations to trainees — a real conversation about whatever you’re actually facing, whether that’s one disability policy quote or a job offer you have two weeks to answer.
It starts with a Zero Call: zero cost, zero pressure, zero strings. If you want to know what you’d be walking into, the GenFi process explains how we work and how we get paid answers the question most people are too polite to ask. And assembling the right team is worth reading before you choose anyone.
Zero Expectations
Zero Pressure
Zero Judgement
Zero Commitment
Zero Cost
Zero Strings