Living like a resident...Financially

Living like a resident means working 80 hours per week, snagging free food, and driving an old beater car.

When doctors graduate and become attending level status, we want to spend our hard-earned money.  For the most of us, this is a big mistake.  Why?

First, we have an ocean of student loans to pay off.

Second, we have little to no savings during our time as students and residents.

Third, we will get used to a "rich" lifestyle and may get stuck on the never-ending treadmill of having more.

So, what's the solution?  Continue to live like a resident until you have all loans payed off, maxed out on your savings, have a 6 month emergency cash reserve, and work as much as you can healthily handle.

This is SPARTA!

"Medicine keeps getting harder. And fewer and fewer folks are doing it. America has no idea that the weight of it all is falling on the shoulders of the emergency physicians and hospitalists who lurk inside the trauma rooms and inpatient floors, the fast tracks and ICUs of their community and university hospitals. The pasty-pale, coffee-sucking, junk-food-eating Spartans of health care who will bear the full assault of health care reform when there aren't enough primary care doctors to manage an AARP convention, much less all of America."

Edwin Leap, Emergency Medicine News, January 2013