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A PGY-2 budget at $4,700 a month, with the training-year funds priced in
Illustrative example. This is an illustrative example, not a real resident. No physician was interviewed or surveyed for this page. Salary, rent and fee figures were chosen by us to demonstrate envelope arithmetic, and they are not claims about what residents actually earn or pay. Look up your own program's and board's real numbers.
An illustrative PGY-2 splits $4,700 into 12 envelopes: $1,650 rent and utilities, $740 emergency fund, $420 groceries, $320 personal and travel, $300 transportation and parking, $260 student loan payment, $250 moving fund, $240 insurance premiums, $190 board exam fund, $160 food at work, $115 phone and internet, $55 license and credentialing.
The breakdown
| Envelope | Amount | % |
|---|---|---|
|
🏠 Rent and utilities
One-bedroom near the hospital, close enough to matter at 6 a.m. |
$1,650 | 35% |
|
🛟 Emergency fund
The only envelope that buys you options during a training year. |
$740 | 16% |
|
🛒 Groceries
Food you eat at home, on the days you are home. |
$420 | 9% |
|
✈️ Personal, social, and travel
Weddings, flights, dinners. One envelope, no itemizing. |
$320 | 7% |
|
🚗 Transportation and parking
Hospital parking is a fixed cost pretending to be a variable one. |
$300 | 6% |
|
🎓 Student loan payment
Whatever your monthly payment is. One line, no strategy advice here. |
$260 | 6% |
|
📦 Moving fund for the next match
Deposits, truck, two weeks of overlap rent. Known date, unknown city. |
$250 | 5% |
|
🩺 Insurance premiums
Health, dental, disability. This page does not tell you which to buy. |
$240 | 5% |
|
📘 Board exam fund
Registration plus question banks. Price it from your own board's published fee. |
$190 | 4% |
|
🥡 Food at work
Cafeteria, coffee, the 2 a.m. delivery order. Funded, not forbidden. |
$160 | 3% |
|
📱 Phone and internet
Flat, boring, easy. |
$115 | 3% |
|
🗂️ License and credentialing
State license, DEA, hospital credentialing paperwork. |
$55 | 1% |
Total assigned: $4,700 of $4,700 monthly take-home — every amount has a job.
The setup
Take-home is $4,700, the hours are unpredictable, and the schedule is the budget's main antagonist. Residency spending does not fail because of luxury. It fails because you are tired at the wrong hour and buying convenience is the only available decision. A budget that ignores that loses. This one funds convenience deliberately in one place, keeps the training-year lumps visible instead of letting them ambush you, and treats the loan payment as a single fixed line so it stops occupying mental space it does not deserve during a month when you have none to spare.
Where the $4,700 goes
Rent and utilities take $1,650 for a place close enough to the hospital that the commute does not eat post-call sleep. The emergency fund gets $740, the largest discretionary decision on the page. Groceries are $420 and food at work is $160, split on purpose. Transportation and parking take $300, and hospital parking is a fixed cost dressed as a variable one. The loan payment is $260, insurance premiums $240, phone and internet $115. Then the training-year funds: $250 for the next move, $190 for boards, $55 for licensing. Personal, social and travel get $320. Exactly $4,700.
Pricing the training-year funds instead of guessing
Board registration, question banks, state licensure, DEA registration, hospital credentialing and the move to your next city are all known-date, unknown-amount costs. Do not guess at them and do not let this page guess for you. Look up your own board's published fee and your state medical board's published fee, add what you are willing to spend on question banks, then divide by the number of months until you pay. That division is the entire method. In this example it produces $190, $55 and $250, which is $495 a month, about ten and a half percent of take-home, sitting quietly in three envelopes instead of arriving as one panicked credit-card month.
What a funded food-at-work envelope does on a night block
Assume a twenty-eight day stretch with twenty night shifts. Assume you order delivery on fourteen of them at $22 an order, which is your assumption to set, not a figure we can source. That is $308, against a $160 envelope, and the $148 gap comes out of groceries or a card without anyone deciding it should. With the envelope funded and visible, the decision arrives before the order does: $160 is roughly seven orders, or fourteen cafeteria meals, or some mix. Nobody is telling you to stop eating at 2 a.m. The envelope only makes the trade explicit while you still have the option to pack something.
The loan line, and what this page will not do
The student loan appears once, as $260, a fixed monthly line like the phone bill. That is deliberate. Which repayment arrangement you should be in, whether to pay extra, and how any of it interacts with your taxes are questions this page is not qualified to answer and will not pretend to. What a budget can do is make the payment boring: one envelope, filled on payday, never renegotiated in a bad week. If your real payment is different, replace the number. The rest of the arithmetic does not care.
The envelope change to make this week
Split food into two envelopes, one for groceries and one for food at work, and fund the second one honestly rather than aspirationally. Look at what you actually spent on it last month before you pick the number, because the aspirational version is always about half the real one and a budget you break in week two teaches you nothing. Then open your board's fee page, find the real number, divide it by the months until you register, and start that envelope this payday even if the first fill is $40. Those two changes cost nothing this month and remove the two most common ways a resident budget breaks: convenience spending that has no home, and a four-figure fee that arrives with three weeks of notice.
Common questions
Shouldn't I put more toward the loans instead of the emergency fund?
That trade-off is real and this page will not resolve it for you, because the right answer depends on details we cannot see and on rules we are not qualified to interpret. What the budget can show plainly is the mechanics: every dollar moved from the emergency envelope to extra loan payments is a dollar unavailable when a car dies during a night block. Decide it deliberately, write the reason down, and revisit it at a fixed point rather than mid-month.
How do I price a board exam fund before I know the fee?
Use the published registration fee from your own board's website as the floor, add whatever you intend to spend on question banks, then divide by months remaining until registration closes. If the total is genuinely unknown, start with a placeholder, label it as a placeholder, and correct it the day you find the real number. A wrong envelope you adjust beats no envelope. The failure mode is not a bad estimate; it is having no fund at all when registration opens.
What if my program reimburses some of these costs?
Then you still front the money, so you still need the envelope. Fund it as normal, and when the reimbursement lands, put it back into the same envelope rather than into general spending. That keeps the fund's balance honest and makes the reimbursement lag visible. If your program pays a vendor directly and you never touch the money, drop that envelope and re-split the amount into the ones that are still yours to pay.
Is a moving fund necessary if I might stay in the same city?
Fund it anyway and rename it if you stay. Deposits, first-month overlap, a truck and the gap between leaving one payroll and joining another are costs with a known date and an unknown size, which is the exact profile a sinking fund exists for. If you stay put, you end the year with an unspent balance, which is a much better problem than the alternative.
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